What King Asked

Riverside

The most consequential single hour of Martin Luther King Jr.’s late career took place on the evening of April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. King delivered an address titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” to an audience of roughly three thousand people, organized under the banner of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam.¹ The address ran fifty-five minutes. It was the most analytically ambitious public speech King had given since the March on Washington four years earlier. It was also the speech that the political establishment of his time, including substantial fractions of the civil-rights movement leadership and the white liberal coalition that had been his principal political support, treated as a strategic mistake from which he never recovered. He was assassinated exactly one year and one day later, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis. The chronological coincidence has been noted in the biographical literature; the analytical relationship between Riverside and Memphis is more direct than the coincidence suggests.

The Riverside speech moved through three arguments in sequence. The first was a critique of American military intervention in Vietnam, framed not principally on pacifist grounds but on the structural ground that the war was draining the financial and political capacity required for the domestic anti-poverty programs the civil-rights movement had been demanding. The second was a critique of the broader American foreign-policy posture, which King characterized as an attempt to maintain a global political-economic order that systematically transferred resources from the developing world to the United States and that required, for its operation, the continual application of military force. The third was a critique of the domestic economic structure that the foreign policy was designed to maintain, in which technology, capital, and concentrated profit operated together in a configuration that King argued would, if continued, render most American workers structurally unnecessary.

The third argument is the one this essay is principally concerned with, because it is the argument the AI transition has made the central political question of the present decade. The passage from the Riverside address that has been most quoted on this subject is:

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.²

The passage has the structure of an old-prophetic critique of accumulation. What is more directly relevant to the contemporary AI argument is the passage that follows, which has been less famously quoted:

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.³

The phrase the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism is King’s own, and it is the analytical structure of his late-period political work. He argued, with increasing specificity across 1966 and 1967, that the three were not separable problems addressed by separable movements; that they were three faces of a single structural condition; and that the civil-rights movement, having achieved its principal legislative victories with the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), had now to address the economic and technological conditions under which the legal victories would either become substantive or remain formal. The expansion of his argument from civil rights to economic structure was not, in his framing, a departure from his earlier work. It was the application of the same analytical framework to the conditions that the legal victories had revealed.

The Shift

The shift from civil rights to economic rights has been retrospectively named, in the King biographical literature, as the second phase of his political work — distinguished from the first phase that ran from Montgomery (1955) through Selma (1965).⁴ The first phase had been concentrated on the Jim Crow legal apparatus of the South: the segregated public accommodations, the disenfranchisement of Black voters, the selective enforcement of criminal-justice procedures against Black defendants. The legislative victories of 1964 and 1965 dismantled the principal Jim Crow apparatus at the federal level and produced, across the next decade, the systematic enforcement infrastructure that effectively ended de jure segregation in the southern states.

What the legislative victories did not address, and what King increasingly argued they could not address without further structural intervention, was the economic stratification that operated independently of legal segregation. King’s 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement, which attempted to apply the techniques of the southern civil-rights campaigns to the housing and employment conditions of the urban North, encountered an opposition that was substantially different from the southern opposition: less legally articulated, more economically and culturally diffuse, and substantially less responsive to the moral framing that had succeeded against southern segregation.⁵ The Chicago campaign produced agreements with Mayor Daley that were not subsequently implemented. The structural conditions that produced housing segregation, employment discrimination, and resource starvation in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods were not principally legal conditions, and the techniques that had defeated the southern legal apparatus did not transfer cleanly to the northern economic apparatus.

King concluded from the Chicago experience, and from the broader pattern visible across the major northern cities in the riots of 1965 (Watts), 1966 (Cleveland, Chicago), and 1967 (Newark, Detroit), that the civil-rights movement’s next phase had to engage directly with the economic conditions of poverty, with the structural distribution of wealth, and with the political-economic arrangements that produced and maintained inequality across racial lines. He began articulating this position in 1966 and developed it across the next eighteen months. By the spring of 1967, when he delivered the Riverside address and began drafting what would become his last book, the position was substantively complete.

