more fully in the direction of community control. "Something is wrong with the economic system of our nation," he told the SCLC staff in 1967. "... Something is wrong with capitalism.... There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." Early in 1968, he told his staff "to turn off the tape recorder" and proceeded to talk "about what he called democratic socialism," as one of his aides recalled. "He didn't believe that capitalism could meet the needs of poor people, and that we might need to look at what was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism." ^* More and more deeply convinced that "the main issue is economic," he began to advocate a guaranteed annual income and to argue that "our emphasis should shift from exclusive attention to putting people to work [to] enabling people to consume." "If we directly abolish poverty by guaranteeing an income," he declared in 1967, "we will have dealt with our primary problem." He did not explain how a guaranteed income would restore self-respect or the pride of workmanship, on which he had once placed so much emphasis.

King's growing commitment to social democracy tended to make poverty, not slavery, the central issue, as G. D. H. Cole would have put it. It made distribution rather than participation the test of democracy. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965, King had taken a different view of things. The most important feature of the civil rights movement, he said, was the "direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all." By 1968, however, he was advocating policies that required comprehensive federal intervention. The original goals of the movement,

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The Marxist historian C. L. R. James recalled a conversation with King at this time: "[He] wanted me to know that he understood and accepted ... the ideas that I was putting forward—ideas which were fundamentally Marxist-Leninist." James described King as a man "whose ideas were as advanced as any of us on the Left, but who, as he actually said to me, could not say such things from the pulpit." This report confirms the impression that King was more and more inclined to regard socialism as the only hope for the poor. The statement that he could no longer speak his mind to his own constituents indicates, however—if James's slightly melodramatic and conspiratorial account can be trusted—that his capacity for leadership was now exhausted.

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