MLK: More radical than you think

Half a century after his murder in Memphis, Martin Luther King lives on in a thousand ways. He lives in the spirit of Black Lives Matter. He lives in the determined non-violent activism of the March for Our Lives youngsters. He lives in the hearts of most Americans, and in a special place in the hearts of African Americans.

King also lives in the uphill struggle for economic justice, in the fight for a living wage and a more just distribution of the bounty of the American economy.

In his time, King opposed the Vietnam War before that became popular, and so he is present in the current resistance to U.S. military adventures and imperial pretensions.

King is there wherever people rally to oppose the persecution of immigrants and the racist xenophobia that underlies it. In these times, in which all the ugliness MLK battled has come roaring back with a vengeance, and new scapegoats—Muslims, Mexicans—have been marked for prejudice and violence, we need his inspiration more than ever.

In the five decades since King’s death, he has been turned into an icon, a national holiday in his name established. But in the process, the radical social activist has been transformed in the public mind into the kind of hero which everyone can revere. To accomplish this normalization, MLK’s legacy has been distorted, domesticated. He has been reduced to a fighter for the civil rights of blacks. To achieve this pale, watered-down version of King, his radicalism has been cropped out of the picture, his image photoshopped to obscure key aspects of his philosophy and his activism inconvenient for our political class, and especially to those who wield power today.

King’s anti-war advocacy, the centrality of economic justice to his philosophy, his support of labor unions, and his belief that government should be a forceful agent in leveling the legal and economic playing field is anathema to those who have ruled the United States since 1968 when Richard Nixon began the long march toward the near total Republican/reactionary domination that exists today.

Martin Luther King died in the front lines of a labor union struggle to secure a decent livelihood and dignity for sanitation workers, garbagemen, among the lowest paid and least respected workers in America. This was a fight at the intersection of the injustices of class and race, then and now.

What has happened to that struggle? Labor unions have been devastated, to a significant degree by design. Republican politicians have worked hand in hand with employers, large and small, to reduce the power of unions to near-insignificance. Laws have been changed to make it more difficult for unions to organize workers. Their bargaining power on behalf of workers has been reduced drastically by the constant threat of relocation to another state or another country with anti-union laws, pro-business tax codes, and weak environmental rules.

The results have been that the percentage of workers who belong to labor unions has plummeted, the balance of power between labor and capital, which has always favored the latter, has become a David versus Goliath affair, and employers now take a much bigger share of the pie than ever before compared to their employees. Workers’ income has flatlined or fallen. A huge working class with a middle-class standard of living has been decimated since the 1970s. Inequality has soared.

This is a trend that to some extent has taken place in all rich countries but nowhere as radically as in the United States. And other countries have not compounded the woes of growing inequality by shredding their safety nets, as this country has been doing by leaps and bounds. The right-wing political monopoly in Washington since the 2016 election has meant a sharp acceleration of this process. The dream of a Great Society has morphed into the reality of the Great Inequality.

On the other side of the intersection of class and race, the picture is more complex. King and the civil rights movement spurred a trend toward racial progress which maintained its momentum for a long time. But there have been important reversals even under a Democratic president like Bill Clinton. Clinton colluded with Republicans to destroy Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), better known as welfare. The elimination of welfare was a long-held dream for the right, one specifically targeted against blacks. This is the end of the legacy of the war on poverty and a major escalation of the Republican war on the poor started by Reagan.

This was the crack that broke the damn, and in the wake has come a wave of destruction of an already weak social infrastructure. Now even once-sacred programs like Social Security and Medicare are in the gunsights of the likes of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a big fan of the crackpot philosopher of extreme individualism Ayn Rand.

On the purely racial front, the rise of Trumpism has been stoked by, and ridden on, an upsurge of racist talk, violence, and policy not seen since the post-civil rights backlash. Mass incarceration of blacks, which the Obama administration had been trying to reduce, is back with the hardline policies of Attorney-General Jeff Sessions. Every week it seems an unarmed black man is killed by police under questionable circumstances, with a predictable result: black rage and rebellion; juries who refuse to convict police officers under almost any circumstance; more black outrage. To boot, under the current regime, Mexicans in particular, and Latino immigrants in general, have become the targets of mass persecution as fierce as that against black youths.

The Trump nightmare is in every way the opposite of King’s Dream. That arc of history, King said, was long but bent toward justice. The arc has taken a few wrong turns since his day. But it may be starting to bend again. Right now, Republicans can’t seem to win an election to save their lives. And just as fed-up young blacks protesting segregation were a key to the civil rights movement, now the youth rebellion against gun violence may augur a change. Some of the March for Our Lives kids will soon begin to connect the dots and realize that gun violence is only a particularly nasty symptom of a deeper and more pervasive rot. By then, they—and millions of young Latinos deeply alienated by Republican xenophobia—will be able to vote. Then heaven help the Republicans. But heaven won’t help the Republicans. Instead, hell will welcome them with open arms.