This past Monday, Critical Resistance joined communities around the world in celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr’s powerful vision and struggle for freedom. In particular, we embraced the call to #ReclaimMLK’s radical legacy of internationalism, anti-war, anti-militarism, and anti-capitalism—a legacy that those in power have attempted to completely erase and whitewash.
There is perhaps no better time than now to celebrate the invaluable contributions of Dr. King, while heeding and uplifting his radical beliefs against war and militarism here and abroad. On January 3rd, the Trump administration killed an Iranian military official via drone strike and recklessly drove our government toward a war with Iran, a country that has faced crippling economic sanctions while being a target of US imperialism for decades.
Less than two weeks later, in the morning hours of January 14th, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in the Bay Area—fully armed with assault rifles, armored vehicles, and military equipment—descended to evict four houseless Black mothers and their children who occupied a vacant house in Oakland to meet their immediate housing needs and call attention to the rampant gentrification and displacement in the Bay Area (#Moms4Housing). In between these incidents, we know hundreds more violent state demonstrations of power have occurred: with tanks, drones, police cars, and the weaponization of bodies through brute force.
CR members at the #ReclaimMLK march, #Moms4Housing action, and Stop Urban Shield rally in Oakland, and a Care Not Cops budget mobilization in Portland.
While these attacks differ in scale—one an international military act to provoke war, the other a domestic act of local policing against Black community members —they are intimately connected and illustrate this country’s oppressive reliance on war, militarism, and state violence.
This country’s endless and destructive wars in the Middle East find their mirror image here in the ceaseless and ruinous war waged by police on poor communities of color, particularly Black and Indigenous people. Both wars are waged to stifle people’s self-determination and to protect the interests of those in power.
But repression breeds resistance. While communities around the world mobilize to oppose war and sanctions on Iran, Bay Area residents and the Moms 4 Housing movement continue to defend their right to housing in the wake of increased police militarization and rapid displacement. In New York City, people have also been mobilizing these past two months in outrage over the addition of 500 new police officers to the MTA subway system and the squandering of over $50 million to control and criminalize people. By the hundreds of thousands, communities in Iraq marched to demand the withdrawl of US troops from their country. Together we see people fighting for life and against war and control. Together we demand housing, we demand freedom of movement, we demand self-determination and freedom from violence. These are acts of solidarity and resistance that reflect the spirit of fighting against what Dr. King called “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.”
We remember Martin Luther King Jr. as he was: A Black radical anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-war revolutionary who died as an enemy of the State. Following the legacy of Dr. King’s radicalism, we must continue build resistance against the evils of the prison industrial complex and build power for the people. Abolition is a strategy to guide us toward the present and future we need. Onward to liberation!
