James Earl Ray, the vanishing mediator?
Carl at Raincoat Optimism has a fascinating article up discussing the position of James Earl Ray as the ‘vanishing mediator’ between Martin Luther King the civil rights campaigner and MLK the social reformer. Ray’s actions in assassinating Marting Luther King ‘preserved’ him for the civil rights cause, so suggests Carl, utilizing examples of Slavoj Žižek.
“Martin Luther King, weeks before he was shot, engaged in workers rallies and championed the proletarian cause with both white and black workers. If this had been any more established King would’ve been written in history as a activist of workers rights, and not part of the civil rights movement – a position that is fully congruent with American ideology – proven today by the presidency of Barack Obama.”
In order for this to make sense, there must be an opposition between being civil rights and workers’ rights. Also there must be an assumption that whatever Martin Luther King did after his decades of civil rights campaigning would be what defined him. Only in this way could assassination preserve MLK for the civil rights side of things, beyond which the murderer himself ceases to have much importance.
Whilst I think the concept of the vanishing mediator has some value, in this instance I don’t buy it. First, the opposition between civil rights and workers’ rights is not clear cut. One might expect the standard Marxist trope to be that advocating workers’ rights directly challenges the class-structure of society, whereas civil rights could be safely incorporated into the edifice of American capitalism.
Within the civil rights movement, however, there were people unwilling be incorporated, who looked to their own actions to advance their demands rather than coat-tailing the liberal establishment and concentrating on elections. As Howard Zinn notes in his study on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee;
“Following the tumultuous freedom rides, the Kennedy administration made attempts to funnel activists of the civil rights organisations into voter registration activities rather than disruptive movements. Indeed the Kennedy administration was adamant in opposing widescale civil disobedience. President Kennedy thought that low key voting activities would result in peaceful change and provide additional votes for the Democratic Party.”
Meanwhile Kennedy was appointing racist justices to the federal courts and appeasing the Dixiecrats. Robert Kennedy, at one meeting, was famously supposed to have demanded of CORE activists, “Why don’t you guys cut all that shit, freedom riding and sitting-in shit, and concentrate on voter registration. If you do that, I’ll get you tax-free status.”
Freedom riding, sit-ins and their associated rallies became mass actions that threatened to defy the moderate leadership of the civil rights movement. Amongst this mass base, the interpenetration of ‘civil’ demands with explicitly social and economic demands is undeniable. If there was a division, it was in the minds of the moderate civil rights leaders who opposed King’s move towards the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968.
A lot of King’s speeches betray explicitly social and economic content however – like the Beyond Vietnam speech of April 1967, seven months before the Poor People’s Campaign was even in the planning stage. Retrospectively portraying the civil rights movement as something that would not challenge capitalism is buying into the views of that moderate section who opposed the more serious demands that finally found a voice in 1968.
It’s at this point which James Earl Ray intervenes, in Žižek’s example. By killing Martin Luther King, Ray supposedly prevented King’s further association with this series of demands. I think this is an overemphasis on the individual. The demands themselves are not well remembered. Most attention is given to equality between white and black, attempting to impose a de-politicized civic view of the past.
This is not because of King’s death, it’s because of the failure of the campaign, which is also not the result of King’s death. The metaphor of the vanishing mediator is thus misapplied in this instance, in contrast to its use in For they Know Not What They Do, one of Žižek’s older works.
“The passage from feudalism to Protestantism is not the same nature as the passage from Protestantism to bourgeois everyday life with its privatized religion. The first passage concerns “content” (under the guise of preserving the religious form or even its strengthening, the crucial shift – the assertion of the ascetic acquisitive stance in economic activity as the domain of manifestation of Grace – takes place), whereas the second passage is a purely formal act, a change of form (as soon as Protestantism is realized as the ascetic acquisitive stance, it can fall off as form).”
