True to form, King moved with his family to a West Side ghetto in Chicago. King’s goal was not simply to speak for the ghettos but to mobilize and organize the urban poor for self-liberating action. In contrast to those who thought the alienated citizens of the slums were capable only of violence, King pursued a remarkable campaign that included the recruitment of gang members, with whom he engaged on the streets of Chicago and invited into his own home to debate pressing social issues as well as the politics of nonviolence. As King made clear, nonviolent action is not passive and submissive but militant and coercive. “Nonviolence must be adapted to urban conditions and urban moods,” King avowed. “We must fashion the new tactics which do not count on government goodwill, but instead serve to compel unwilling authorities to yield to the mandates of justice.”10 Moreover, King emphasized that forms of mass protest and civil disobedience should be used to attack not only unequal rights but also economic inequality. To this end, King argued that “militant non-violence” was not only morally but also pragmatically and politically superior to violent riots. “To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to the larger society, but not wantonly destructive.”11 King rightly predicted that riots would only strengthen the right-wing demonization of the black population and facilitate repressive measures on the part of the governing authorities. By contrast, politically articulated forms of mass civil disobedience—which highlight actual forms of racial and economic inequality—exhibit moral authority in practice and are “more difficult for the government to quell by superior force.”12
While King’s organizing efforts were fraught with difficulties, he successfully mobilized a wide range of citizens in the ghettos, including gang members from the Vice Lords, the Roman Saints, and the Blackstone Rangers, in both the 1966 Mississippi Freedom March and open-housing marches in Chicago that same summer. As Brandon M. Terry has shown in an important study, King’s work in the ghettos was a form of practical and critical engagement with the contentions of the Black Power movement.13 Like many of the representatives of Black Power, King regarded the crimes committed by rioters to be “derivative crimes,” the roots of which were social and economic injustice (what King called “the crimes of white society”). Yet King’s conception of what needed to be done was profoundly different from the advocates of Black Power. While leaders of the Black Power movement laid claim to the riots as part of an emancipatory project, King pointed out that they had no actual control over the unfolding of the riots and therefore no actual authority with regard to the expressive meaning of the actions undertaken by the rioters. Only organized political action could lay claim to such authority. Moreover, King clearly saw any form of black nationalism or separatism as a dead end, since it ignored the issues of class and economic justice that cut across racial boundaries. There is no “separate black road to power and fulfillment,” King repeatedly emphasized.14 Instead, he articulated the need for a cross-racial labor movement and engaged in depth with labor activists, while combating persistent forms of racism within labor unions themselves.
King was thus led to launch the Poor People’s Campaign, which he was in the midst of organizing when he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. The Poor People’s Campaign was supposed to be a “genuine class movement” transcending racial and ethnic lines to include Native Americans and Hispanics, as well as the white working poor and the unemployed, who had been left behind by deindustrialization in the cities or by automation in the countryside.15 This “non-violent army” would engage in massive forms of civil disobedience in order to bring fundamental economic issues into focus. As part of this mobilization King also began to collaborate with the National Welfare Rights Association, through which black women had organized militant protests. At the time of his death King was planning a new march on Washington, D.C., which would lead to an occupation of the capital and display an interracial alliance of the poor. As he told a reporter in Memphis shortly before his assassination: “You could say we are engaged in the class struggle, yes.”16
King was well aware of the opposition he would meet from those in power, but it did not prevent him from radicalizing his public stance. “Something is wrong with the economic system of our nation,” King emphasized more and more often in the last years of his life. “Something is wrong with capitalism.”17 These were not abstract claims but directly linked to the concrete problems regarding housing, education, and welfare that he encountered while working in the ghettos of the North, as well as with the urban and rural poor in the South. “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there,” King said in an interview in 1967. “Now I feel quite differently, I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”18 King knew that his radical agenda would make his political work all the more difficult and that the “class issues” he was now engaging would be countered with much greater violence than his campaign to end legal discrimination. At a retreat for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in November 1966, King made clear that the demand for real economic justice meant “getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with Wall Street. You are messing with captains of industry.”19
The following year—at the SCLC convention in August 1967—King emphasized that “we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society” and “to question the capitalistic economy.”20 King had studied Marx already in his early twenties and throughout his life he expressed his appreciation of Marx’s economic analysis of systemic injustice. “We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s market place,” King reminded his audience at the convention, “but one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring….When you deal with this, you begin to ask the question: ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question: ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ ”21 Thus, King’s quest for freedom and his commitment to ending poverty led him to question capitalism. As he persistently argued: “The problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together.”22
Today King’s radical legacy is largely forgotten. He is the most celebrated American political figure of the twentieth century, but the celebration has come at the cost of domestication. “Dead men make / such convenient heroes,” the black poet Carl Wendell Hines once wrote. “They / cannot rise / To challenge the images we would fashion from their lives / And besides, it is easier to build monuments / than to make a better world.”23 Since King’s death many monuments have been built in his honor. In Washington, D.C., the Capitol Rotunda holds a bust of King (the first black person to be given the honor) and the National Mall exhibits a massive sculpture of King looking out over the city. Perhaps most strikingly, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the only federal holiday commemorating an individual American civilian. Apart from Columbus Day, it is the only holiday named after an individual at all.
