Why Does the Poor People's Campaign Fail to Win Its Just Reform Demands?

The answer, surprisingly, is because it doesn't aim for the radical change that is needed

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has developed out of years of organizing across the United States. In communities across this land, people impacted by systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative have said the same thing: “We want to be free! We need a Poor People’s Campaign! We need a Moral Revival to make this country great for so many for whom it has not yet been.” This call echoes the cries of the prophets throughout the ages to stand up for justice, righteousness and the dignity of all: [from the organization’s “About” page of its website]

Thanks to censorship by the mass media, I was not aware of the “Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival,” until very recently, even though it has been active for years. I am going to share with you some information about this organization and then discuss why, despite its many admirable aspects, it is failing to win its just demands.

First, here is what it says of itself on its website:

About the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

In 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others called for a “revolution of values” in America. They sought to build a broad, fusion movement that could unite poor and impacted communities across the country. Their name was a direct cry from the underside of history: The Poor People’s Campaign. 

Today, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has picked up this unfinished work. From Alaska to Arkansas, the Bronx to the border, people are coming together to confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism. We understand that as a nation we are at a critical juncture — that we need a movement that will shift the moral narrative, impact policies and elections at every level of government, and build lasting power for poor and impacted people. 

During the summer of 2018, from Mother’s Day to the Summer Solstice, poor people and moral witnesses in 40 states committed themselves to a season of direct action to launch the Campaign. What ensued was the most expansive wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in the 21st century United States. More than a series of rallies and actions, a new organism of state-based movements was born. Now, in over 40 states, the groundwork for a mass poor people’s movement is emerging.

In June 2019, we convened over 1,000 community leaders in Washington, D.C. for the Poor People’s Moral Action Congress, which included the largest presidential candidates’ forum of the pre-debate season, the release of our Poor People’s Moral Budget, and a hearing before the House Budget Committee on the issues facing the 140 million poor and low-income people in the nation. Over the next nine months, we embarked on a 25+ state We Must Do M.O.R.E. Tour (Mobilize, Organize, Register, and Educate), which led toward an unprecedented Digital Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington on June 20, 2020. 

Listen to them say what their demands are here:

and read their list of demands here.

Despite many wonderful aspects and strengths, the Poor People’s Campaign is not winning its demands. Why not?

The wonderful aspects and strengths of the Poor People’s Campaign include these:

• It is multi-racial and opposed to racial discrimination.

• It focuses on things that are of great concern to hundreds of millions of Americans.

• It demands that our society be more equal and democratic (which is the jist of its many specific demands).

• It rightly says: “The truth is that instead of waging a War on Poverty, we have been waging a War on the Poor, at home and abroad, for the financial benefit of a few. It is morally indefensible to profit from perpetual war.”

• It makes its case in the most noble and moral terms.

The obvious explanation for why the Poor People’s Campaign has not won its demands is, of course, that the ruling class—the ruling billionaire plutocracy that controls the government and the mass media and even most of the “alternative media” and all of the major private for-profit and not-for-profit institutions of our society—does not WANT it to win its demands; it wants to keep our society based on class inequality so that the ruling plutocracy will remain a ruling plutocracy with its enormous wealth, power and privilege and the have-nots remain very poor. Duh!

But the question remains, why does the ruling class succeed in preventing the Poor People’s Campaign from building the kind of egalitarian revolutionary movement that CAN prevail against the ruling class, even despite the proverbial 82nd Airborne Division? Yes, it really is possible to prevail against the ruling class and I discuss how it can be done in my, “How We CAN Remove the Rich from Power.”

Here’s why I think the Poor People’s Campaign is failing to build the kind of massive movement that it takes to win.

The Poor People’s Campaign is trying to build a mass movement on the basis of merely demanding reforms to, but not the abolition of, the class inequality of our society. What do I mean by the “class inequality of our society?” I mean this.

Our society is based on money, on buying and selling things and on richer people hiring poorer people to do their bidding as slaves once did the bidding of masters. Our economy, because it is based on money, i.e., exchanging equal value for equal value (the same as barter but much more conveniently), is thus not based on the very different moral principle that most people think is the right one: “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” (Note: Not only did Karl Marx NOT invent this principle, but he actually wrongly opposed its implementation until the far FAR future, as you can read about in item #2 of my earlier post here.)

In our society, money is power and a few people have many billions of dollars of wealth and hence virtually all of the power, while most people have hardly any wealth (and about 20% of us have less than zero because our debts exceed our assets) and hence have virtually none of the money-power. This is class inequality.

Furthermore, to maintain this class inequality despite the fact that most people hate it, the rich must treat the have-nots like dirt, as I discuss in great detail here.

It is class inequality and the way that the rich treat people like dirt to maintain it that is rightfully and passionately hated by the great majority of the population. This is why the vast majority would LOVE to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor, as I prove here.

But the Poor People’s Campaign does not talk about abolishing the class inequality basis of our society or about removing the rich from power; it only talks about taxing the rich more and shifting some wealth to the poorest people. This is, frankly, as if during the slavery era of the United States, people sympathetic to the slaves had talked only about improving the work and living conditions of the slaves a bit but never about abolishing the system of slavery or removing the slave masters from power. As a result of this profound weakness of the Poor People’s Campaign, as I will illustrate with examples below, the ruling class is able to turn a big part of the population against the Poor People’s Campaign’s demands, and thereby prevent it from winning them and from gaining mass popular support for its demands in general. Here are some examples of this.

