I joined the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) in 2018 on the fiftieth anniversary of Dr King’s assassination. Rev. Dr. William Barber II, who Cornell West has described as “the closest thing we have to Dr. King,” envisioned the new PPC as a “re-consecration” of King’s life’s work to “change the coversation about what is possible in our life together.”

The first PPC dissolved after King’s assassination and I felt this rebirth, with its dynamic leadership, organizational skills, social media savvy  and empathetic young membership,had the potential to evolve into a radical itransformative movement. There was a palpable sense of camaraderie at the meetings and as a left-wing atheist I felt welcome from the outset.  I heard Rev. Barber issue calls for nonviolent direct action and I participated in a June 4, 2018 civil disobedience protest at the Capitol in Harrisburg, PA. in which 13 of us were arrested for blocking an entrance to the building.

My sense was that the PPC was exposing the “Four Evils” of poverty, racism, ecological devastation, and our war economy, the most egregious maladies of our society. For me, the  PPC was tantalizingly close to taking the next logical step: To move from publicly calling out these symptoms to diagnosing and naming the disease. In other words, as King advocated, the radical reconstruction of society.

However, even at that early Harrisburg rally, one of many occuring across the country on that day, the pink elephant in the Capital Rotunda was the capitalist system but neither capitalism nor socialism was mentioned by a single speaker at the rally.  Making this explicit connection would be in keeping with Dr. King’ own political evolution as he eventually embraced socialism and in his later years said, “If we are achieve real equality the United States will have to adapt a modified socialism.”¹  He also spoke openly about class struggle and the need to go beyond rallies and marches. I was also confident that King would have been unsparing in his criticism of the Black (mis)leadership class in Washington and their craven fealty to the Democrats.

Over my 50+ years as a would-be radical public scholar and activist, I’d witnessed too many promising efforts come to grief on the shoals of trust in the Democratic Party where, as activist Danny Haiphong said “social justice movements go to die.” I began to worry that the PPC might fall into sheep dogging and corralling people for the Democratic Party. When I gently raised these concerns with conversations among PPC members they sensibly responded that this was a new organization still finding its way.  After writing to state leaders about my concerns I was promised “exciting new changes in the near future.”

My late comrade Bruce Dixon, who was then the managing editor of Black Agenda Report (BAR) was writing about PPC, and asserting that “A ‘moral revival’ to explain our past and present but which fails to mention capitalism or socialism was problematic at best.” That is, how can we explain the aforementioned “Four Evils” without utilizing these concepts “makes Barber’s and the PPC’s actual politics of change more than a little cloudy.” And although I knew Dixon was right when he criticized PPC’s prioritization of voting our way out of this situation and that a “galaxy of foundations and wealthy individuals” were financing the PPC, I decided to remain a bit longer in hopes that those members who agreed with me would be able to affect a change in direction.² That proved more and more difficult and in early 2002, Rev. Barber fell into step with U.S. imperialism by voicing his considerable moral support for Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine. BAR’s Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley’s expressed what I was feeling when she wrote “It is sad to see the name Poor People’s Campaign, which was launched by Martin Luther King, being used to support the war machine. It is even sadder to see a man like Rev. Barber succumb to the very worst narrative of American exceptionalism and demonization of another nation.”³

PPC’s endgame remained opaque to me and I became a disillusoned inactive member. I was aware that on August 1, 2002,  200 members were arrested in Washington, D.C.during a protest at the Hart Office Building. They were demanding that Congress pass voting rights reform legislation. And in 2023, the PPC celebrated the 10th anniversary of Moral Mondays, a weekly event initiatiated by Dr. Barber. Given this background I was eager to read Rev. Barber’s new book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2024), written with Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove. What was their take on the subject and did it hold promise of new direction for the PPC.

Rev. Barber writes, “I have written this book to ask Americans to look at its poor — all its poor —  in the face and acknowledge that these faces are overwhelming white.” Barber, who Cornell West calls “the closest thing we have to Dr. King,” intones that he must be a “watchman” as in, “The ancient prophets remind us that when we can’t see a problem, a watchman must remind us.” He continues, “I sound the alarm about white poverty because I’m convinced that we expose the peculiar exceptionism of America’s poverty without seeing how it impacts the very people that our myths pretend to privilege.”  And writing about the poor in white skins, Barber suggests that “degradation that poor whites have learned to aim at Black people is precisely what keeps them from joining a coalition that could reconstruct America and end the humiliation of poverty for all us.”

Barber contends that if we look at poverty in terms of measured practical necessities, only interrupted by a small emergency, there are 140 million poor and low wage people or 43 percent of the population in the United States. Some 24 million of them are Black and 66 million are white. Thus, to say that poverty is only a Black issue is to dismiss tens of millions of white people. Note: according to Health and Human Services (HHS) the official poverty measure (OPM is $15,060 in 2024). Accordingly, we are called to embrace a “new idenity” that unites poor and working people of every race.

