Making sense of where MLK was headed

Martin Luther King was an enormous catalyst causing America to finally align its Age of Enlightenment philosophy and ideals with the realities on the ground, especially with regard to race and poverty.  As a man of the cloth, as an orator, and as skilled activist, there is a lot to admire and be thankful for from him.

However, as he brought about more and more social and legislative change, as he accomplished more of his dream, it has always seemed to me that he ended up flirting with socialism and communism.  His focus was on the poor and as one can imagine, the bottom quintile in the 1960s were indeed materially poor (though rich compared to the rest of the world at that time.)

But as so often in the sixties, it has always felt to me like King's Christian exhortations to care for the poor came dangerously close to communism, or at least it's more socially acceptable cousin, socialism.

Matthew Yglesias has a column today that allows his later-in-life directions to be seen in a somewhat different light.  From Martin Luther King, Jr.'s plan for class struggle by Matthew Yglesias.  The column is essentially an exert of a piece in the New York Times from March 31, 1968, Dr. King's March on Washington, Part II by Jose Yglesias, Matthew's grandfather.  

A few minutes later, in Dr. King’s office on the other side of a thin partition, an office no larger than Young’s and much more cluttered, I asked King also if he hadn’t abandoned moral issues for the class struggle. He was in shirt sleeves and had leaned back in his chair, one arm raised, tapping his head lightly with his hand, a favorite position with him. Now he leaned forward and spoke directly, a manner I was to find customary with him, so that interviewers seldom have to rephrase questions; he responds to the tone and level of the question but also, as if fulfilling a personal need, to implications that at first do not seem implicit in the question: an intellectual curiosity that gives the effect of total sincerity.

“In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle, yes,” he said. He explained that the gains for which the civil-rights movement had fought had not cost anyone a penny, whereas now — “It will be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls for a redistribution of economic power. Yet this isn’t a purely materialistic or class concern. I feel that this movement in behalf of the poor is the most moral thing — it is saying that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth.”

Although we went on to talk of other things, this question remained with him, and I heard him the next night, at a church in Birmingham, expand on it. There he continued with a discussion of the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus. Lazarus had not gone to heaven simply because he was poor, King argued, nor was the rich man to hell because he was rich. “No, the rich man was punished because he passed Lazarus every day and did not see him … and I tell you if this country does not see its poor — if it lets them remain in their poverty and misery — it will surely go to hell!”

In his office, however, I quoted to him a New York radical who had said that Dr. King’s political problems derive from the fact that his present support comes from middle-class Negro churches and organizations: they would oppose his new tack. Has there been opposition?

He shook his head. “When we began discussing this thing last fall, we expected there would be opposition — from the timid supplicants and from the ultra militants.”

He shook his head again.

“In a sense, you could say we are waging a consensus fight. The Harris Poll recently showed that 68 percent want a program to supply jobs to everyone who wants to work, and 64 percent want slums eradicated and rebuild by the people of the community — which means a great many new jobs.”

"Our program calls for a redistribution of economic power" sure sounds like a socialist agenda.  One which has once again reared its ugly head in the form of the Squad in Congress.  

But the framing of the piece seems to give a greater emphasis on the Christian value and goal of improving the lot of the poor rather than the socialist ideology of redistributing economic power.  From this piece, it appears to me, that socialism was a naive means to an otherwise noble end.  If his goal was indeed that of bettering the poor, which all Christians and most people could endorse, then, at least for me, that sheds some light on his last couple of years.

It was the late sixties.  The old colonial empires were dissolving.  Communism in the form of the Soviet Union still then did seem a viable alternative to free competitive markets in a capitalist system.  Certainly Christian Socialism as practiced in a number of European countries seemed viable.  

Move on fifty years and we now know that all the perceived economic accomplishments were a mere Potemkin village.  Communism has still not been seen to work anywhere at anytime.  As all the Scandinavian Christian Socialist economies have collapsed and been reformed into more free market systems, even the socialist model is questionable.  

In 1968 these approaches seemed promising of greater prosperity and equality.  We now, with the luxury of hindsight, know they only offer equality of misery and economic failure.

I guess what this column does for me is allow me to see King's flirtation with socialism in a different light.  It is a matter of tactical versus strategic.

Governments formed on the principles of Age of Enlightenment ideas and powered by free market capitalism always deliver better prosperity to all members of society than do authoritarian governments, whether socialist or communist.  Governments underpinned by free market capitalism do have to have robust and reliable regulatory mechanisms and it is always difficult to find the optimal point between free market capitalism and some minimal viable regulation but that is the key challenge.

A refined free market capitalist will always, in the long run and strategically, yield the best outcome for the poor.  It is not surprising that the tactical promise of equality through socialism or communism was, and has always been, a strategic trap for immiseration.  We know that now.  In 1968?  

In the short term, as money and power is redistributed, it can seem like Eden is within grasp.  But that redistribution is always the catalyst for the engine of prosperity to stutter and then dry up.  But King, concerned for the well-being of the poor, could not have known that as clearly then as it is seen now with fifty years of experience under our belt.  

In seeing evidence of a flirtation with socialism, perhaps all I have been seeing is a naive effort to deliver a better life to the poor.