The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st

Century.
By: Dr. Tommy J. Curry
Bio: Dr. Tommy J. Curry is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, Affiliated Professor of
Africana Studies, and a Ray A. Rothrock Fellow at Texas A&M University. He is the author of
over 40 articles, the editor of William H. Ferriss The African Abroad, the current President of the
oldest Black philosophy organization in the United States; Philosophy Born of Struggle, and the
editor of several ongoing projects on Black Male Vulnerability and Death. His work focuses on
Critical Race Theory, Anti-Colonial Thought, Sexuality Studies, and Social Political Philosophy.
Dr. Curry was the first Black JV National Debate champion (for UMKC) and was half of
the first all Black CEDA team to win the Pi Kappa Delta National Debate Tournament with
Diallo Brown (at SIUC); a tournament most famously known for denying Wiley Colleges
participation under the direction of Melvin B. Tolson because it was reserved exclusively for
white debaters.
Introduction:
We are confronted by a somewhat controversial normative claim: Just governments ought to
require that employers pay a living wage. The living wage is wage earning that allows the worker
to sustain a quality of life distant from that of poverty; set by the awareness of a society to the
social and economic conditions which constitute healthy, realizable, and capable citizenship.i The
view of work from the perspective of a living wage differs sharply from marginal productivity
theories of old that assume competitive labor markets generate wages that are directly linked to
productivity, or the actual job that is being performed.ii An example of this differentiation is
Deborah Figarts work which argues that living wages are based upon workers needs, or a
socially defined level of subsistence. Human beings must have access to the goods and services
necessary to support and sustain themselves and their dependants.iii Figart highlights how the
social plays a significant role in defining the living standard of the worker as a member of
society. This view is in contrast to determinist accounts limiting wages to survival or the
satisfying of Manslows hierarchy of needs. The living wage reaches beyond mechanistic laws be
they market or naturalist in an attempt to develop and care for the human as a necessary
component of society and work. Traditionally, there is an externality to classical economic theory
which holds that wages are not set by businesses, or in the 21st century, corporations, with the
worker or even social goods in mind, but that the market which allows for competition and
operates upon supply and demand function for the benefit of all: the individual worker, the
business, profits, and ultimately the society which houses these entities. This assumption has
been proven false with the dawn of the 21st century.
Whereas the 20th century saw radical shifts in racial, sexual, and a range of competing
economic theories, from Communism to capitalism and the dawn of
globalization/interdependence/imperialism, today we see the solidification of economic classes
defined in the United States not only by poverty or education, but most significantly along
fissures of race and national origin. This modernization has made the economic modalities more
rigid and less varying in its substance, not more dynamic or fluid. Many raced individuals remain
locked into the conditions of previous generations despite the claims of mobility, while even
poor whites remain alienated but clueless to the lessening worth of their racial claims to

superiority given the organization of American society. To some it is just enough to be above
Blacks, and a white citizen who is not an immigrant; the failing social conditions however are
making the segregationist divisions harder and harder to sustain. This hierarchy rests upon class
divisions used to determine the availability of property and profit as well as the historical denial
of work and the devaluing of bodies by wage which continues in our present day. The current
market view of wages, however, remains nave and dangerous in its denial of the role that
ideology and power play in determining which workers can subsist. A living wage however
paradigmatically addresses this concrete disparity, because it believes that work should be an
instrument of production towards the sustainability of a society politically, economically, and
morally, and that the worker in being the corporeal medium of this potential must have not only
the minimum for surviving in a modern society, but enough to flourish within the society. The
living wage seeks to address the negation of persons within the varying matrices of oppression
sustained and propagating the vulnerability of raced, sexed, and poor people(s) by eliminating
their distance from the services and institutions which are the defining aspects of Americas
democratic society. By attempting to address the socio-economic conditions that perpetuate
exclusion and allowing groups historically made invisible by poverty, disease, and voicelessness
access to the institutions which amplify their voice and mobilize dissent, the living wage allows
oppressed groups of people the ability to address their ills politically without remaining tied to
the ontological categories used to enforce racism (i.e: criminals, lazy, savage, uncivilized, thugs,
rapists, etc.) and invisibility. In short, the living wage dispels the sociological conditions used to
confine the humanity of the oppressed, opening the field of politics so that the confrontation and
negation of racialized, indigenous, and immigrant peoples remains clear and demythologized in
the public view; an illumination between the people and the conditions the people were confined
to within American empire. Perhaps such a simple amelioration is much too complex for the
subtleties of debate.
Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to
the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues
of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions
concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the
adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory
over the other. In Ideal Theory as Ideology, Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary
theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are
confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset,
Mills concedes that ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics
as against metaethics); [s]ince ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative
issues, [it is set] against factual/descriptive issues. iv At the most general level, the conceptual
chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty,
disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoreticallythe assumptions and shared
ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy problem by
an audienceis the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists
on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this
chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empiricalobservable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that
phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one necessarily has to abstract
away from certain features of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs.v

