Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Economic justice for all, in the nation and the world
Let us honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by remembering what he taught and rethinking his teachings in the context of the challenges of the nation and the world today.
Dr. King emerged to become an important moral authority on the national and world stage from 1955 to 1965, as a leader of mass actions in the U.S. South demanding civil and political rights for all citizens, regardless of race, with a secondary focus on the need for the full protection of the socioeconomic rights of all citizens. The southern civil rights movement triumphed, leading to fundamental changes in U.S. laws and customs with respect to civil rights, voting rights, and access to public accommodations. The triumph was made possible by the intelligent strategies of the movement, which focused on specific and clear demands, connecting them to the fundamental Jeffersonian principles of the American Republic. It was aided by the fact that the United States was assuming a dominant role in the world-system, which was in transition to a neocolonial world-system with a legitimating ideology of the equal sovereignty of nations, casting aside the racist justifications that had been central to the forging of the European colonial empires and settler societies.
King began to reflect in 1963 on the strategies of the next stage of struggle, which he saw as giving emphasis to the social and economic rights of all citizens. Initially, he thought in terms of a “coalition of conscience” that would unite blacks and whites in political advocacy based on democratic moral principles. However, he was disappointed to learn that many white allies in the civil rights movement were not inclined to join this next stage of struggle. In Why We Can’t Wait, published in 1964 but written for the most part in 1963, King expressed disappointment that many white allies were rejecting the emerging black demand for “the mass application of equality to jobs, housing, education, and social mobility.”
In Why We Can’t Wait, King put forth a proposed program for economic justice, in which the federal government and private industry would cooperate in the creation of new jobs for blacks and whites, using creative economic policies that would take into account the declining number of blue-collar jobs, resulting from the changing dynamics of the world-economy. Why We Can’t Wait included a proposal for preferential treatment for blacks in education and employment as reasonable compensation for past discrimination. But King envisioned a program of preferential treatment as functioning in the context of a societal wide commitment to economic justice for all. On December 14, 1964, he observed that his trip to Scandinavia—where he observed the gains of democratic socialism—had increased his “determination to press even more vigorously for a broad alliance of all forces—Negro and white—dedicated to the achievement of economic justice.”
In the period 1965 to 1967, King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference increasingly turned their attention to the conditions of lower-class blacks in the urban North. He described these conditions as including overcrowded, inadequate, and segregated housing; low-quality and segregated education; low-paying and second-rate jobs; and police brutality. He understood attention to these issues as a new phase of the civil right movement, involving not a “coalition of conscience” but a multiracial coalition based in common economic interests. This tendency culminated in the Poor People’s Campaign, announced early in 1968, which convoked a massive nonviolent protest of the poor in Washington, DC. The goal of the Poor People’s Campaign was economic justice; and its focus was on “jobs or income for all Americans.” The Campaign called upon the federal government to invest in full employment, a guaranteed annual income, and the construction of low-income housing for the poor. It was envisioned as a multiracial alliance of blacks, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and poor whites, an alliance forged on the basis of common economic interests.
For Dr. King, economic justice ought to define not only the nation but the world. In 1967, in Where Do We Go From Here?, King explained the economic function of slavery in the West Indies and the United States: the production of raw materials such as rice, sugar, cotton, and tobacco for export to Great Britain. At the same time, the plantation economy of the Americas served as a market for the manufactured goods produced in Great Britain. Thus, slavery contributed to the economic development of Great Britain, the United States, and European nations. At the same time, the slave trade promoted the underdevelopment of Africa.
Accordingly, King saw the civil rights movement in the United States as part of a worldwide movement of people of color in opposition to colonial rule. This global movement of people of color is reversing the “direction of history” of the last several centuries; and as a result, “the era of colonialism . . . is at an end.”
On February 4, 1967, at the Riverside Baptist Church in New York City, King condemned the U.S. war in Vietnam as a colonialist war that seeks to stop the Vietnamese struggle for self-determination and democracy. He further declared:
“These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.”