These forms of ritual celebration, however, do not ensure that we are keeping King’s legacy alive. On the contrary, his legacy has increasingly been reduced to a message of peace and consensus, at the expense of what he actually said and fought to accomplish. While King is often enrolled in a conciliatory narrative regarding achieved civil rights and formal racial equality, he was emphatically clear that the most important challenges for achieving actual reconciliation and equality still lay ahead. Moreover, these challenges still lie ahead for us today. As Hosea Williams—who worked closely with King in the civil rights movement—has observed: “There is a definite effort on the part of America to change Martin Luther King, Jr., from what he really was all about—to make him the Uncle Tom of the century. In my mind, he was the militant of the century.”24
Yet we only have to listen to the speech King gave on the steps of the Lincoln Memoria
l—the famous “I Have a Dream” delivered on August 28, 1963—to be led down the radical path he came to follow. King here proceeds from the commitment to freedom, which is inscribed in “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”25 In producing these documents, the Founding Fathers were “signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” namely, that each person “would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”26 By virtue of the historical achievement of such a commitment to freedom, we can criticize the Founding Fathers for failing to live up to the principles they avowed—e.g., by keeping slaves and subordinating women—as well as criticize our contemporary society for failing in its commitment to freedom. “It is obvious today,” King declares in the speech, “that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned.”27 King’s appeal to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is not an appeal to stay true to who we already are. Rather, it is a transformative appeal to become who we have never been but ought to be in light of our own commitment to freedom and equality. As early as in Stride Toward Freedom (1958), King had made clear that freedom and equality are “inseparable” from economic justice.28 At the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, he makes the point by speaking of freedom in terms of economy from the beginning. “America has given the Negro people a bad check,” King underscores, “a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”29
The economic dimension of King’s argument became more and more pronounced as he progressed into the second phase of the civil rights movement. When he returns to the promissory note of the Founding Fathers in a 1968 speech, he makes explicit that liberty and the pursuit of happiness require the economic resources to lead one’s life. “It is a cruel jest,” King underscores, “to say to a bootless man that he should lift himself up by his own bootstraps.”30 He gives the example of African Americans being granted formal freedom (freedom from slavery) while not being granted any resources to pursue and cultivate their freedom. When African Americans were released from the bondage of physical slavery in 1863, they were not given land, money, or access to educational institutions that would enable them to lead their lives. “It was something like keeping a man in prison for many, many years,” King points out, “and suddenly discovering that he is not guilty of the crime for which he was imprisoned. And then you just go up to him and say, ‘Now, you’re free.’ But you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back. You don’t give him anything to get started in life again….We were left illiterate, penniless, just told, ‘you’re free.’ ”31 In the same period of U.S. history, King recalls, Congress was giving away millions of acres of land to white peasants from Europe, for whom the state “built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm, provided county agents to further expertise in farming, and then later provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms.”32
The division of privilege is perpetuated today in terms of what King calls “the two Americas,” where there is “socialism for the rich” and “rugged individualism for the poor.”33 In one America, there are “millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits.”34 In the other America, by contrast, “millions of people find themselves forced to live in inadequate, substandard, and often dilapidated housing conditions,” while their children “are forced to attend inadequate, substandard, inferior, quality-less schools,” which are “so overcrowded, so devoid of quality, so segregated, if you will, that the best in these minds can never come out.”35
As I myself work in New Haven, Connecticut, I am reminded every day that the two Americas in King’s analysis still persist. On the one hand, there is Yale University where I teach, which is one of the richest educational institutions in the world. On the other hand, only a few blocks away from the university, there is severe and widespread urban poverty, with a population that is predominantly African American. Even within Yale the legacy of slavery in America is manifest, with a majority of white faculty and a majority of black service personnel. Compared with the sixties, there is now a greater institutional commitment to represent ethnic and gender diversity on the faculty. As King was well aware, however, such a solution can never address the root of the problem, which is fundamentally economic. A society that seeks to promote true equality of opportunity cannot limit itself to having a few representatives of an ethnically defined group in positions of power, while the mechanisms of economic marginalization continue to be operative for the majority. Rather, facilitating true equality of opportunity requires that every citizen have adequate resources for material well-being, education, and social recognition.