The Book

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, published by Harper & Row in 1967, is King’s final published book and the most thorough exposition of his late-period political program.⁶ The book is roughly two hundred pages, written in the prose register that mid-century American readers expected from a serious public intellectual, and structured as a sustained argument across six chapters. It is the work in which King articulated, with greatest specificity, the institutional and policy proposals that constituted the next phase of the civil-rights movement as he understood it.

The book’s most-quoted passage on the question of poverty appears in Chapter IV (“Where Are We?”):

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it. The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty.⁷

The passage is, in the book’s structure, the pivot from diagnosis to prescription. King’s argument, across the preceding chapters, had been that the prosperity of the post-war American economy had produced sufficient productive capacity that the elimination of poverty was no longer a question of resource availability; it was a question of resource distribution. The technical capacity existed. The political will did not. The disagreement was not whether poverty could be eliminated; the disagreement was whether the country was willing to do it. King’s prescription, advanced in the next chapter, was that the country should commit to doing it through a specific institutional mechanism.

The mechanism he advanced was a guaranteed annual income. The passage:

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.⁸

The proposal was not original to King. The guaranteed-income idea had been advanced in different forms across the 1960s by various contributors to the policy debate — Robert Theobald in The Challenge of Abundance (1961) and Free Men and Free Markets (1963), Milton Friedman in his negative-income-tax proposal (1962), James Tobin in his demogrant proposal (1965), the National Welfare Rights Organization in its organizing of the late 1960s, and the various contributors to the Triple Revolution Report submitted to President Johnson in 1964 by a coalition of academics, civil-rights leaders, and labor figures.⁹ King’s contribution was not to introduce the policy but to bring it into the civil-rights movement’s program and to argue, in published form, for its centrality to the next phase of the movement’s work. The proposal that the National Welfare Rights Organization had been building from below received, in 1967, the institutional endorsement of the most prominent civil-rights leader in the country.

The book also contains King’s most direct articulation of what the contemporary AI labor-displacement literature has been rediscovering since 2018. The passage appears in Chapter V (“Where We Are Going”):

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.¹⁰

The passage is conventionally read as a philosophical-religious framing of the political program. It is, more concretely, an early articulation of the position that the deployment of technology in the service of capital concentration produces specific political-economic outcomes that are incompatible with the civic conditions of self-governing citizenship. King was writing in 1967 about technology that had not yet been deployed at the scale he anticipated; the cybernetic revolution Wiener had warned about in 1950 was still in its early industrial phase; the computerization of clerical, financial, and managerial work that would become the dominant feature of the 1980s and 1990s American economy was a forecast, not an observation. King was extrapolating, as Wiener had eighteen years earlier, from his understanding of where the technology was going to where it would arrive. He was substantially correct about where it would arrive.

The Campaign

The book’s policy program required, for its political realization, a coalition that the civil-rights movement had not previously assembled. King had concluded, by late 1967, that the legislative path to a guaranteed income would require political pressure of a kind that the existing civil-rights coalition could not generate on its own. The coalition would have to be cross-racial; it would have to include poor whites, who had not been part of the civil-rights movement’s principal constituency; it would have to include Hispanic, Native American, and Asian-American populations whose poverty rates were comparable to or higher than the Black poverty rate but who had not been organized as part of the civil-rights infrastructure. King began assembling the coalition in late 1967. The organizational form he selected was a sustained encampment on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., demanding economic legislation. He called it the Poor People’s Campaign.¹¹

The campaign was unusual in the history of American political organizing. King’s strategic premise was that a multi-racial coalition of the poor, physically present in Washington in numbers sufficient to constitute a political pressure that could not be ignored, could compel Congress to act on economic legislation that would otherwise not advance. The campaign’s specific demands, announced at organizing meetings in late 1967 and early 1968, included a thirty-billion-dollar annual federal anti-poverty program, full employment legislation, a guaranteed annual income, and the construction of approximately five hundred thousand units of low-income housing per year.¹² The demands were ambitious; the strategic logic was that ambitious demands were the appropriate response to the empirical scale of the problem the coalition was addressing.

