The ‘Socialist’ King?

To-day is Martin Luther King Jnr’s birthday, tomorrow will be the public holiday in his honor. The Reverend King’s radicalism went beyond the practice of Christianity itself. He was a preacher first and never stopped being a preacher but he was also a teacher and he taught in many different classrooms.

King attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania from 1948 to 1951.  It was clear to one of his teachers and closest associates there, Rev. J. Pious Barbour, that King "believed Marx had analyzed the economic side of capitalism right" and that "the capitalistic system was predicated on exploitation and prejudice, poverty, and that we wouldn't solve these problems until we got a new social order." In this period he studied the Communist Manifesto and Capital.

In a July 1952 love letter to his wife to be Coretta, the smitten King lay bare his socialist heart. Of capitalism, he said that he “failed to see its relative merits” and believed that it had “outlived its usefulness.” He made a striking confession: “I am more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” For King, capitalism was “a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” Alhough he was “opposed to the metaphysical structure of communism as well as Marxism,” he learned from reading Karl Marx “that religion can so easily become a tool of the middle class to keep the proletariat oppressed. Too often the church talked about a future good ‘over yonder’ totally forgetting the present evil over here.”

Coretta noted that "within the first month or so of our meeting," in 1952, King "talked about working within the framework of democracy to move us toward a kind of socialism," arguing that "a kind of socialism has to be adopted by our system because the way it is, it's simply unjust." She commented that "Democracy means equal justice, equity in every aspect of our society," and that King "knew that the basic problem in our society had to do with economic justice, or… the contrast of wealth between the haves and the have-nots.  Believe it or not, he spoke these words to me when I first met him. It wasn't something that he learned later and developed."

But his vision of socialist economic, like so many others, was that of “the nationalization of industry” which he would “welcome the day.”

In his Sept. 30, 1962, sermon “Can a Christian Be a Communist?” at Ebenezer Baptist Church, he makes clear that Christianity cannot be reconciled with communism but at the same time welcomes Marx’s critique of profit motives. Communism offers “a necessary corrective for a Christianity that has been all too passive and a democracy that has been all too inert,” King suggests. He went on to raise the issue of wealth inequality — “One-tenth of 1 percent of the population of this nation controls almost 50 percent of the wealth, and I don’t mind saying that there’s something wrong with that.” In this sermon, as with his letter to his beloved, King draws a clear distinction between being a communist, which he associated with the Russian authoritarian corruption of it and a Christian while upholding a sustained Marxist critique of capitalism.

At a 1966 planning meeting he understood that the Poor People’s Campaign took on a more radical critique of capitalism and reaffirmed his commitment to democratic socialism:

 “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums,” he warned his staff in 1966. “You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.…There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

The ambitious Poor Peoples Campaign  was designed to mobilize a massive interracial movement in an uncompromising struggle to eliminate poverty throughout the United States. King appealed for "the dispossessed of this country" to "organize a revolution" that would eliminate poverty:

“I can't see the answer in riots.  On the other hand, I can't see the answer in tender supplications for justice.  I see the answer in an alternative to both of these, and that is militant non-violence that is massive enough, that is attention-getting enough to dramatize the problems, that will be as attention-getting as a riot, that will not destroy life or property in the process.  And this is what we hope to do in Washington through our movement.

We feel that there must be some structural changes now, there must be a radical reordering of priorities, there must be a de-escalation and a final stopping of the war in Vietnam and an escalation of the war against poverty and racism here at home. And I feel that this is only going to be done when enough people get together and express their determination through that togetherness and make it clear that we are not going to allow any military-industrial complex to control this country.”

King explicitly linked the problem of capitalism with the problem of racism. “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” he argued in a speech at Riverside Church in 1967.

King recognized class identity as much as racial ones:

In the final analysis, the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the Black man needs the white man, and the white man needs the Black man. However much we may try to romanticize the slogan, there is no separate Black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with Black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We are bound together in a single garment of destiny.”

He explained  racism actually retarded the organization of poor whites to challenge their own poverty:

“There are, in fact, more poor white Americans than there are Negro. Their need for a war on poverty is no less desperate than the Negro's. In the South, they have been deluded by race prejudice and largely remained aloof from common action. Ironically, with this posture, they were fighting not only the Negro, but themselves.”

He reiterated this:

“The dispossessed of this country — the poor, the white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. they must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.”

King wrote from the Selma, Alabama jail in 1965 “If we are to achieve a real equality the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.” King knew that political democracy is hollow without economic democracy. Referring to the Greensboro Lunch Counter sit-ins, he asked, “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”

King spent time on picket lines. Upon his return from accepting the Noble Peace Prize in 1964, King joined striking black women at the Scripto pen factory and helped negotiate a settlement. He consistently worked with unions. His presence in Memphis, the location of his murder, was to speak in solidarity with the city’s striking sanitation workers whose subhuman work conditions had led to two deaths.

The activist and Marxist scholar C.L.R. James concluded—after intensive discussions with King—that King was "a man whose ideas were as advanced as any of us on the Left” Describing the civil rights movement, King asserted that "we are engaged in a social revolution," explaining: "It is a movement to bring about certain basic structural changes in the architecture of American society.  That is certainly revolutionary."

The World Socialist Movement makes no claim that Martin Luther King would be a member or agree with all its principles but we do say that if you share MLK’s dream for a better world then join us and make it a reality. King’s dream won't come true unless we end the nightmare.

“You can’t have capitalism without racism. And if you find a person without racism and you happen to get that person into a conversation and they have a philosophy that makes you sure they don’t have this racism in their outlook, usually they’re socialists.” - Malcolm X

“We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight capitalism with black capitalism; we fight capitalism with socialism…The very nature of the capitalist system is to exploit and enslave people, all people. So, we have to progress to a level of socialism to solve these problems.” - Bobby Seale