Barber is calling for a Third Reconstruction, a new “Moral Fusion” movement, the  first one occuring from 1865 to 1872 during which  poor whites and poor Blacks briefly engaged in a coalition based on shared economic interests. Barber agrees with most historians that although the First Reconstruction produced the 13th,14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, it ultimately failed because whites were manipulated into terrorizing new Black citizens through the KKK and other organizations.⁴ In Gerald Horne’s acute observation, during Reconstruction, “Whiteness become the battle pay, for many poor whites in order to protect the interests of the elite only they don’t know they’re doing it.”

The Second Reconstruction was the civil rights movement of the 1960s when some voting rights were gained but again, the Republican “Southern Strategy”  of persuading Southern whites to leave the Democratic Party worked for them in the South and beyond. Further, voter suppression continued under the reaity of what Barber terms “Jim Crow, Esquire — the result of Jim Crow’s son going to law school and coming back to undermine democracy through more sophisticated means.”  However, as the authors point out, the claim has always been “If Black folks do better, white folks are going to do worse.”

Barber is reminding readers that in1965, Dr. King said that the greedy oligarchy’s greatest fear was that poor whites and Blacks would join in a voting bloc that would fundamentally change the country. Poor people make up 30  percent of potential voters and thus a “Fusion Politics” could be the decisive factor promoting a progressive agenda and determine “who sits in the White House, who sits in the Senate and who sits in the governor’s office.”

In the September 19, 2024 issue of Forbes Magazine, Subramiam Vincent notes that votes in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia will likely decide who becomes president. Because the margin of victory in these seven states is likely to be narrow, poor and low income voters could be decisive — if they vote.This is why Barber titles a chapter in the book “Poor People Are the New Swing Votes.”

This 259 page book often reads like a righteous jeremiad, replete with compelling personal stories from (mostly) white people in dire straights plus supporting data that provides a look at an egregiously neglected topic. And it’s not the least bit disparaging to suggest that this deeply empathic, faith-based, powerful message and movement should be linked to a political economy diagnosis of the problem. That is, the  class and power structure of American capitalism are responsible for the “Four Evils.”

Early in the book, Barber quotes James Baldwin’s observation that “Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced” and elsewhere Barber delclares that “to tell the truth in a time of lies is itself a revolutionary act.”  One can heartily agree but that means facing and uttering the uncomfortable truth that democracy does not and never has existed in this country. Bourgeois democracy has served as a screen to conceal the class rule of capital. Unless I’m mistaken, Barber is prescribing a faux socialist, Bernie Sanders’ version of anti-democratic class rule under the Democrats. As Malcolm said in 1964 to Black people who vote for those who do nothing for them — like the Democrats — are “political chumps.” Put another way, liberal capitalist democracies can accommodate many things, including universal suffrage in  the interest of stability and creating the iilusion of democracy.There is every reason to believe that the later Dr. King (he was only 39 in 1968) would have  agreed with a mature Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois who stated that “Univeral suffrage does not lead to a real dictatorship until workers  use their votes to consciously rid themselves of the domination of private capital.”

The late sociologist  Gerald Dawley concluded that “The ballot box was the coffin of class consciousness” and the Black anarchist revolutionary Lucy Parsons proclaimed “The ballot is only the paper veil that hides the trick.” And even after his earlier unqualified suppport for the franchise, the great W.E.B Du Bois refused to go the polls in 1956 and declared “Democracy is dead in the United States.”  Class consciousness was lacking during both the First and Second Reconstructions and my fear is that Barber’s well intentioned book, with its “Vote and Change the System”  slogan will not advance that class consciousness and may retard its development.

Barber may be romanticizing the First Reconstruction in that the conditions for class consciousness and real international solidarity simply did not exist at the time. Even W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the “lack of vision of vision” by both Black and White legislators in the South and my reading the Marxist Du Bois may have fallen to exaggerating  the “dictatorship of labor.”  And I’ve yet to see any evidence suggesting that the essentially  conservative Reconstruction governments were inclined to enact legislation hostile to capitalism. Such assertions reveal wishful thinking that to our peril in not umcomon on the Left.

Again, there is a highly selective use of Dr. King’s writings in the book. We know know that in his final speech to the Southern Cristian Leadership Conference (SCLC) members he said, “One day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin asking that question, you are asking about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question you begin to question the capitalist economy.” And in a posthumously published essay, King wrote “…only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather those men in the system”  and a post gradualist reformer added, “The dispossessed of this nation — both White and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society [and] they must organize a revolution against injustice.”⁵

Finally, words “capitalism” and “socialism” did not make their way into the book and this reminded me of Bruce Dixon’s final bit of advice about the PPC: “We can and should march alongside them. What we can’t do as socialists is to consent to this cramped vision, a vision which refuses  to name the capitalist system.”⁶

ENDNOTES:

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.