The campaign was actively organized in late 1967 and early 1968. King traveled extensively, speaking at organizing meetings, recruiting state and regional leaders, building the cross-racial coalition the campaign required. He was simultaneously engaged in the SCLC’s ongoing work in Memphis, where Black sanitation workers had been on strike since February 1968 over working conditions and union recognition. The Memphis strike had drawn King into a campaign that the SCLC’s strategic leadership had not initially planned to engage; King’s commitment to it had grown across March 1968, and he was scheduled to lead a major march in Memphis on April 5, 1968.

April 4, 1968

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968 — exactly one year and one day after the Riverside address. He was thirty-nine years old. The shot was fired by James Earl Ray from a rooming house across the street; Ray was apprehended in London two months later and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, though the question of whether Ray had acted alone or in coordination with other parties has remained the subject of subsequent investigation, including the 1976–1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations and the 1999 civil trial King v. Jowers in Memphis, both of which produced findings inconsistent with the lone-gunman conclusion.¹³ The factual question of who organized the assassination is outside the scope of this essay; the analytical relevance is the temporal coincidence.

The temporal coincidence is this. Across the fifty-three weeks between the Riverside address and the Memphis assassination, King had been the subject of intensified surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the COINTELPRO program. The FBI had been monitoring King since the late 1950s, but the surveillance escalated substantially after Riverside; J. Edgar Hoover had personally directed the bureau’s operations against King and had circulated, through the bureau’s network of selectively-leaked information, materials intended to discredit King with various political audiences.¹⁴ The bureau’s internal characterization of King as the most dangerous Black leader in America — the specific phrase appears in declassified bureau documents — was operationalized through a sustained campaign of surveillance, harassment, and discrediting that was substantially intensified following the Riverside address. King had also, after Riverside, lost the support of substantial fractions of his previous coalition — the white liberal establishment that had funded much of the civil-rights movement, the New York Times editorial board, the Johnson administration — on the explicit ground that his anti-Vietnam position was a strategic mistake. The political conditions under which he organized the Poor People’s Campaign in the year between Riverside and Memphis were materially less favorable than the conditions under which he had organized the Selma campaign two years earlier.

The Poor People’s Campaign proceeded after his death. Resurrection City, the encampment on the National Mall, was constructed in May 1968 and remained occupied until forcibly cleared by the U.S. Park Police on June 24, 1968, six weeks after its establishment. The encampment did not produce the legislative outcomes King had projected. The thirty-billion-dollar anti-poverty program was not enacted. The full-employment legislation was not enacted. The guaranteed-income proposal did not advance. The five hundred thousand units of low-income housing per year were not built. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the Fair Housing Act) was passed in April 1968 in the immediate aftermath of King’s assassination and was the principal federal legislative response, but its scope was substantially narrower than the campaign’s program. The next decade of American economic policy proceeded without the structural intervention King had argued was the necessary next phase of the civil-rights movement.

What Was Carried Out, and What Was Not

The substantive content of King’s late-period political program was, across the half-century following his death, partially incorporated into American political discourse and substantially not implemented in policy. The discursive incorporation was real: the language of “structural racism,” the analytical framework that links civil rights to economic conditions, the recognition that the legislative victories of 1964 and 1965 were necessary but not sufficient — these became, across the post-1968 period, standard features of the American political vocabulary. The policy implementation was not. The guaranteed annual income was not enacted. The thirty-billion-dollar anti-poverty program was not enacted. The structural redistribution that the Poor People’s Campaign had been organized to demand was not produced.

What did proceed, across the post-1968 period, was substantially the opposite trajectory. The labor-share decline that had been masked through the early 1970s by the post-war social contract accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s. The wealth concentration that King had identified as the structural condition his program was meant to address intensified through the period; the top one percent’s wealth share, which had been at approximately twenty-three percent at the time of King’s death, rose to thirty-eight percent by the 2020s. The cybernetic deployment that King had warned about in Where Do We Go From Here? proceeded across the four waves described in essays 24 and 25, on terms set by capital rather than labor, in the absence of the redistributive mechanism King had proposed. The Poor People’s Campaign coalition was not assembled at scale by any subsequent political actor; the cross-racial economic-justice coalition King had been organizing remained, across the next half-century, a project that was repeatedly attempted and never substantially achieved.

