A Radical, Not a Dreamer (The Uncompromising Anti-Capitalism of Martin Luther King and more)

[Omaha Steve]

Thoughts?

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A Radical, Not a Dreamer
My Martin Luther King Trilogy
by Dr. Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.



The Uncompromising Anti-Capitalism of Martin Luther King
www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/the-uncompromising
In the thousands of speeches and celebrations on the official Martin Luther King holiday since its inception, there is a crucial fact of his life, activism and thought that no major commemoration has ever celebrated: that King was a strong and uncompromising opponent of American capitalism. This was no late-in-life development for King. It spanned from his youthful years to his death while attempting to gain humane wages and working conditions for a public union. Why was Martin Luther King so opposed to capitalism?
Read the full essay here

Martin Luther King, the Beloved Community and the Socialist Idea
www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/martin-luther-king
Recently on The Huffington Post I explored Martin Luther King's rejection of capitalist logic and his endorsement of Democratic Socialism as an antidote to the ills and injustices inherent to the capitalist system he so fervently opposed. These include capitalism's subordination of human welfare to the pursuit of profits; its transformation of greed from Christianity's Third Mortal Sin to the preeminent capitalist virtue (based on a selective reading of Adam Smith); and its rejection of the biblically-mandated responsibility to "love your neighbor as yourself," i.e., to care for society's poor and vulnerable. In addition to the consternation that I would dare to use Martin Luther King and "socialism" in the same sentence, a number of readers also seized on King's endorsement as confirmation of the old charge that he was a Communist sympathizer.
Read the full essay here

Why Martin Luther King Had to Die
www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/why-martin-luther-king
On February 12, 1968, Martin Luther King and his staff completed the master plan for what they dubbed the "Poor People's Campaign." The purpose of the campaign was to mobilize masses of impoverished Americans of all races and regions to descend upon the nation's capital to "place the problems of the poor at the seat of government" and remain until the government announced substantive measures to address their plight. King was uniquely positioned to lead so bold a challenge to the forces of America's economic and political status quo. Yet he knew the Poor People's Campaign would attract to him enemies more powerful than he'd faced before. Martin Luther King was murdered on April 4, 1968 -- just days before the Poor People's Campaign was to begin. Was this mere coincidence? Or was there something more at work? A largely forgotten event in American history might reveal an answer.

Correction: In this essay I mistakenly assert that Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young opposed the Poor People's Campaign. That statement is inaccurate; they did not oppose the idea of the March. They only raised questions about strategy and logistics of implementation. Both Jackson and Young fully supported King and the Poor People's Campaign.
Read the full essay here

ABOUT OBERY HENDRICKS



Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Ph.D. is the author of The Universe Bends Toward Justice: Radical Reflections on the Bible, the Church, and the Body Politic (Orbis, 2011) and The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus' Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted (Doubleday, 2006). In 2004, HarperCollins published Hendricks' debut novel Living Water, an ESSENCE bestseller.

Hendricks is one of the nation’s most provocative and innovative commentators on the intersection of religion, politics, and social policy in America. The Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation calls his work “the boldest post-colonial writing ever seen in Western biblical studies.” A former Wall Street investment executive, Dr. Hendricks is also past president of Payne Theological Seminary, the oldest African American theological seminary in the United States.

A widely sought lecturer and media personality, Dr. Hendricks has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, PBS, National Public Radio, BBC, al-Jazeera Television, NHK Japan Television, Fox News, the Discovery Channel, the Bloomberg Network, and countless other media outlets. He is currently an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for American Progress and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Public Religion Research Institute.

Dr. Hendricks is a Professor of Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in the Department of Religion and the Institute for Research in African American Studies. He holds the Master of Divinity with academic honors from Princeton Theological Seminary, and both the M.A. and Ph.D. in Religions of Late Antiquity from Princeton University.

Dr. Hendricks is a popular blogger for The Huffington Post. Read his articles here: www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd
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[hfojvt]

1. I think that over-steps a little bit

"My reading of Marx also convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth."

Stride Toward Freedom p. 95.

In "Why we can't wait" he wrote about a GI bill for the disadvantaged that helps to end poverty and he wrote about full employment as a goal but he says nothing that is specifically anti-capitalist.

Of course, he had other books and speeches and sermons, but he certainly did not make anti-capitalism a major theme of those two books.

[RainDog]

2. MLK supported basic minimum income

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/martin-luther-kings-economic-dream-a-guaranteed-income-for-all-americans/279147/

One of the more under-appreciated aspects of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy is that by the end of his career, he had fashioned himself into a crusader against poverty, not just among blacks, but all Americans. In the weeks leading to his assassination, the civil rights leader had been hard at work organizing a new march on Washington known as the "Poor People's Campaign." The goal was to erect a tent city on the National Mall, that, as Mark Engler described it for The Nation in 2010, would "dramatize the reality of joblessness and deprivation by bringing those excluded from the economy to the doorstep of the nation's leaders." He was killed before he could see the effort through.

So what, exactly, was King's economic dream? In short, he wanted the government to eradicate poverty by providing every American a guaranteed, middle-class income—an idea that, while light-years beyond the realm of mainstream political conversation today, had actually come into vogue by the late 1960s.

To be crystal clear, a guaranteed income—or a universal basic income, as it's sometimes called today—is not the same as a higher minimum wage. Instead, it's a policy designed to make sure each American has a certain concrete sum of money to spend each year. One modern version of the policy would give every adult a tax credit that would essentially become a cash payment for families that don't pay much tax. Conservative thinker Charles Murray has advocated replacing the whole welfare state by handing every grown American a full $10,000.

King had an even more expansive vision. He laid out the case for the guaranteed income in his final book, 1967's Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Washington's previous efforts to fight poverty, he concluded, had been "piecemeal and pygmy." The government believed it could lift up the poor by attacking the root causes of their impoverishment one by one—by providing better housing, better education, and better support for families. But these efforts had been too small and too disorganized. Moreover, he wrote, "the programs of the past all have another common failing—they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else."

Before he was murdered, he supported people of all races coming together to deal with poverty.

I think he's still right about this - and, again was ahead of his time in so many ways.