This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and
politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature
of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and
reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: What distinguishes ideal theory is
the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,vi so what
we are seeking to resolve on the basis of thought is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately
irrelevant to the actual problems which our theories seek to address. Our attempts to situate
social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenonmeaning we
cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging
and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within
an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or
the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever
developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to
only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions
addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order
to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we
pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement
of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an
underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique
or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to reformulate the
values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed
views of the worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to
currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters.
The Living Wage as a Kingian Social Value: Coordinating Anti-Racist Theory with Actual
Political and Economic Disparities.
Over the last decade the living wage has been tied to some local successes in America. States and
municipalities have indeed succeeded in raising the minimum wage in Maryland, Florida, and
some counties in California with calls for a national increase underway.vii As Donald Stabile
notes, Advocates for a living wage typically support it by arguing that it is necessary for
economic justice and a fair economy;viii the weight of their cry largely upheld through moral
suasion and the sympathy our society has respecting to the rights of low-wage workers and
addressing the ever-expanding boundaries of poverty. While proponents of a living wage have
emphasized ideas of justice, fairness, dignity, and of course the sacred American creed of rights,
few economists have recognized these constructs as actual entities translatable into market
principles or governing dynamics.ix Proponents of the living wage largely dismiss the need for
values to be accountable to economic postulates, insisting the higher compensation would mean
they [workers] could walk down the street and look anyone in the eye. They could walk with the
self-confidence that only dignity gives. They could, whatever else, feel that they belong.x
Such debates largely obscure what is really at stake in the actualization of the values one
intends. Is it the case that dignity is realizable through income, and home ownership, rather than
equality, or the end to discrimination? Are we unshakable in our belief that discrete attainments
within society constitute enough of ones social self such that a higher income remedies racism,
or sexual exploitation, and the sheer brutality of anti-Black violence? How do we reconcile

dignity, justice, and fairness with a dehumanizing, unjust, and precariously biased world? Poor
people are discriminated against. Poor Black and Brown people are killed, indigenous peoples
are erased and defined as savage, and immigrants are thought, contrary to fact, to destroy the
economy and live under the constant threat of deportation. Race determines the risk populations
have for poverty, and poverty itself has been highly related to crime, domestic abuse, substance
abuse, sexual violence and incarceration.xi Recently, Alejandro Varela has argued that maps of
poverty in the United Statesoverlay quite seamlessly onto the maps of HIV. That should come
as no surprise to anyone who studies or treats chronic conditions, most of whichdiabetes, heart
disease, kidney disease, etc.xii Poverty breeds disease and because of the enduring segregation
and stratification of races in America, it is drawn to the racialized members of our society.
Unfortunately, these are our realities; yet we seem impotent to address them beyond screaming
that we rebuke their existence, declaring we will burn it down, questioning the causes of such
inequities, or even recognizing these social phenomena exist. All these phenomena, all the deaths
caused by them, the lives lessened by their persistence; despite all our claimsthe consequences
will remain. Our theories, and the values we use to justify them, will ultimately do little to
actualize our paradigm anymore than those who remain committed to the status quo. We need a
stronger approach.
Martin Luther King had such an alternative to remedy these concerns. In his last book Where Do
We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, King introduces the living wage as a practical political
reorientation of the self aimed towards addressing the plague of poverty. Though Kings text is
dedicated specifically to racism, white supremacy, and American imperialism, he surprisingly
addresses poverty nationally, because there are more poor whites than Blacks in the 1960s. King
argues that thinkers erroneously have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence
of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified
home life and suppressed initiative; fragile family relationships
which distorted personality development. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these
causes be attacked one by one.xiii This moment-realization is important for how King aims to
resolve the phenomenon of poverty through policy which reorients our values towards workers
in our society more generally. King points out that as discrete programs our remedies do little to
address the wholeness of the workers Black or white dealing with the social consequences of
poverty. Each program while embodying both a value and call towards the political fails because
the self which is the object of program is still lacking. A living wage however is more effective
because it gives substance to the frail social self aiming to be empowered by education, housing,
and family structure. As King says While none of these remedies in itself is unsound, all have a
fatal disadvantage. The programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis or at similar rates
of development In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the
past all have another common failingthey are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first
solving something else.xiv King concludes then that a living wage is the only way to deal with
poverty, he says: I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most
effectivethe solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the
guaranteed income.xv The guaranteed income or the living wage expresses a desire King has for
the worker to be more than the object of exploitation. He recognizes that politics and normative
endeavor alone is insufficient to transform that which is simply an instrument of work into the
human. King is aiming for the transubstantiation the meek/laborer/object into the humana
move consistent with his more general thinking of Agape.

