These Revolutionary Times is a project of The Political Revolution. Each Sunday, we focus on a small selection of papers, articles, and essays published in various publicly available sources that reflect political change already happening or that we think ought to happen or ought not to happen in 21st Century America. Our goal is to spur people to read these pieces with an open-minded but critical focus and engage here in an interchange of ideas about the issues raised in them.
It’s little wonder, and a good thing, that many folks who are passionate about social justice are also passionate about economic justice, environmental justice, and other just causes. It’s also little wonder and a good thing, that while many people will recognize the importance of many causes, they’ll focus their own attention and energy on particular causes. As I wrote in another diary:
[A] landmark 2011 study led by epidemiologist Sandro Galea attributed 291,000 U.S. deaths in the year 2000 to poverty and income inequality, 245,000 deaths to low education, 176,000 deaths to racial segregation, and 162,000 deaths to low social support (New York Times; Science Daily). When people are dying from raw economics at the same time as people are dying from racist policing, I surely don’t want Democratic politicians to stand in a room with Fight for 15 activists and Black Lives Matter activists and declare that one life-and-death issue is secondary to another. Democratic politicians should have their constituents’ backs on all these issues.
One of the very strengths of progressives is that we recognize there are myriad issues that need to be addressed and we are determined and able to work on multiple problems at the same time. Progressives can achieve the most when we’re being supportive toward all folks who are focusing on critical concerns, from racist policing to income inequality to transgender rights to global warming and a multitude of other areas I haven’t listed.
Surely anyone who champions any just cause should be applauded. And if a public figure comes along who can speak passionately and persuasively on multiple justice issues, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does, that’s even more cause for celebration. The attention she’s getting is deserved and welcome.
Here are the opening paragraphs of a short article recalling Martin Luther King, Jr.’s thoughts on capitalism and socialism (The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King, Jr., In These Times, Jan 15, 2018):
In 1952 a 23-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a love letter to Coretta Scott. Along with coos of affection and apologies for his hasty handwriting, he described his feelings not just toward his future wife, but also toward America’s economic system. “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he admitted to his then-girlfriend, concluding that “capitalism has outlived its usefulness.”
King composed these words as a grad student on the tail end of his first year at the Boston University School of Theology. And far from representing just the utopianism of youth, the views expressed in the letter would go on to inform King’s economic vision throughout his life.
As Americans honor King on his birthday, it is important to remember that the civil rights icon was also a democratic socialist, committed to building a broad movement to overcome the failings of capitalism and achieve both racial and economic equality for all people.
Can you imagine if someone with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s commitment to social and economic justice had become president? Well, someone like him did become president of South Africa. Here are excerpts from a 2013 article by Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson on Aljazeera America:
Nelson Mandela was the pivotal, indispensable architect of one of the greatest political miracles of the 20th century, the abolition of apartheid in South Africa and the establishment of a multiracial democracy, achieved through tough negotiation rather than the catastrophic civil war that many observers had predicted.
Yet the second half of the revolution he sought for South Africa — freedom from poverty, establishment of genuine equality of opportunity and a fair share of national wealth — has yet to be achieved. Poverty was a central theme of Mandela’s famous 1964 speech at the Rivonia trial, in which 10 African National Congress leaders were prosecuted for sabotage, just as poverty was a central theme of the 1955 Freedom Charter, which articulated the ANC’s ambitions for a democratic society.
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He would come to abandon nationalization so as not to deter foreign investment — a move variously praised and denounced as pragmatically modifying the aspirations of the Freedom Charter to fit the demands of the global economy as well as the practical need to reassure whites frightened by the prospect of a black-led government. Instead his government embarked on the Reconstruction and Development Programme, an ambitious social democratic vision that led to some tangible gains in housing and other basic needs but fell far short of the goal of eradicating mass poverty. Subsequent turns in the late 1990s to more overtly neoliberal policies that favored private investors over state-led development under the Growth Employment and Redistribution program were severely criticized for exacerbating rather than narrowing inequalities. Serious deprivation remains a fact of life for many South Africans: Recent data show that from 2011 to 2013, 40 percent of population experienced water shortages at least some of the time, including 11 percent facing frequent or constant shortages.
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The sticking point, now as in early 1990s South Africa, is building sufficient political will to enact a long-term program of wealth redistribution targeting the very top. Mandela was surely right to judge that his 1990s government could not rigidly cling to 1950s strategies. But 20 years of experience with the neoliberal model have swung the pendulum in the other direction, with renewed appreciation among both politicians and the public of the reality and danger of unchecked inequality and of economic systems effectively dominated by the richest 1 percent.
In that context, South Africa, the U.S. the U.K. and other countries would do well to return to Mandela’s and the ANC’s early insights that the central question of social justice concerns control of property and that finding ways to broaden ownership in a fundamental and not merely marginal fashion should be the leading edge of an agenda of economic justice. Mandela stood for the end of economic marginalization and the broad advance of equality of opportunity. After the necessary accommodations needed to find peace, returning to the radical ideas of the younger Mandela can be an important component to finishing the uncompleted work of his remarkable life.
I also highly recommend another. somewhat longer essay by Thad Williams, The Almost Inevitable Failure of Justice (Boston Review, Feb 22, 2018.) Williams is a political philosopher at the University of Richmond who took a leave in 2016 to serve a 2-year stint as director of Richmond, Virginia’s Office of Community Wealth Building. This essay is a review of the book Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform by Tommie Shelby, a philosopher and professor of African and African American studies at Harvard. A bit of Williams’s essay dives into some scholarly weeds, but mostly it’s very readable and discusses not only theory but what happens when theory meets up with practical political considerations, as in the case of the initiatives he’s been involved with in Richmond. Some excerpts:
[Martin Luther King, Jr.’s] warning about the thinness of the country’s commitment to democracy was combined with a profound optimism that ending poverty and creating a truly free society was within reach—that Americans might at last choose justice. His optimism was consonant with and informed by social and policy analysis of the time. Three years earlier, the Johnson administration had launched its War on Poverty, and in Where Do We Go From Here, King quoted the analysis of Hyman Bookbinder—from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity—that “the poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.”
Twenty years later, when William Julius Wilson published The Truly Disadvantaged, his landmark assessment of the causes and consequences of ghetto poverty, it may have still been possible to view inner-city poverty as simply unfinished business from the civil rights movement. After all, African Americans had made substantial economic gains since the 1960s, and Ronald Reagan’s presidency could be seen as an aberration, the last vestige of reaction against inevitable social change. In his successful 1988 run for the presidency, Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, even allowed that he was haunted by the fate of ghetto children.
But today, after another thirty years, it is hard not to fear that the persistence of racial injustice and U.S. poverty is anything but a permanent feature of our democracy. There have been pilot and demonstration programs, tax incentives, competitive grant initiatives, and other policy steps aimed at steering investment toward low-income communities. Indeed, the initiatives of the Clinton administration—such as the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, HOPE VI, New Market Tax Credits, and Moving to Opportunity—were followed by Promise Zones, Promise Neighborhoods, and Choice Neighborhoods in the Obama administration. Especially under Obama, federal programs sought to induce localities to engage in comprehensive planning, adopt best practices, and provide holistic support to neighborhoods and families involved in or impacted by community redevelopment efforts.
These initiatives generally had decent intentions, but their most notable quality is their sheer modesty relative to need. None of them, alone or together, represent the kind of massive assault on urban poverty briefly championed by the Office of Economic Opportunity in the 1960s. The federal government continues to spend much more money supporting suburban homeowners through the mortgage interest tax deduction than it does programs aimed at “transforming” urban communities.