The meaning of Protestantism was fought over by real people rather than pre-determined as part of the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism. The ‘assertion of the ascetic acquistive stance’ (assuming for a moment that this is an acceptable simplification of Protestantism as ideology) was what emerged from social struggle between competing material interests; it was not predetermined in a formulaic manner.
Protestantism was the metaphor through which these struggles were fought in social struggles from Switzerland to Scotland.
The assumption which establishes Protestant theology as the vanishing mediator is that, whichever side emerged victorious in the class struggle, the bounds of Protestantism would have been transcended and its explicit use necessarily discarded. I think this is empirically verifiable; it’s evident at the Putney debates in the voices of the Levellers present.
That this is equally true of the ruling class shouldn’t even be in dispute – since the ruling class won through, and Theological assumptions and debates quickly receded as an indispensible touchstone of political discourse. The vanishing mediator is thus a useful shorthand in understanding the relationship between the ‘form’ of demands and their proper material content, and how form can change according to material context.
I was inspired when I first read about MLK’S final months. His championing of striking workers was radical, precisely because it represented a broadening of his political horizons (which, let’s be fair, were quite broad anyway) and connected issues that had largely been treated separately. This marked a potential radicalisation of civil rights – by linking the movement with the organised working class – and also a strengthening of the workers’ struggle. But, yes, it’s also crucial to recognise such strands and tendencies were already there, rather than some innovation of King’s.
I think that’s my point; there’s no decisive break, either for the movement as a whole or for King. Also, I don’t really see either King or Ray as the form covering a qualitative shift in content.
ah yes, but betrayal is the form covering a shift in content. As we can see from Zizek’s first example, in order for Christianity to fully become, it must displace the individual (Jesus) with betrayal (betrayal being the task goven to Judas by Jesus). Utilising this, it is Zizek’s contention that for Martin Luther King’s “dream” to have found itself woven in to the American soul, he needed to be betrayed (given the so-called Judas kiss) so as not to become a simple historical referent of the workers movement. James Earl Ray – an opponent of the civil rights movement – killed Martin Luther King in order for this “dream” to be apparent today in the US. Because by an extraordinary mistake a Florida convention drew up a plaque thanking James Earl Ray for carrying on King’s dream, Zizek notices that this isn’t a mistake like any other, it is a Freudian slip – an error that carries with it a modicum of truth – and that truth is that by Ray killing King in a way not compassionate, he rather is to thank for the “dream” and what is synonymous with the dream today.
So, some act of betrayal, or treachery, a breach of a social contract, is needed in order to shift content – this I think is Zizek’s contention. This is not to say – as you suggest Dave – that the civil rights movement didn’t start off as incongruent with what we might – for want of a better term – call the American ideology, but as you and I realise – and white America has hitherto realised – “civil rights [can] be safely incorporated into the edifice of American capitalism”.
A shift from puritan, Protestant ethics, to postmodern ethics has taken place with a shift in capitalism from duty to duty to enjoy – what Zizek might call a shift from the superego’s demand to enjoy (break the barriers of puritanism) to a big other (institutional, state apparatus, capitalist) demand to enjoy. Alongside this, capitalism happily accepts fair trade coffee, charity, shareholder power, philanthropy – these are no longer enemies of capital. Blacks can be president and gays can be the most popular bloggers in America, women can be more right wing than men and promote this on chat shows. Our task as anti-capitalists is to try and identify the break, the betrayal as vanishing mediator, between the spirits of capitalism and late capitalism, in order to qualify a break that cannot be “incorporated into the edifice of … capitalism [proper].”
I had a really long reply just typed out then clicked the wrong button and lost it. Gah. Will be back probably tomorrow to retype it.
I had that happen to me this morning – were you scathing of me, I be you were heh
I wasn’t that scathing I think. Anyway, I have actually reconsidered some points of my view.
My argument was that the assassination is incidental to regular functions of ideology and power, not explanatory nor central to them. This view I’ve reversed.
