The Importance of Remembering King’s Vision of Economic Justice and Equality as a Contrast to Trump’s Proposed Agenda

NARA

 As I sit watching Donald Trump’s inauguration, with the billionaires’ boys club of Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, among other CEOs and oligarchs, seated obsequiously behind him on stage, these optics make clear the importance of remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision for human emancipation could not be more important.

And the importance of King’s vision lies in the contrast it offers to Trump’s past and proposed policies.  For example, his infamous tax cuts during his first administration redistributed wealth to the top, and his proposed tax cuts promise more of such redistribution, raising taxes on working families while relieving the wealthiest of even more of their responsibility to help pay for the world that makes their production of wealth possible. Plus, the elevation of anti-worker and anti-union billionaires, such as Bezos and Musk, should thwart any illusion that Trump’s regime will in any seek to empower workers in their struggle for better wages, beneits, and working conditions, including workplace democracy.

Trump is installing an oligarchy, and there’s no reason to believe these folks will encourage Trump to draft policy that suddenly makes them pony up with their fair share of taxes or create conditions that empower workers to unionize.  Their history teaches us otherwise.

King’s vision and the organized struggles he led, on the other hand, focused powerfully on achieving economic justice for all in the movement for civil rights and racial equality. Unions were pivotal allies and vehicles for King in this movement.

King’s vision stressed that achieving racial justice and equality for African Americans and people of color generally entails achieving economic justice and equality for all. In his address to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in Memphis in March 1968, just weeks before his assassination, he articulated this vision with unmistakable clarity: 

Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know now that it isn’t to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee? What does it profit a man to be able to eat at the swankiest integrated restaurant when he doesn’t earn enough money to take his wife out to dine? What does it profit to have access to the hotels of our city and the motels of our highway when we don’t earn enough to take our family on vacation? What does it profit one to be able to attend an integrated school when he doesn’t earn enough money to buy his children school clothes?

He imagined an economy designed above all to meet human need, even if it doesn’t achieve full economic equality, asserting in this speech, “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too, will go to hell.”

In September 1962, King addressed the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union District 65 in Monticello, New York, reminding his audience that our world still features “a great gulf between superfluous, inordinate wealth, and abject, deadening poverty.”  He underlined “the fact that right here in America, one-tenth of one percent of the population controls almost 50 percent of the wealth.”

Today, the top 1% controls about 30% of wealth, more than the middle class as a whole which possesses about 26% of the nation’s wealth.

 So, we are not in a vastly different place in terms of gross inequality in America. 

King’s exhortation from this speech powerfully resonates as a challenge to the politics Trump promises. King urges that “we must always maintain a keen sensitivity to these conditions, for there is something wrong with a situation that will take the necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”

King’s vision of justice rests on both moral and rational grounds.

In moral basic humanitarian terms, King elaborates his belief for an economy built to address human need in the 1962 speech referenced above: “I believe that we can work within the framework of our democracy to make for a better distribution of wealth, and I believe that God has left enough to spare in this world for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life.”

Most powerfully, though, King’s thinking and vision enjoin us to re-think on rational grounds the unjust and irrational system of valuing the different work people do, which is really the root the economic inequality and injustice.

In the 1968 speech in Memphis before AFSCME workers, King makes clear in powerful argument the nonsensical, irrational, and unjust dynamics of our economic value system. He writes:

So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs.  But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth. One day society must come to see this.  One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.

This passage challenges in profoundly rational ways the conventional meritocratic and hierarchical thinking that informs our current economic value system which assigns more importance and thus justifies higher salaries or wages for some work in relation to others.  King, in insisting “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny,” points out the irrationality of disaggregating the physician’s work from that of the sanitation worker–and differentially valuing them–when they are so interdependent.

This prejudicial degradation or devaluation of labor is as dangerous for King as a racial prejudice–and the two are connected.

We have heard from the likes of Bernie Sanders that the last election “was largely about class and change.”  Sanders blames Democrats (in ways I’ve argued is absolutely wrongheaded) for not addressing these issues strenuously enough to create a contrast.

It’s hard to see how Trump and his billionaires’ boys club will do anything but exacerbate class and economic inequality, given their resistance to a fair tax system and worker political and economic empowerment.

Perhaps on this day when Trump’s inauguration coincides with this day we honor Dr. King’s legacy, the contrast and choice will be presented to and made clear for Americans.

Remembering King’s profound vision for an economy that first and foremost addresses human need and his incisive understanding of the key relationship between racial and economic justice and of the dignity and value of all labor has, perhaps, never been more important as Trump is installed back in the presidency.