In February, I wrote a post arguing that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a conservative or a socialist. Instead, he should be understood as a sort of progressive or liberal. In response, Professor Oliver left the following comment, which I reproduce here in full:
Christian socialism was a significant movement in the first half of the 20th Century. As you demonstrate, MLK rejected atheist communism as practiced by the USSR and other state socialist societies, and parroted the talking points of the anti-Communist brainwashing that was being fed to people my age in school in the 1960s, i.e. socialism sounds good but it turns into totalitarian atheism. But he advocated policies that are called socialism in the US today, and even in the 1960s the politics of the Socialist Party were markedly different from the politics of the Communist Party. My guess is that, if asked, he would not have repudiated the Christian socialist movement. He was certainly close to the social gospel movement and I think identified with it. He carried Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited which , while not socialist, is not really "liberal" either insofar as it is about challenging structures of domination. You are writing a bait and switch. --Pam Oliver
This lengthy post is a response. My argument is simply that using some standard definitions of socialism and MLK’s own writings, he would probably be classified as a liberal and not a socialist.
The first step in this response is to discuss what socialism normally means. If you aren’t careful with words, then most everyone becomes a socialist pretty fast. For example, most people would say the USSR was a type of socialist nation and others, such as Senator Bernie Sanders, have said that modern day Denmark is an example of socialism, even though it has a stock market and corporate tax rates lower than the US. For example, the philosopher GA Cohen has even argued that families are socialist institutions, which is odd because Marx famously called for the abolition of families at the end of the Communist Manifesto (see this review of pro- and anti-family arguments among socialists). In this post, I’ll work with the idea that someone is socialist if they advocate that economic production be communally owned. This is the usual dictionary definition and the one that most political theorists employ.
Getting back to MLK, was he more in line with the liberal/progressive position that focuses on regulation and taxation of private markets for an expanded welfare state? Or was he a real socialist focused on the elimination of markets and collective ownership? This is not a hard question to answer because Stanford University has digitized thousands of documents written by MLK and you can search them.
First, did MLK ever advocate nationalization of industry? The Stanford archive shows that only two documents use the term “nationalize” and only in reference to the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 where the Egyptian state nationalized the water way. King’s papers only mention “socializing” industry twice and these papers are from his seminary days. In 1948, he took a course on preaching where the instructor asked the question “Will Capitalism Survive?” His response is highly critical of capitalism and says “it has seen its best days.” In a shorter note for the same course, he thinks capitalism is on its last legs and compares American capitalism to a desperate football team that’s at the end of a losing game. Thus, MLK is certainly not a fan of capitalism, but he doesn’t actually discuss the signature core socialist policy very much.
It is also worth noting that MLK makes a terminological mistake. He labels the income tax as a form of socialism (“what is more socialistic than the income tax…?” ). As I noted above, the essence of socialism is public ownership of industry, not welfare state programs or specific forms of taxation. Also, the US income tax is an ironic example because it was started in the Civil War. Rather than being a paragon example of a socialist policy, it precedes socialist politics and is meant for raising funds for war making.
Beyond these course papers from 1948, MLK situates his discussion of capitalism in different ways. First, as noted before, he actively rejects the Marxian alternative, which is to set up a large bureaucracy to manage the economy. Second, he anchors much of his discussion in the theological work of Reinhold Neibuhr, a theologian who was very popular in mid-20th century progressive religious circles. For example, in this 1952 paper written at Boston University, he discusses how Neibuhr situated capitalism as a serious moral and ethical problem, but that its imbalances could be remediated and addressed through “reshuffling,” which suggests reform, not abolition of capitalist institutions. In 1958, he concurs with the Marxian view that capitalism is deeply flawed, but turns away from the socialist solution. In 1962, King still holds to this position on communism and socialism. In a sermon called “Can a Christian be a Communist?,” King says that communism is a “corrective” in a world where democracy has failed the poor, but does not endorse communism’s policies or requirements: “Can a Christian be a communist? I answer that question with an emphatic “no.” These two philosophies are diametrically opposed.”
In her comment, Professor Oliver argues that King may have endorsed other forms of socialism such as Christian socialism. Once again, we can turn to the Stanford archives to understand his views. Stanford’s search engine does not yield any hits for the phrase “Christian socialism” or “democratic socialism.”
Professor Oliver suggests that MLK would have approved of Howard Thurman and this is a point that supported by the documents. Thurman is noted by archivists in footnotes in this seminar assignment. MLK used Thurman’s parables in his sermons (here, here, here). MLK invited Thurman to attend a conference of leading preachers, which did not happen due to schedule conflicts. Later, they had a bit of trouble making their schedules meet. He also encouraged people to meet and talk at length with Thurman.
