“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” –- Speech to the Negro American Labor Council, 1961.
Decades of right-wing propaganda have made many of us shy away from adopting any descriptor that contains the term “socialism” in it. A lot of the arguments sound politically astute, mostly because they present conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom is that calling yourself any kind of “socialist” is such a strong signal that it will turn off tens of millions of Americans, and lose elections. We should challenge such conventional wisdom. It is true that in the American context, the term “Democratic Socialism” is a bold signal, it demands attention. We should ask ourselves whether exactly such a bold signal is required to awaken the tens of millions of Americans who do not vote.
It’s also worth asking ourselves who we are casting aside when we make derogatory, dismissive comments about Democratic Socialism. One person you’re dismissing is MLK, who used that term repeatedly and expressed very strident critiques of American capitalism. And he had these critiques well before the Reagan revolution began to dismantle many of the protections FDR, LBJ and other Democratic politicians had put in place.
Capitalism “has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes,” King wrote in his 1952 letter to Scott. He would echo the sentiment 15 years later in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?: “Capitalism has often left a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty [and] has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.” — inthesetimes.com/...
“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…” –- Speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967.
In his famous 1967 Riverside Church speech, King thundered, “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.”
And in an interview with the New York Times in 1968, King described his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) this way, “In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.” — inthesetimes.com/...
“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter,” King is widely quoted as asking, “if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” In King’s view, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, the voter registration drives across the South and the Selma to Montgomery march comprised but the first phase of the civil rights movement. In Where Do We Go From Here, King called the victories of the movement up that point in 1967 “a foothold, no more” in the struggle for freedom. Only a campaign to realize economic as well as racial justice could win true equality for African-Americans. In naming his goal, King was unflinching: the “total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.” — inthesetimes.com/...
“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.” — Speech at Bishop Charles Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ in support of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike on March 18th, 1968, two weeks before he was assassinated.
“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” — Report to SCLC Staff, May 1967.
“The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.” — Speech to SCLC Board, March 30, 1967.
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed matter: the guaranteed income… The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” — Where do We Go from Here?, 1967.
“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. 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.” — Speech to his staff, 1966.
“I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic… [Capitalism] started out with a noble and high motive… but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness.” –- Letter to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952.
“[W]e are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism…. There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” — Speech to his staff, 1966.
h/t Katie Halper’s collection of MLK quotes on capitalism which is where many of these came from.
— @subirgrewal