Doug Henwood wrote:
> I find it
> perfectly plausible that the ruling class would have good reasons to
> want to kill Martin Luther King; once he started talking about
> imperialism and class exploitation, he wasn't safe for liberals
> anymore. But JFK? C'mon.
Although I don't think Marx's claim that the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of the ruling class can be asserted without a lot of qualification, something like it is certainly true. And the connection between anti-racism and communism (i.e., either supporting workers or opposing imperialist war) certainly had become part of public consciousness for many decades. (Cf. J. Edgar Hoover's you can tell communists because they are comfortable around negroes..)
Without any "conspiracy" in the legal or most popular senses, that still would have produced quite a crop of willing assassins of King. Of course a crop of those willing to perform X does not make X inevitable, there is still a wide area of contingency involved, but my main objection to focusing on conspiracies (both real and mythical ones) is that it forecloses the kind of analysis I gesture at here. Watergate (or rather the exposure of Watergate) set the left back by providing fodder for individualist explanations of social ills.
Carrol