krebscycle

I want to highlight a small part of a speech Martin Luther King made nearly 50 years ago because King’s ability to go to the core truths in just a few words is still kind of breathtaking. In this work, Dr. King teaches us that the moral problem of how to reduce poverty and get past racism is tied directly to the practical problem of how to grow the economy. And 50 years of America trying to evade its responsibilities to the poor and to back off from true civil rights have had a devastating effect on social prosperity.

We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation, as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s ability and talents. And, in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available

We don’t have enough teachers, children go without day care, there are not enough police, firefighters, street sweepers, road crews, engineers, social workers, and construction workers. People want useful work and the infrastructure of society is in desperate need of work, and yet we persist in believing that the “absence of worldly goods indicate[s] a want of industrious habits and moral fiber”.  The paradox that economists like Keynes observed is that a society that tries to save money and punish the “unworthy” poor by practicing austerity will impoverish itself by shrinking markets. Poor people can’t spend money (except on poorly made, unsafe junk) and this means fewer people can make money by manufacturing goods and growing food and making art or discovering science.  Austerity creates a society of small luxury markets paired with poverty markets of goods and services aimed at the poor. Austerity increases the cost of operating the government as well. The fake tough-guy, fake realistic “we can’t afford this” approach that is really just motivated by ill-will and selfishness turns out to be grossly impractical.   “People must be made consumers by one method or the other.”- if only the Republicans in Congress, not to mention the kings of misery who run the European Central Bank understood that. A society of gross excess for the rich and punishment for the poor will be a poor and ugly society. Dr. King was trying to show us a better path.

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the task, by the taskmaster, or by animal necessity. It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished.

Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. [..]

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated .

If you read the speech, you will see it’s mostly concerned with practical problems of strategy for the civil rights movement in 1967. What I have excerpted is just a single facet of a much broader work. There is a tendency among white American political thinkers to treat the civil rights struggle as a kind of side show  to the real issues, by which they often mean the issues of white people, or even just white men. That theory gets it backwards. The civil rights struggle is and always has been the motor of any social progress in the United States.