Thank you for the Martin Luther King Video.

Listening again to the speech of Martin Luther King against the war in Vietnam I am struck by what a giant he was and how he would be opposing today's wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Martin Luther King insisted on explaining that capitalism was the organizer of the Vietnam war as it is of the present wars. He called the US government the source of the greatest violence in the world as it remains today and he would have said so. Martin Luther King refused to keep quiet in spite of pleas from both his enemies and his allies.

At the same time he moved to oppose the Vietnam war he also began to explain that there had to be an alternative to capitalism. He spoke about the need for the US to move towards democratic socialism. And simultaneously with this he move to explain the need for working class unity and to organize the Poor Peoples March on Washington.

US capitalism saw that Martin Luther King was moving to unite working class people, that he was linking racism and and war and poverty to capitalism, that he was linking these to the vicious imperialist assaults of the advanced capitalist countries against the former colonial countries. This was when US capitalism organized the assassination of Martin Luther King. The leaders of the black revolt they could not buy and who began to draw class and socialist and internationalist conclusions they assassinated. Right here in the land of the free.

Malcolm X moved from his segregationist position to one of the unity of all of the oppressed. He began to criticize capitalism and speak of socialism. He explained you "cannot have capitalism without racism." He visited Africa and spoke against the exploitation of the former colonial countries by the advanced capitalist countries such as the US. It was then he was assassinated by the US state. Both he and Martin Luther King were looking at the way that capitalism was destroying the world through poverty, oppression and war and speaking for democratic socialism and working class unity, this is why they were assassinated.

More people throughout the world are standing up to capitalism. As this happens and it will only increase as more and more people understand the world through their own experiences and developments like wikileaks, then we have to learn the lessons from the past. The heroic stands taken by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. and the conclusions they drew about the need when fighting racism and war and poverty to always explain that these evils were inevitable with capitalism. And that we have to move to democratic socialism. These are the lessons. And also the meed to build a mass collective movement with a collective leadership so when US capitalism moves to assassinate the leaders of the movement there will be others to take their place.

Sean.