King’s official proposals for achieving such an end mainly concern the redistribution of wealth. He advocates for a guaranteed annual income that would eliminate poverty, supplemented by job creation by the state, programs for housing assistance, free health care, and the invigoration of a public school system. These reforms are in line with what I analyzed as “social democracy” in chapter 6 and they resonate with the leading proposals on the progressive Left today, where a universal basic income or other forms of redistribution are seen as the solution to the problems of economic injustice under capitalism. Yet King also senses that there is a deeper problem of value under capitalism, which cannot be resolved through the redistribution of wealth.
As we have seen, the problem of value becomes especially manifest in the replacement of living labor time with nonliving, automated production time. In his speeches and books, King keeps returning to automation as a double-edged phenomenon. The automation of previously necessary labor should be emancipatory, since it liberates us from the need to expend our lifetime on tedious forms of work. Yet, under capitalism, automation does not lead to the emancipation of workers but rather to their unemployment, which makes them available for further exploitation in temporary jobs and with lower wages. “As machines replace men, we must again question whether the depth of our social thinking matches the growth of our technological creativity,” King emphasizes in a speech to the Workers Union of America in 1962.36 “We cannot create machines which revolutionize industry unless we simultaneously create ideas commensurate with social and economic reorganization, which harness the power of such machines for the benefit of man. The new age will not be an era of hope but of fear and emptiness unless we master this problem.”37
The social and economic reorganization that King envisions would require what I have called the revaluation of the capitalist measure of value. Under capitalism, technology is not developed for the benefit of our life together but for the sake of profit. Such profit depends on converting the surplus time of our lives into surplus value. Only the extraction of surplus value from living labor time can generate profit and lead to the accumulation of capital wealth. This is why the production of value under capitalism—as we have seen—is measured in terms of socially necessary labor time. No matter how efficient a machine becomes, we cannot extract any surplus value from its own operation but only by exploiting the lifetime of someone who is operating the machine. The purpose of capital gain—the generation and accumulation of capital wealth—thus requires the exploitation of socially necessary labor time. The purpose of capital gain shapes not only the use of machines but also the conception and construction of the relevant technology in the first place.
Hence, the exploitation of the lifetime of workers is necessary under capitalism. For the power of technology to serve emancipation rather than exploitation, we must transform our measure of value from socially necessary labor ti
me to socially available free time. As I argued in chapters 5 and 6, such revaluation demands not only a theoretical but also a practical transformation of the way we reproduce our lives through technology, education, and labor. Rather than private ownership of the means of production, which exploits socially necessary labor time for the sake of generating capital wealth, we must own the means of production collectively, developing our technologies and producing our goods for the sake of increasing socially available free time.
To recall, socially available free time is not merely leisure time but time devoted to activities that we count as meaningful in themselves. These activities can range from participation in forms of labor that we recognize as necessary for the common good, all the way to the pursuit of individual projects that challenge the given norms of what may be a meaningful activity. For socially available free time to be recognized as a value, we must develop democratic institutional forms of acknowledging one another as social individuals who are ends in ourselves. These institutional forms of democratic life must enable us both to discuss collectively what needs to be done in our community and to engage individually the question of what to do—what is worth doing—with the socially available free time that is produced by the reduction of the socially necessary labor time. The problem with life under capitalism is not only that we are subjected to wage labor but also that we do not have adequate institutional forms for recognizing and cultivating the value of socially available free time. While the decrease of socially necessary labor time under capitalism leads to the problem of unemployment and the loss of a sense of purpose in existence, the increase of socially available free time under democratic socialism leads to the possibility of exploring our priorities and what matters to us, through different kinds of education, forms of work for the sake of the common good, shared projects, leisure activities, and individual pursuits.
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