Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Radical Socialist

Rev. Martin Luther King with wife and activist Coretta King Scott in the the Selma to Montgomery Marches. The assembly marches to the Alabama state capitol on March 19, 1965, AP.

Today, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. He would have been 92 years old today. In the reverent memory and conscious of the late great Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King we are all obligated to be called into action and thought for the radical, social, and economic reordering of American society. A pluralistic society which is not fundamentally and exclusively based on equal opportunity, but far more important, a society that provides a floor, a universal safety net that insures the working classes equal outcomes both socially and economically. Dr. King knew in order to problem solve and debunk the capitalist abstractions and contradictions of the American paradox; it required the fulfillment of economic justice to manifest racial justice. He called for a class-based revolution, the Poor Peoples’ Campaign (still alive in moral, faith-based movements today) that was multi-racial and inclusive of all creeds, races, and backgrounds, to unilaterally improve the material conditions of all working families and households. It is a radical redistribution of wealth both the white moderate and conservative who invoke Dr. King’s memory candidly ignore, in hopes to dissuade any legitimacy and aspiration for class-based movements. This movement conceived by Dr. King did not proxy whites as the availed saviors and it did not tolerate blacks as passive victims, but universally through a collective effort of all races- Indigenous, Latinx and Hispanic, Black and White to convene and organize in the common goal to redress the injustices of a forgone past that continue to haunt our foreseeable future. It is the social democratic guarantee that the endorsed promissory note in Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech will ensure: policy to elevate living conditions in late-stage American capitalism. 

MLK, Jr.’s legacy is endearing and ever so relevant today as it was in the 20^th century. His influential Dream taught and cautioned us the only way to rehabilitate the American economy’s dismal racial disparities and wealth and systemic inequality in the American justice and criminal systems is to confront and battle the “Three Evils.” These are the oppressive evils which are systemized and proliferated only in a capitalistic, western society. They are Poverty, Racism, and War. These Three Evils in the past were the depleted, drained, and sprawled urban core, the preponderance of white supremacy in everyday American society by de jure and de facto segregation, and of course the Vietnam War. But these three evils did not cease, no they reformed and still violate Americans and countries abroad today. Much of it still the same as it was back then, but the Three Evils are a continuity of the perversities and corruptions of the American machine today.

Poverty is the disparity in income and share of net wealth in this country’s economic castes between rich, middle-class, and poor. It is the fact rents are untenable and cannot be kept with current minimum wages. Median wealth is not evenly distributed under this capitalist American dream. That sometimes two jobs is only breaking even. The capitalist regime forces the working classes to abide by and defer to the undemocratic forces of the powerful and wealthy elite. The wealthy CEO with an average $18 million dollar salary and generous compensation from government bailouts will do whatever he must to prohibit the increase of the starving minimum wage to that of a living wage in order to excise surplus profit from the burdened and alienated service worker. They do it by calling it “menial, unskilled labor.” But complicity from the general populace is to blame too. Most times, American consumers do this by electing the politicians who will protect free markets, defend bourgeois democracy, and abscond corporations from ever having to pay a tax for government-run programs and public goods. Corporate exploits will continue, so as long as misguided, and mislead American consumers parrot the capitalist lie that prices will go up if the dignified $15 living wage is finally restituted to the worker at McDonald’s.

Racism today is the ghost of Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and outlasting disparities in wealth and equity due to the aftermaths of chattel slavery, segregation, discriminatory institutional practices, and government-sanctioned residential segregation. Racism is the fact Black Lives Matter-led movements spur broad, white, reactionary disdain and incite the white man’s propensity for racial-based violence simply because Black liberation and power is non-negotiable to white America. It is the fact that the American conservative scoffs and mocks the deaths of George Floyd and amount no sympathy for Breonna Taylor, killed in the safety and security of her own home by the hands of police. It is the fact that people say Blue Lives Matter because they do not believe Black Lives Matter­. A significant dialogue surrounding policing is in order due to fact that Blacks are killed by police at a far greater rate than whites in encounters. Additionally, Edwards, Lee, and Esposito assert according to data on police-involved shootings, “Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police”. The horrific history of violence and oppression in the United States is horizontally and vertically visible and apparent (even today) for non-white ethnicities, yet the white ruling class in their inherent ire and contempt to democracy and justice will never relent nor cease the violence. Their power-politics congealed a system bent on oppression.  

War today is crippling police services budgets streamlined in state legislatures and city halls, which consolidate the post-9/11 militarized police state with military munitions and supplements. War is the national defense budget which undercuts any or all social and public services for education and healthcare. It is the American crusades for colonial projects of liberalism in foreign countries, and limited wars to consolidate a globalized capitalistic regime for transnational profit and competition. Massacres on the ground and drone strikes from the sky to satiate and arouse American exceptionalism.

All and many of these are the social and economic indignities to the oppressed and marginalized in this country and the world. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and heroes of the Civil Rights Movement forced us to question the powers that be, cajoling our complacency in order to confront the immorality of the United States. It was not what we have all been taught in schools to preserve the misplaced sense of exceptionalism. Even the existence and symbolism of Dr. King has been co-opted by the timid, white, moderate and contemptuous conservative to aggrandize America’s fragile ego. To diagnose and remedy this American pathology, all need to counter this mythology of America redeemed and forgiven, and in doing so - along with rectifying other misunderstood and once feared political and cultures figures – is by revisiting Dr. King as the radical anti-capitalist and socialist he truly was and forever will be. So today whether through action or thought, be revolutionary and stir up, as late Civil Rights icon John Lewis said, “good trouble.” Today is not -as many Black activists and organizations are prefacing- a day off but a DAY ON.