But the story is complex when it comes to Thurman and MLK in the 1960s. In 1963, MLK wrote a version of a sermon that the Stanford archivists note is a response to Thurman and others about unmet expectations in the Black freedom movement. It’s a rich sermon where he urges people to resist “fatalism,” constructively grapple with failure, and provide the optimism needed to move in the right direction. Here’s MLK on this last point:
Moreover, through our suffering in this oppressive prison and our non-violent struggle to get out of it, we may give the kind of spiritual dynamic to western civilization that it so desperately needs to survive.
To me, the person calling on his congregation to work to improve Western society doesn’t exactly sound like the sort of “burn it down” revolutionary socialist we find later in the history of the movement. Still, there is definitely a notable connection between MLK and Thurman, but it’s not quite a full blown endorsement or integration of his ideas. He draws on Thurman in sermons and thinks highly of him, but he provides some distance later in his career and doesn’t build his own ideology on Thurman’s.
It turns out that we know a lot about how MLK developed his ideas and he’s very explicit about it. He sees himself as someone responding to and criticizing Reinhold Neibuhr, the American theologian. This is pretty clear from his writings and the Stanford archive lists at least forty items where MLK responds to Niebuhr, which includes multiple lengthy discussions.
I think it is very important to appreciate the context of Niebuhr for MLK and other liberal or progressive intellectuals of the mid-20th century. Niebuhr was probably the most important Protestant religious figure of the time and he was extensively debated in seminaries, which is why MLK wrote so much about him in school and beyond. Even decades later, Niebuhr’s shadow looms in Black and American religious thought. There is even an entire book explicating Obama’s personal theology and governance as being a response to Niebuhr.
What did MLK think about Niebuhr? He said a ton of things, but this quote from “My Pilgrimage to Non-Violence” makes the point that he concurred with Niebuhr’s assessment of human motivation and collective responsibility to inflicting evil, but rejected his critique of pacifism. Here is MLK praising Niebuhr’s analysis of the human capacity of evil:
“While I still believed in man’s potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man’s social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil.”
Here he is on why Niebuhr was wrong to abandon pacifism:
As I continued to read, however, I came to see more and more the shortcomings of his position. For instance, many of his statements revealed that he interpreted pacifism as a sort of passive nonresistance to evil expressing naive trust in the power of love. But this was a serious distortion. My study of Gandhi convinced me that true pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil.
Readers knowledgeable about the politics of the era will notice what MLK does not talk about: Niebuhr’s stance on socialism. To summarize, Niebuhr was an extremely strong advocate for socialism, but then backed off and became a liberal in the late FDR/early Cold War era. In this article, “From Marx to Roosevelt,” historian William H. Becker traces his evolution:
Yet a closer reading of Niebuhr's writings at the end of the thirties and the beginning of the forties, and of the years 1939-1941 especially, indicates that Niebuhr's Marxist interpretation was replaced by an acceptance of the American two-party system within a capitalist economy earlier than Schlesinger suggests. This change came about in large part through a growing appreciation of the goals, methods, and domestic programs of the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Why doesn’t MLK comment on this aspect of Niebuhr? Why didn’t he defend socialism against Niebuhr in the same way we defended pacifism and nonviolence? He never directly answers this question, but I’ll offer my guess. Niebuhr and MLK went down a similar path and arrived at similar conclusion. They both disapproved of capitalism, deeply considered socialism, and then pulled back. Since they both were in a similar area of thinking, and arguing about political economy wasn’t MLK’s goal, he didn’t feel a need to raise the issue of Niebuhr and socialism. This was a very common path among intellectuals of that era. If readers can find a document where MLK responds to Niebuhr’s rejection of socialism and movement to liberalism, please send me a note.
To summarize, MLK was highly critical of capitalism, openly rejected state socialism as found in the USSR, and rarely talks about nationalization of industry. In his papers, he does not refer to Christian socialism or democratic socialism, but does have nice things to say about people associated with Christian socialism today like Howard Thurman. In extended discussions of his theology, he spends considerable time on folks on issues not directly related to socialism like Ghandi and Niebuhr on pacifism, but does not engage Niebuhr’s shift from socialism. He doesn’t not offer extensive discussions of taxation, social programs, and the like, but my guess is that he would approve of them, which is very consistent with a liberal or progressive position.
Bottom line: MLK was a very liberal guy, and that’s plenty good.
Editorial note: This post relies heavily on Stanford’s MLK archive and was written in Summer 2023. If more documents are uploaded in the future, or there are other sources at odds with the argument in the post, please send them.
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