I’ve been listening to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. this past week.
In particular his August 1967 “Where do we go from here speech?” (video) at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
One of the parts that moves me is his synthesis of so much context that he’s living in the midst of.
- Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. The jobs they’ve won from a major employer. The new housing developments
- The work in Cleveland… fighting discrimination from employers, realizing that if people have a livable income, more is possible.
- Universal Basic Income — and the relative cost to bring 40 million americans out of poverty versus the U.S. Government’s spending on the Vietnam war.
- Not Capitalism, Not Communism — a higher synthesis. I love hearing his analysis and read of Marx not following Hegel enough and then Feuerbach — and rejecting that. It’s worth a quick look:
I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism.
My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough.
He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism.
And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called “dialectical materialism.” I have to reject that.
What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual.
Capitalism forgets that life is social. (Yes, Go ahead)
And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis.
It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.
There is so much underneath this that I’d like to dive into some day.
But what really grabs my attention from King’s 1967 speech as I listen to it this year is his understanding of power.
All of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power.
But there is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.
Power. In the way I was taught.
I’ve been thinking about power, poder, the ability to act — a good bit recently.
In faith-based community organizing training we learn and teach that Power is neutral — it’s the ability to act.
We also teach that there are two kinds of power:
- Organized People
- Organized Money
There’s also a few distinctions with how power is used.
- Power Over — or unilateral power — when you chose to act on another (without their consent)
- Power With — when you chose to act with mutual consent & mutual responsibility
We then teach that as faith communities, or schools, or community non-profits, we can organize our money — but when we do — that’s often small compared to the organized money of larger corporations and asset management firms. What we can organize is our people — and organized people can create a formidable ability to act.
So then, I ask myself, what is the power that I’m building?
Or am I even building power?
Do I have more ability to act than I did at this time last year? Or the year before? How would I know?
The kind of power that I’m after is a relational power. It’s an ability to lead — to invite others and to have enough experience and trust with them — that they might pause, sit for a while to discern — and then from their own will — decide to say, “Yes, I’d like to join”
But I know from conversations with colleagues and others that this is not how we most often think about power.
Dr. King noticed this too:
We’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
What is Power? from Dr. King
Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose.
It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say, ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.”
This image is so helpful to ground us in a positive vision of power.
Concentration of Power
I’m especially concerned about power at this moment in time because of how hedgefund billionaire Bill Ackman has used his power to fire the President of Harvard. We’ve been watching Elon Musk with Twitter. We’ve been watching Bezos. But it feels like all level of decorum is now up for grabs. Perhapst his is part of the effect of Trump. Or perhaps this is just what the concentration of power can look like.
Billionaire Tantrum –> unleashing a dangerous virus
I really appreciate Prof. Scott Galloway’s take:
The earthquake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel has caused devastating destruction and loss of life, on both sides. The aftershocks, including the presidents of Penn and Harvard resigning, may signal the beginning of the end of DEI on campuses. The media has focused on big and small issues, including antisemitism on campus and what qualifies as plagiarism. The real story? A: The steady shapeshifting of influence. An apex predator known as an activist investor has escaped its cage and is now attacking social issues. What happens to Harvard is a sideshow. Ackman’s billionaire tantrum represents a far more dangerous virus that has plagued humans throughout history: the concentration of power.
To me, more of this Acktivism, is one of the scariest threats of 2024.
Will governments step up to the plate?
I think we need public institutions, media and our culture to step up to the plate and talk about this as unacceptable.
For governments to have sufficient power, though, they need resources. This is a critical problem that I think may become more acute. One piece of the puzzle: taxes.
250 millionaires and billionaires were at Davos asking for governments to tax them.
Can you believe the highest tax rate in the U.S. used to be 90%? This startled me.
It’s only been 30-40% in my conscious lifetime..
It’s hard for me to see the above graph, because it shows just how much things could be different.
How we got this wrong
Let me return to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s narration of where we got off base with power
You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love.
Love and Power
This next paragraph was introduced to me in college and I didn’t appreciate how important it was.
Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.
This next part requires another post to unpack. I’ll include it here so that I can pick it up again as I feel like we need a national conversation about power and seeing where we go wrong… and what we must build to love and power well.
Now what has happened is that we’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.
It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.