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Critical Reflections
With his life cut short at the young age of 39, Dr. King had not arrived to a revolutionary understanding of the need for the taking of power by people’s parties/organizations, which in the conditions of the United States, would necessarily involve arriving to political power through electoral, legal, and constitutional means, on the foundation of a coherent program that is presented to the people. King remained throughout his life oriented to the organization of non-violent mass demonstrations in order to pressure the elite to concede to just and necessary demands, in spite of the greater possibilities for people’s parties to take political power as a result of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
It was Jesse Jackson who brought the evolution of King’s thinking in the period 1963 to 1968 to its culmination in the terrain of power. Although limited by the erroneous conception that political power could be attained through the strategy of presidential candidacy, Jackson nonetheless put before the people the important notion that political power in the USA could be attained through alliance of the various disempowered sectors, a “Rainbow Coalition.” As expressed on November 3, 1983, the new coalition was to include whites, blacks, Hispanics, Indians and Native Americans, Asians, women, young people, poor people, old people, gay people, laborers, small farmers, small businesspersons, peace activists and environmentalists. He declared that “if we remain separated, we will forever remain poor and powerless. But if we come together around our common economic plight and a humane political agenda, we won’t be poor and powerless anymore. . . . Together we can build a new majority.” Jackson also proposed a reorientation of U.S. foreign policy from East-West confrontation with the Soviet Union toward North-South cooperation with the anti-imperialist governments of the Global South
There were various factors that prevented the Rainbow Coalition from developing into a mass organization and/or sustaining itself as an important permanent presence in U.S. public discourse. First, Jackson’s incapacity to attend to the implementation of the plan to develop the Rainbow Coalition into a mass organization with local chapters throughout the nation. Secondly, the increasing economic and social fragmentation of the black community, giving rise to a black agenda that increasingly reflected the particular interests of the black middle class. Thirdly, the incapacity of the white left to formulate a coherent critique of American society and the world, pointing toward concrete proposals for an alternative political movement. Fourthly, the increasing presence of post-modern epistemological assumptions, giving rise to the emergence of non-empirical and politically unwise formulations of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” as permanent dimensions of American society, even after the significant reforms of 1964 and 1965. Fifthly, the unpatriotic political will of the elite to disseminate non-empirical and unwise concepts among the people, sowing division and confusion.
In Dr. King’s time, it was assumed in progressive circles that white resistance to the second stage of struggle for economic justice was rooted in white racism; and that opposition to a strong state role in the economy was based in an unexpressed hidden racism. But since that time, socialist governments of the world, like China, Vietnam, and Cuba, have arrived to the conclusion, based on their experiences in seeking to develop the economies of their nations, that the government must creatively direct economies in a way that stimulates economic productivity, which can include less direct governmental presence in the economy and more space for private property. Today, we can understand that resolving socioeconomic problems primarily involves creatively stimulating the national economy and enlisting the support of the patriotic national bourgeoisie in this project, if the conditions allow it. Today, we can understand that opposition to determined proposals with respect to the role of the state in the economy, in the form that they were historically expressed by the left, is not necessarily racism in disguise; it may reflect sincere reservations with the historical economic proposals coming from the left, which to some extent have been rejected by the most advanced projects of the left in the world, even as they maintain a strong institutional commitment to the construction of a just society.
Dr. King, like most progressive thinkers of his time, assumed that white resistance to the next stage of struggle was motivated by white racism. He maintained that racism is a “congenital conformity” that has crippled the nation from its inception.” He wrote that racism, even in 1967, is more than just an occasional departure from the norm of freedom and equality on the part of a few bigoted extremists.
But King did not dwell on the point. His focus was not on accusations of racism, even when accurate, but on building the necessary coalitions with sectors of white society. He grasped that multiracial coalitions were necessary for the construction of a society characterized by economic justice; and he understood that alliance for economic justice would lead to the disappearance of hidden and indirect forms of racism in the long term. He envisioned the overcoming of racism through united struggle for a common interest in the attainment of economic justice. Although profoundly disappointed with the deep cultural roots of white racism, he nonetheless saw the redemption of America through a united struggle by the people for social justice. Dr. King never left behind the slogan of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “To Redeem the Soul of America.”
Thus, we ought to appreciate the evolution of Dr. King from civil and political rights to economic justice and to social justice for the colonized peoples of the earth. His teachings suggest the need today for a multiethnic struggle for economic justice in the United States, unified by common principals and proposals; and for a foreign policy rooted in cooperation with the socialist and progressive governments of the world in the construction of a more just, post-colonial and post-imperialist world order.
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