The pattern is consistent. King had identified, by 1967, the principal structural conditions that would produce the contemporary inequality crisis. He had proposed the principal institutional remedy that subsequent generations of policy economists have continued to advance under different names. He had attempted to assemble the political coalition required to enact the remedy. He was killed before the coalition could be assembled at scale. The remedy did not advance. The conditions intensified.

What This Platform Inherits

The Intelligent Party’s platform is, in substantive content, the late-period King program translated into the institutional and technological vocabulary of fifty-eight years later. The translation has three components.

Country Profit Sharing is, in direct policy terms, the guaranteed annual income that King advocated in Where Do We Go From Here? The framework has been refined across the intervening decades — the modern UBI literature, the Alaska Permanent Fund, the Paine-derived property-rights framing this site has been concerned with — but the institutional form is the form King endorsed. He did not invent it; he brought it into the civil-rights movement’s program. The platform of The Intelligent Party brings it into the contemporary political coalition required to enact it.

The Tiered Profit-Ratio Tax is the funding mechanism King’s program required and lacked. King had identified, in Where Do We Go From Here?, that any guaranteed-income program of sufficient scale would require revenue at a level that could not be raised through conventional federal tax instruments without substantial restructuring of the tax base. He did not propose a specific tax instrument; the policy literature of his time had not generated the analytical framework to design one against the kind of capital concentration that would emerge across the subsequent fifty years. The Tiered tax is the contemporary instrument, designed against the contemporary concentration, funding the contemporary version of the program he advocated.

AI Tiering is the regulatory framework King’s “thing-oriented society” critique demanded and his political moment lacked. He had named, with specificity in 1967, the relationship between technology, profit, and human displacement that the contemporary AI transition has made the central political question of the decade. He did not have, in 1967, the technical or regulatory vocabulary required to design a framework against the kind of cognitive technology now being deployed; the technology did not yet exist at the scale he anticipated. The AI Tiering framework is the contemporary regulatory architecture King’s analytical claim required.

The three instruments — CPS, Tiered Tax, AI Tiering — are not assembled from disparate ideological traditions. They are, in substantive content, the late-period King program rendered in the political and technological vocabulary of the present moment. The translation is direct. The political coalition required to enact the program — cross-racial, multi-class, organized against the specific concentration of capital and technology that the AI transition is now producing — is the coalition King was building when he was killed. The coalition was not assembled. The work was left undone.

What Is Owed

The argument is sometimes made, by people sympathetic to the platform but cautious about its political prospects, that the program is too ambitious, that the coalition required to enact it is too large, that the institutional changes it proposes are too structural. The argument has historical precedent. It is the argument that was made against King’s late-period program in 1967 and 1968 by substantial fractions of the political coalition that had supported his earlier work. The argument was, in its specific empirical form, correct: King’s program was too ambitious to be enacted under the political conditions of 1968. King was killed; the program did not advance; the structural conditions he warned about intensified across the subsequent half-century to produce the contemporary inequality crisis.

The argument that the program is too ambitious because the program is too ambitious is a circular argument. It does not, in any specific historical instance, distinguish between programs that fail because they are ambitious and programs that fail because the political conditions for their success have not been organized. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, by the standards of 1958, too ambitious to be enacted; it was enacted because King and the movement he led organized the conditions under which it could be. The Social Security Act of 1935 was, by the standards of 1929, too ambitious to be enacted; it was enacted because the political conditions of 1933–1935 made the impossible possible. The argument from ambition is not a structural objection. It is an observation about the political-organizational state of a particular moment.

The political-organizational state of the present moment is the question the platform of The Intelligent Party exists to address. King had organized, in his final year, the cross-racial coalition of the poor that was the necessary precondition for the program he advocated. The coalition was not assembled at scale before he was killed. The work that he was doing in his final year is the work that has been waiting, since April 4, 1968, to be resumed.

He saw it. He wrote it down. He organized for it. He was killed before the work could be carried out. We are fifty-eight years late. The conditions he warned about have intensified across the half-century. The coalition he was building can be built now, against the contemporary version of the same problem, on the analytical foundation his late writing left us.

The remaining work is ours.

---