I have a dream, and if you think about it, it's a Socialist dream.

It’s that time of year – a time when we hear variations on the same line in the news: “We’ve come a long way, but we still haven’t fulfilled Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream.” At once, a statement like this fills us with pride – de jure segration has been eliminated, after all – but makes us beg the question: why not? What aren’t we doing to achieve what King wanted?

This brings us to another common theme of this time of year: the nearly complete void in discussion of what King was actually doing in his activism. What Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon pointed out 17 years ago is still true today: there’s little coverage of what King was arguing for in the last years of his life. King wasn’t just the preacher who had a dream that “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” He was also advocating economic policies that we Socialists fully endorse. You won’t see that on NBC, CBS, or FOX’s coverage of MLK Day.

Indeed, after winning the battle against de jure segregation, King wanted more, specifically for the poor – black, white, Latino, and Native American. In 1968, he often asked, “What does it profit a man to be able to have access to any integrated lunch counter when he doesn’t earn enough money to take his wife out to dine? What does it profit a man to have access to the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities when he doesn’t earn enough money to take a vacation?” In other words, what good is it that segregation is outlawed when poverty segregates people even more thoroughly? One of his answers was for a guaranteed income for all, an idea that the Socialist Party USA Presidential Ticket is advocating for. A guaranteed income is fundamental idea in American thought, going back to Thomas Paine. Even Nixon advocated for it in 1968. A guaranteed income would help prevent poverty for all citizens of the country. Yes, it’s Socialism. And yes, it’s American. And yes, it was an idea MLK fought for.

What’s holding a guaranteed income back? King rightly noted that rampant militarism was a key roadblock. In his 1967 speech against Vietnam, he argued

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

And of course, the spiritual death of the 1960s is our spiritual death today, as we maintain the largest military budget in human history with hundreds of bases, grotesquely expensive weapons, and inadequate health and mental care for soldiers who do our fighting. All the while, we rack up debts in war and debts in tax breaks for the 1%, and we gut basic services, education, and jobs for the 99%.

But of course, simply shifting money from bombs to preventing poverty is no solution, in King’s view:

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

What is this edifice? King’s answer couldn’t be clearer. It’s capitalism:

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.

Given the context, with a brutal Stalinist, totalitarian regime in the USSR, MLK had little hope for Marxism. But, he did recognize Marxism’s revolutionary spirit:

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

Unfortunately for King, the stunted, twisted and wrong vision of Marx in the USSR made democratic socialism an option he couldn’t suggest – even though he was suggesting socialist ideas as solutions to social problems. If he could read the Socialist Party USA’s Principles, he very well might agree with our own condemnation of totalitarian communism:

Under capitalist and authoritarian “Communist” states, people have little control over fundamental areas of their lives. The capitalist system forces workers to sell their abilities and skills to the few who own the workplaces, profit from these workers’ labor, and use the government to maintain their privileged position. Under authoritarian “Communist” states, decisions are made by Communist Party officials, the bureaucracy and the military. The inevitable product of each system is a class society with gross inequality of privileges, a draining of the productive wealth and goods of the society into military purposes, environmental pollution, and war in which workers are compelled to fight other workers.

We don’t want authoritarian communism. We want Democratic Socialism. We want “a new social and economic order in which workers and consumers control production and community residents control their neighborhoods, homes, and schools.” We want militarism and empire to come to an end. We want universal health care, universal education, and universally guaranteed incomes. We want a country where people work the jobs they enjoy for a brief part of the week and then spend the rest of their time learning and building communities. We want racism, sexism, and homophobia to wither away.

In other words, we want the world King dreamed of. This is our way of honoring King.