King settles the eradication of poverty based on income because Now we realize that
dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust
people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The
poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and
incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands
it does not eliminate all poverty.xvi Recognizing the failure of the market to ever satisfy the
needs of workers, King argues that we must rid ourselves of our naturalized notions of scarcity
through a living wage which offering worth to the worker which precedes the awareness and
capability of our economic system. King argues for an internalized worth of humanity which
cannot be predicated upon market systems. If the market cannot provide for the needs and
development of a democratic worker then we must turn against the machinations of society
imbued with this erroneous ethos. The living wage on Kings account is necessary to eliminate
the consumption of the weak by the appetite of the strong. The worker, being consumable, then
emerges within an ontology of disposability first oriented upon the bodies of Blacks. This makes
life contingent and fleeting rather than a foundation from which life emanates and extends the
consequences of slavery beyond the commodification of Africans first expressed by W.E.B.
DuBoiss The Negro to a movement attempting to remedy the vulnerabilities of Blacks and
whites alike which was created by the anti-Black suppression of humanity.xvii The slave was the
template from which the economic dehumanization of his era was built upon and well as the
dehumanized model of consumption haunting King even in the 1960s.xviii King eloquently states
that:
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which
has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and
upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning,
it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are
wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and
blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other
because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant
animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct
and immediate abolition of poverty.xix
Towards a Conclusion: Addressing the Colonial Legacy of Anti-Black Racism Through A
Kingian Systemic Analysis?
Racism is manifested from the psychological, and I would argue the psychoanalytic
(unconscious), through material inequality. The disposition of whites which bring about racism
and dehumanizes the oppressed is not simply rooted in temperaments and privileges housed
within ones racial identity, but the ability of powerful white groups, with militaries, and
economic systems to devalue and conquer those deemed only capable of labor. Racism is the
catalyst behind the social organization and the historical architecture which places Blacks into
the cogs of dehumanizing existencelaborer, slave, criminal, etc. King recognized that Racism
is no mere American phenomenon. Its vicious grasp knows no geographical boundaries. In fact,
racism and its perennial allyeconomic exploitationprovide the key to understanding most of
the international complications of this generation.xx This analysis is similar to Frantz Fanons

understanding of racism as the shameless exploitation of one group of men by another which
has reached a higher stage of technical development, and acknowledges that actual racist
oppression is made possible by the existing entities of domination like militaries and economic
oppression.xxi The rules of colonial engagement function as a logics which constrain and define
the colonized. Aime Cesaire summarizes the problem as such, Between the colonizer and
colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft,
rapebrainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and
submission.xxii Cesaire settles on one proposition: colonization=thingification.xxiii What then
remedies the relations which preserve the various manifestations of the colonial economic
systems ignited by notions of racial inferiority, but preserved in the racist structures of society?
The living wage is the actualization of a revolution of values rooted in the transubstantiation of
humans into that which is not thing but person. King is clear that We must rapidly begin the
shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and
computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important
than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being
conquered.xxiv King advances an entity based reorientation that demands the social structures of
our society to change. King does not propose to simply introduce a new value, but argues that
our thingification of racialized beings, the history of colonialism itself, has produced a paradigm
that takes our system to be natural and inevitable. This is not the problem simply of thought, but
a symptom of how we act and engage thought. We believe that there should be divisions of labor,
we believe some people are simply labor, we believe, conditioned by the history of Black
dehumanization, that individuals are things and not persons; it is these beliefs that blind us from
acting concretely against poverty and transforming working-things into humans. The living wage
is Kings actualization of a political philosophy capable of reorienting objects simply thought to
be necessary to economic production into living human flesh. The living wage demands the
worker to be a persona living being capable of development, life and joywhich once
accepted makes the material conditions which deny this reality appear decadent and illusory. The
living wage is the concretization of a political action (an act of X) which generates new value
orientations to actualize their material demands. By giving workers the income to exist beyond
the modalities of our American society, these persons have the capacity assert their dissent and
realize their aspirations denied to them by poverty, racism, and power.

