Martin Luther King Jr. DayThe below comments from Professor Mathias Risse, Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs and Philosophy at the Harvard Kennedy School, reflect the perspective of the author, and do not represent the institutional views of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, or Harvard University.

On Inauguration Day we focus on the future. It is the day when the new president makes clear how they understand the office and their role in history. This year, today, Inauguration Day is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day. As it happens, both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama also had their second inaugurations on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (in 1997 and 2013), but the next time these occasions will coincide is in 2053. To the extent that MLK is mostly seen as person with a dream, he is rather too easy to identify with. The radical ways he stood for economic justice remain under-appreciated. The coincidence of these holidays is a welcome occasion to recall that the way MLK focused on the future involved a comprehensive social justice agenda. American policymaking in the last half a century has effectively been an extensive rebuke of King’s ideas on economic reform. Recalling his ideas means to recall the richness of American thought on economic reform, especially in an era when structural economic reform is low on the agenda.  

What is of course widely known is that MLK stood for advancing civil rights through non-violence and civil disobedience. But indeed, he also advocated for far-reaching economic reform, in his own time insisting on meaningful jobs at living wage, on secure and adequate income for all unable to find or do a job, on access to land and capital for the poor, and on the ability of ordinary people to play a significant role in government, much beyond participation in elections as voters. Perhaps his most radical proposal is a guaranteed income pegged to median income in society. These proposals went far beyond the social policy programs of his era.  Adjusting MLK’s ideas to the present age, one would need to look at the realities of what Shoshana Zuboff has called Surveillance Capitalism. In today’s economy, MLK’s thinking calls for organizing our digital realities in inclusive and participatory ways, and for making sure our enormous technological capacities are used for broad societal benefit. His ideas call for democratization and decentralization of digital spaces, and for focused and coordinated efforts to harness them for social advantage. Current trends are not going in this direction, much as they did not within the economic parameters of MLK’s own time.  

MLK was also a global thinker who wrote a piece called “The World House” to express how he saw humanity’s political and economic realities connected. In the digital age, that interconnectedness has only increased. “Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table,” he wrote in “The World House,” “when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life?” The basic challenge he brings to us in the 21st century is to deploy the enormous technological advances that have been made since then for purposes of global collaboration and empowerment of developing nations. As far as the tech space is concerned, King would be as puzzled today as he was in the mid-60s as to why resources and scientific know-how (the technologies that make the tech spaces) are not being deployed to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life.  

MLK never lost hope that eventually people could no longer tolerate the deep injustices around them, and that it would not take revolutionary change to get to a just society. He believed in genuine democratic empowerment and tried to find common ground with broad segments of society who were all concerned with injustices in their own segments of society (such as the white labor unions in the American South of his day), to create common causes around racial and economic justice. “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love,” he wrote in his 1967 piece, “Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community?”

MLK was both a philosopher and an advocate of love and justice, and a philosopher and advocate for unity around causes of justice. These are all topics we should ponder on this day that is both celebrating Luther King Jr. Day and inaugurating our next president. The basic messages of MLK’s work transfer readily to the digital age. They remain as unheeded today as they were on the day of his assassination in April 1968, but we are well-advised to remember they are there.