I still don’t accept that someone made a conflation between James Earl Ray and James Earl Jones and that, in the context of MLK, this necessarily means people think of Ray as part of the King ‘dream’. I think this is baseless inference. However the broader point is relevant.
What sanitized Martin Luther King was the failure of the movement he led up until his assassination. The Poor People’s Campaign was deliberately kept running in his memory. From that point on there was a battle between the liberal establishment (epistomised by Bobby Kennedy’s speech after King’s death) and the more socialist elements for King’s legacy.
The assassination/betrayal probably did distract from this struggle, and it’s arguable that the subsequent riots pushed race rather than class to the fore and helped engineer the defeat of the socialist elements of King’s programme. But I have difficulty seeing an assassination as the form of the break in content, since that was enacted some months previously and much more openly, when the mainstream Civil Rights leadership abandoned King and his planned march on Washington.
The assassination certainly elevated King to martyrdom, an empty vessel from which all class-specific content could be purged, but there’s an element of this to most American political figures once they cease to have teeth; they become elder statesmen, invited on to the chat shows and whatnot.
A key argument, admittedly counter-factual, is that an unassassinated King could quite easily have become one of these – ultimately deprived of teeth by the disintegration of the liberal/socialist base of the SCLC and the subsequent move right-wards.
Moving on to Z’s use of Jesus, I think the historical evidence is much too shaky to build such houses of cards. The bottom line is that we don’t know what made Jesus of Nazareth any different from the other pseudo-messiahs of the 1st Century AD. We know the theological requirements imputed by the Old Testament and some of the literary traditions of the time to a messiah, but quite a number of these were met by a number of people who weren’t Jesus.
Lastly I suspect I disagree with your assessment of our task as socialists, but wouldn’t mind some clarification before I write.
Well there is no way of knowing for certain the unconscious goings-on with regards to the plaque made out for Jones, with Ray’s name instead – though it does seem rather strange, and because it is both closer to the truth of the matter, and an unconscious act, this does awaken Zizek’s Freudian (via Lacan) reading that the unconscious has a closer relationship to truth than does our conscious selves. Though I admit it would be tricky to prove this – and I shouldn’t like/need to try and do this – and I agree that the broader point is relevant anyhow.
Having taken note of the liberal establishment’s battle with King in his lifetime, I think the death of King still needed to take place in order for his “dream” to continue, and function the way it does today. And also in order that betrayal be the vanishing mediator, for the dislike by the establishment of King only added to him beind subordinated to a voice of the left, whereas it was Ray and not the liberal establishment who have secured King’s place as a civil rights activist and not – necessarily – a voice of the left.
This is most important when we discuss the point that racism can often be displaced class agitation. Looking at it this way is also important as it shows that an assassinated King has had his place positioned in a way that is more than just martrydom – his place in American history has been secured forever, whereas an unassassinated King would’ve been positioned as precisely the opposite (demoted to an Unamerican other) – something that is not captured if we simply consider his martyr status. Largely, Dave, I think you’re right, but there is something significant to his position in the american soul about him being killed, than the betrayal by the liberal establishment, and I think the former is closer to Zizek’s point.
Finally, what I mean by the task of socialists and anti-capitalists is by observing the change in (spirit of) capitalism from the protestant ethic to late, postmodern capitalism (which in Lacan, and thus Zizek’s lingo is the difference between duty-based Genevan capitalism and the superego injunction to enjoy, a prominent feature to Zizek’s work The Fragile Absolute – more of which will appear on my blog some time before the end of the week) and in doing this noting what disturbs the present function of capital against that which renders it formal. Nowehere is this better exemplified by those who I have identified as the no-logoists (Power2010 et al); their idea of people power is not only congruent with the present functioning of capitalism, it will only make it stronger, and does not seek to subordinate it at all. The same conditions added to the change of spirit in capitalism (or so is the opinion of Zizek via Lacan and Weber).