Martin Luther King's Economic Dream: A Guaranteed Income for All Americans
superunknown23
Superstar
Birnin Zana
Honorary Wakandan
Just read over the "Poor People's Campaign" MLK was leading (through which he was advocating his economic dream). This would have been a wonderful movement if it was implemented properly. Unfortunately this wasn't the case, a very big part because MLK was killed right before it was about to be implemented.
What was sad however was the shape of the movement after King died. The vacuum in leadership turn a movement with a strong coalition, including blacks, whites, latinos, and others, with a strong, clear message and a disciplined game plan, to an ineffective event that was sabotaged by the Powers that be. In fact, this movement served as the FBI's testing grounds for its "Ghetto Informant" program. Unfortunately, this program proved successful in infiltrating the movement and causing divisions among its members.
In many ways, it more or less ended like the Occupy Wall Street movement: the Feds simply kicked out everyone who marched to Washington DC and set up tents for the protest once the permit expired. And even prior to that, the movement's approach, which ended up being different than what Dr. King had plan, did little to move things in its favor.
Also, interesting to note that Robert Kennedy was cosigning the movement. He also got killed when the campaign reached Washington.
There's plenty of info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People's_Campaign
It's really a damn shame. MLK was trying to do the right thing. His reward: a bullet that ends his life.
What was sad however was the shape of the movement after King died. The vacuum in leadership turn a movement with a strong coalition, including blacks, whites, latinos, and others, with a strong, clear message and a disciplined game plan, to an ineffective event that was sabotaged by the Powers that be. In fact, this movement served as the FBI's testing grounds for its "Ghetto Informant" program. Unfortunately, this program proved successful in infiltrating the movement and causing divisions among its members.
In many ways, it more or less ended like the Occupy Wall Street movement: the Feds simply kicked out everyone who marched to Washington DC and set up tents for the protest once the permit expired. And even prior to that, the movement's approach, which ended up being different than what Dr. King had plan, did little to move things in its favor.
Also, interesting to note that Robert Kennedy was cosigning the movement. He also got killed when the campaign reached Washington.
There's plenty of info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People's_Campaign
It's really a damn shame. MLK was trying to do the right thing. His reward: a bullet that ends his life.
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I was like
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Sickens me when I see Glenn Beck and the Centrist Corporate Party (Dems) have rallies and give speeches in this man's honor. He stood against many things these entities are for. The revising of his agenda began the day he was assassinated.
superunknown23
Superstar
Conservatives despised him when he was alive, calling him a "dangerous communist."
Reagan opposed the MLK holiday when the NAACP pushed it through. He was forced to sign it only after the democrats passed the bill with a veto-proof majority (all 22 "no" votes in the Senate came from republicans).
Yeah, it's funny... Now that's he's safely dead, these cacs are trying to claim him somehow
A guaranteed income or anything like it (for example, Friedman's negative income tax) is most certainly not in effect anywhere here in the US. The EITC is totally different.
I doubt most of the people calling him that even knew enough about his actual beliefs to cite things like this.
theworldismine13
God Emperor of SOHH
Yeah, the elites had to kill this dude...
Can you imagine Martin rallying blacks and whites in the south for the same thing; racial politics aside and...
El Malik El Hajj Shabazz rallying blacks and whites up north for the same thing; racial politics aside...
America would look like Germany right now.
what would you describe his political beliefs? My friend has told me before he was politically communist (not in a negative way, this friend of mine is big into karl marx and all that jazz)
He was evolving. This is beyond concise, but e began to recognize that even with getting racial "freedom" that people of color would not be able to rise in America without better wages and employment. Thus, he began to connect the labor movement with the civil rights movement. Economics rights became part of civil rights. As he looked at the landscape, he began to be more skeptical and pessimistic about the current American system and thus you get the thoughts about "Democratic Socialism" and things of that ilk. I think some of my very left-wing socialist brethren try to accredit more to MLK than the information allows, but others try to ignore these critiques and pretend they didn't exist at all. I think it's fair to say that he recognized what many have recognized--that while capitalism is a great wealth creating tool, left on its own, it is unlikely to bring about equality nor provide a baseline of sustenance for human beings that we find to be morally acceptable.
I don't think he had a concrete set of beliefs. He was definitely in a period of transition when he died. He had abandoned the piecemeal reformism of his earlier days- that much we know for sure, and he was starting to talk about a more systemic or large-scale change, meaning that the fundamentals of the economy had to be different. In 1967, he already said "There is something wrong with capitalism" and was calling for large-scale redistribution of wealth.
At the same time, he was resolutely not a communist, both because of what he saw the Soviets doing and because he knew Marxism was strongly associated with atheism, which as a Pastor, he obviously rejected:
"I'm not talking about communism. What I'm talking about is far beyond communism...I read 'Communist Manifesto' and 'Das Kapital' a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn't follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called 'dialectical materialism.' I have to reject that.
What I'm saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated."
I think you could indeed call him a socialist, if socialism is broadly (that is to say, properly) conceived as a system in which labor power is democratized, which is exactly how he explained his support of a universal guaranteed income, though he avoided the word himself probably for pragmatic reasons (he was already under the McCarthyist eye for alleged communist sympathies, and because socialism at the time was used so much as a mere synonym for communism.)
There's a good article on this subject here: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.23...2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103243495031