Guaranteed Annual Income

The first demand of the Poor People’s Campaign under the “Poverty and Inequality” section of its demands page reads;

• We demand the immediate implementation of federal and state living wage laws that are commensurate for the 21st century economy, guaranteed annual incomes, full employment and the right for all workers to form and join unions.

Otherwise known as the Universal Basic Income, this guaranteed annual income demand falls right into the trap that the ruling class has laid for the have-nots. I discuss this trap in my article, “Beware of the Universal Basic Income,” which I hope you will read to fully understand why this demand is a “trap” demand. Very briefly, it is a demand that is calculated (by the ruling class) to be opposed by many working class people, a demand that FOX NEWS and the conservative media can easily turn their working class audiences against. The reason is this: a guaranteed annual income for all people, including those who can but who refurse to contribute reasonably according to ability (i.e., freeloaders) is a freeloader-friendly program, and for that very reason is rightfully opposed by many working class people. The notion that anything that depends on the labor of others is the “right of all” is a trap, as I discuss here. The Poor People’s Campaign falls into this trap when it demands:

• We demand the expansion of Medicaid in every state and the protection of Medicare and single-payer universal health care for all.

Opposing the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border

Under the section “War Economy and Militarism” the Poor People’s Campaign demands:

• We demand the demilitarization of our communities on the border and the interior. This includes ending federal programs that send military equipment into local and state communities and ceasing the call to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Under the section “I. Declaration of Fundamental Rights and Poor People’s Moral Agenda: Systemic Racism” it also states:

Immigrants of all backgrounds have the right to citizenship that will afford them a full right to vote and participate in our democracy.

As I discuss in my earlier post about immigration, “Illegal* Immigration to the U.S.: Myth vs. Reality,” to simply demand that all people crossing the border into the United States legally or illegally should be granted citizenship is a demand that is calculated (by the ruling class) to elicit the strong (and very understandable!) opposition by many working class people. Why? Because illegal immigrants into the United States are indisputably used by Big $ as cheap labor (cheap because these workers fear deportation if they organize a strike or join a union) with which to drive down the wages of citizen workers.

The very different demand that the Poor People’s Campaign could make that would UNIFY the vast majority of Americans AND the illegal immigrants as well, is the demand that the U.S. ruling class stop doing the things that it has been doing for many decades (both major political parties) to force poor people south of the border (and in Haiti) to migrate to the United States just in order to survive. I discuss this further in my post, “In 1954 the CIA Forced North Vietnamese Peasants to 'Migrate' to the Far South of South Vietnam; the U.S. Later Forced People South of Our Border to Illegally Immigrate to the U.S.: Same Purpose!”

As the Poor People’s Campaign implicitly frames the issue, the problem is that many ordinary Americans wrongly don’t welcome foreign people to have a “full right to vote and participate in our democracy,” presumably because of bigotry or some such nasty reason. But no! First, we do not live in a democracy. We live in a dictatorship of the rich. Most people know this. So when the Poor People’s Campaign pretends that we are living in a democracy, then right away people smell a rat. Then, when the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) implicitly points the accusing finger at working class Americans who are angry at how illegal immigrants are being used to drive down their wages and worsen their working conditions (note: THIS is why Americans don’t want to do agricultural work now, but would if the pay and working conditions were good) that’s when the PPC falls even deeper into the divide-and-rule trap laid for it by the ruling class.

Furthermore, when the PPC demands that “immigrants of all backgrounds have the right to citizenship,” it implicitly includes immigrants who do bad things, who are anti-social criminals. True, immigrants are not more criminal than citizens (arguably less so, as this academic research article shows). But nonetheless, many Americans quite understandably fear letting “immigrants of all backgrounds” have citizenship. The unifying demand would be to welcome immigrants who want to contribute reasonably according to ability and who support relations of mutual aid with others, and to prohibit the contrary kind of persons from immigrating. This is what the very admirable people in a Mexican town did, as you can learn in this video:

These Mexicans aimed for the kind of radical change in society that most ordinary people actually wanted. The Poor People’s Campaign could win if it did the same thing.

The Poor People’s Campaign falls into the ruling class’s divide-and-rule traps because it does not aim for the radical changes that most people actually want

If the Poor People’s Campaign truthfully acknowledged that our society is fundamentally in need of a radical change, that our current dictatorship of the rich must be replaced by genuine democracy (which I discuss here), that we must remove the rich from power—not just tax them more (which is all that the PPC demands), which amounts merely to making the very rich pay a fee for the right to treat us like dirt—and abolish class inequality instead of just tinkering with it, and replacing the immoral way our society is based on money with the morally right way of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need”: if, in other words, the Poor People’s Campaign aimed to make society be the way the vast majority of people actually want it to be, then it would avoid falling into the divide-and-rule traps that the ruling class uses so effectively to prevent it from winning the good demands it has.

Read here how YOU can help build the kind of movement that can win, an egalitarian revolutionary movement.