King understood that automation was a weapon to be used against organized labor: “This period is made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into impotency by viciously attacking it at every point of weakness.” And the unions’ only chance to take control of the course of automation was to forge a common cause with the civil rights movement: “The political strength you are going to need to prevent automation from becoming a Moloch, consuming jobs and contract gains, can be multiplied if you tap the vast reservoir of Negro political power.” 57 Malcolm X, in contrast, argued that the threat of automation justified a separatist strategy. “At best,” he cautioned, “Negroes can expect from the integrationist program a hopeless entry into the lowest levels of a working class already disenfranchised by automation.”