Endnotes

i The definition of a living wage differs in terminology but coalesce around the aforementioned summary within the text.
John A. Ryan makes this point as well; he argues that: The advocates of the living wage doctrine do not all reach their
common conclusion by the same process of reasoning. Some of them base it on the social benefit to be derived from
maintaining the workers in a condition of the highest industrial efficiency; others, on the manifest justice of giving a man
sufficient to repair the energy that he expends in his labor; others, on the common estimate of what constitutes a just price
for work; and still others, on the personal dignity of the laborer, or his right to possess the requisites of a decent human life
(The Right to an Individual Wage, in Living Wage Movements: A Global Perspective, Deborah M. Figart (ed.), [New
York: Routledge, 2004], 16-26, 16.) What is common but largely unstated in the secondary materials consulted is the
assumption that workers will work year around. Ryan argues that a living wage has not been embraced not necessarily
because of its efficacy in addressing concrete issues like poverty and sustenance, but rather as a function of the paradigms
used to sustain our modern economic thinking. As he argues One of the principal reasons why the right to a living wage
has been obscured in the minds of many men, is the complexity of modern economic life (23).Similarly in his historical
work on the living wage Lawrence B. Glickman has argued in his book A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making
of Consumer Society, that Wage labor seems almost a natural aspect of the world, a system of renumeration so ingrained
that it is difficult to imagine an alternativewhile acknowledging the encroaching reality of a wage labor society, wage
earners and their advocates refused to accept the meaning of wage earning as fixed and inevitableA wage labor society in
their view, had not pre-determined meaning; it could be inhabited by degraded wage slaves, or in the version they preferred,
it could be constituted by proud citizensworkers earning living wages.([Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997], 1-2).
Jerold Waltman for example defines a living wage as as a wage that would provide someone who works full-time yearround with a decent standard of living as measured by the criteria of the society in which he/she lives (The Case for a
Living Wage [New York: Algora Publishing, 2004], 86). Though distinct and differing in the criterion used to argue for the
position, these accounts all share a distance from poverty, an idea of a decent standard of living in a given society, and a
respect of workers beyond what they producethese definitions gesture towards full democratic citizenship beyond the
demands of work itself.

ii Deborah M. Figart, Introduction to Living Wages Around the Globe, in Living Wage Movements: A
Global Perspective, Deborah M. Figart (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1-12,1.
iii Figart, Introduction to Living Wages around the Globe, 1.
iv Charles Mills, Ideal Theory as Ideology, Hypatia 20.3 (2005):165-184, 166.
v Mills, Ideal Theory as Ideology, 166.
vi Ibid., 168.
vii See Michael Winter et. al., Protestors Nationwide Call for a $15 Minimum Wage, USA Today,
December 4, 2014.
viii Donald Stabile, The Living Wage: Lessons from the History of Economic Thought (Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar, 2008), 1.
ix Stabile, The Living Wage, 1-5.
x Waltman, The Case for a Living Wage, 228.

xi Raul Caetano et al., Alcohol Related IPV Among white, Black and Hispanic Couples in the U.S.,
Alcohol Research and Health 25.1 (2001): 58-65.
xii Alejandro Varela, The Best Way to Beat AIDS Isnt Drug Treatment: Its a Living Wage, The New
Republic, December 7, 2014.
xiii Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press,
2010), 170.
xiv King, Where Do We Go From Here?, 171.
xv Ibid.
xvi Ibid.,171-172.
xvii W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro (New York: Holt Publishing, 1915).
xviii Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within Slave
Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2014).
xix Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go From Here?, 174-175.
xx Ibid.,183.
xxi Frantz Fanon, Toward an African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, Inc, 1967), 37-38.
xxii Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42.
xxiii Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42.
xxiv King, Where Do We Go From Here?,196-197.