Comment by rayiner
5 years ago
It is a dichotomy: you either believe that police brutality and inequality can be fixed within the basic structure of our society and economy, or you don't.
I'm a regular reader of Jacobin, so I have some idea of what modern Marxists think. (Though I won't say I'm well read on the subject.) But that's besides the point--I have no objection to Marxists participating in solving police brutality and inequality. I'm addressing the practice of socially coercing people to say "black lives matter." What ideas are you actually asking people to endorse? I think many, many people are happy to endorse that idea insofar as it means "the police shouldn't murder black people because of the color of their skin," or "black people shouldn't get the short end of the economic stick."
But the eponymous organization behind the slogan happens to be led by Marxists and has a Marxist and anti-Western platform. I think people are quite reasonably hesitant that what they're actually being asked to endorse is the platform and ideology of the organization. And I think it's perverse to insist on such endorsement under the banner of anti-racism.
I don't read Jacobin and find American socialism tiresome and unmoored from reality. But the "What We Believe" statement you cited earlier espouses none of the economic justice positions of Jacobin or the DSA, nor do either of their petitions.
There is a strain of socialist activism in BLM (you saw it with the ridiculous "property crime isn't violence" stuff). But those were voices in a larger crowd, and the movement doesn't seem to endorse them explicitly.
There are BLM signs all over Oak Park and, I assure you, very few of these people actually want to defund the Oak Park Police Department. I think BLM supporters have more clarity on the issues than you give them credit for: they're standing in solidarity with black people who have been targeted for generations by a policing culture we all know to be fucked up. They're not looking to seize the means of production.
> I'm addressing the practice of socially coercing people to say "black lives matter." What ideas are you actually asking people to endorse? I think many, many people are happy to endorse that idea insofar as it means "the police shouldn't murder black people because of the color of their skin," or "black people shouldn't get the short end of the economic stick."
I think you're quite severely overestimating both the number of people who are asking others to endorse Marxism when pressuring them to support their side in the current moment, and more to the point, the number of people who perceive themselves as being pressured to endorse Marxism in the current moment. There is some tangible benefit to both the far left and to the right for there to be a perception that that is what is going on, but I'm just not seeing it much IRL.
My extended social circle might not be representative of anything, but people are talking about cops murdering people, the behavior and misbehavior of protesters, whether vandalism during a protest is bad or somehow actually good for some reason (sigh), whether protesters deserve to suffer brutality at the hands of police (double sigh), whether racism is even a thing and whether whites are the REAL victims of racism (facepalm), whether events that are happening and are clearly documented on widely distributed video are really happening or whether that's just what "they" want us to think, and some other crazy stuff that I bet would sound familiar to you as well.
I think I'd actually feel a lot better about things if I were witnessing an argument about fringe political beliefs coming to the fore, rather than finding out how many people I know are overtly or covertly racist. That sounds a little negative but some demonstrably good things are happening as well, so... you take the bad with the good, I guess.
Parent poster was not talking about people who are merely being asked "to support their side in the current moment"; their concern was specifically wrt. the slogan/hashtag "Black Lives Matter", which is associated with a radical Marxist organization. One can care about Black lives and even demonstrate that they care without endorsing a harmful slogan.
> I think I'd actually feel a lot better about things if I were witnessing an argument about fringe political beliefs coming to the fore, rather than finding out how many people I know are overtly or covertly racist.
That makes sense, but it's also sensible to ask whether hijacking a much-needed conversation about race and police brutality to push fringe, Marxist-inspired political views helps people and institutions become less racist. It's not even clear that 'Black Lives Matter', as an overtly organized and led social movement, is doing all that much to meaningfully improve Black lives.
> Parent poster was not talking about people who are merely being asked "to support their side in the current moment"; their concern was specifically wrt. the slogan/hashtag "Black Lives Matter", which is associated with a radical Marxist organization. One can care about Black lives and even demonstrate that they care without endorsing a harmful slogan.
The parent poster described himself in another comment as pro-BLM (his phrase), and I think he was making some slightly more subtle points.