One of the movement’s founders, speaking as “we” for all of them, has publicly stated that “they” are “trained marxists”:
Along the same lines:
“I went through a year-long organising programme at the National School for Strategic Organising (NSSO), and it was led by the Labour Community Strategy Centre. We spent the year reading, anything from Marx, to Lenin, to Mao, learning all types of global critical theory and about different campaigns across the world, and most importantly every day, five days a week we were out on the ground actively recruiting people into the organisation we were in, as a way to learn how to bring people in, how to keep them in an organisation. There’s an entire skillset to this.”1
The irony could be that Marx himself does not seem to easily lend himself to a godfather of “anti-racism”, evidenced, among other quotes, by what he wrote about Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the German workers’ movement:
“It is now perfectly clear to me that he is descended, as evidenced by his head formation and hair growth, – from the negroes who joined Moses’ procession out of Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on his father’s side crossed paths with a nigger). Well, this combination of Judaism and Germanicity with the negro basic substance must produce a strange product. The pushiness of the fellow is also niggerly.”2
And about his own son in law, in a letter to Friedrich Engels: “Lafargue has the foul scar of the Negro tribe: no sense of shame.”3 Engels himself wrote: “I can only think that the 1/8 or 1/16 of Negro blood, which is in Laf[argue] and which from time to time gets the upper hand with him, has led him to this quite inexplicable madness.”4
Promoting the as such impeccable idea that “lives matter” on the basis of the most deadly ideology in human history that has cost tens of millions of people around the world their lives, which on top of it was wholesale anti-black, and – apparently on the same basis – advocating for the toppling of statues of historical figures while at the same time advocating for the erection of additional statues of Karl Marx5 seems like a lot of illogic.
The same kind of illogic that indiscriminately accuses police of racially motivated murderous brutality when actual scientific research has repeatedly shown that any bias, as far as it exists, has rather the opposite effect.6 To quote from a prominent study:
“We found that, despite clear evidence of implicit bias against Black suspects, officers were slower to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White suspects, and they were less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects. These findings challenge the assumption that implicit racial bias affects police behavior in deadly encounters with Black suspects.”7
The time may have come to consider the possibility that the widespread rioting and looting of recent weeks in the wake of police brutality that happened to hit a black person may be – just that. And to conceive of some logical consequences. After all, marxist ideology expressly strives to establish totalitarian oppression, namely the “dictatorship of the proletariat”,8 as an “intermediate” stage on the path towards communism, which in turn aims to eliminate the very concept of individuality – and thus humanity as such – , by means of “revolutionary terror”.9
Not logic-based persuasion.
Terror.
_____- https://www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/39587/1/black-lives-matter-founder-interview-patrisse-khan-cullors[↩]
- Karl Marx in a letter to Friedrich Engels of July 30, 1862. In: Karl Marx in seinen Briefen. Ausgewählt und kommentiert von Saul K. Padover, München 1981, p. 518, quoted after https://www.grin.com/document/42618, translation by deepl.com[↩]
- Karl Marx in a letter to Friedrich Engels of November 11, 1882, in: MEW 35, p. 109, quoted after https://sozialgeschichteonline.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/vorverc3b6ffentlichung_sgo_24_hund_der_jc3bcdische_nigger_lassalle.pdf, translation by deepl.com[↩]
- Friedrich Engels, letter to August Bebel of November 15, 1891, in: MEW 38, p. 220, quoted after https://sozialgeschichteonline.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/vorverc3b6ffentlichung_sgo_24_hund_der_jc3bcdische_nigger_lassalle.pdf, translation by deepl.com[↩]
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-china-marx/huge-statue-of-marx-a-gift-from-china-erected-at-his-german-birthplace-idUSKBN1HK2AA[↩]
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27/this-study-found-race-matters-in-police-shootings-but-the-results-may-surprise-you/[↩]
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9133.12187[↩]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat[↩]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat#Karl_Marx[↩]
This Post Has 4 Comments
Thanks for this info. The BLM movement was founded in response to Zimmerman’s acquittal, although he was indeed innocent of Trayvon Martin’s murder. There was massive fraud in the case, basically framing Zimmerman, which Joel Gilbert details in his brilliant documentary that is available free for a limited time on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=26&v=QAw5ykIPOBM&feature=emb_logo
If Mr. Zimmerman was indeed “innocent“, something that the film you link to makes an admittedly strong case for, then, since it was Mr. Zimmerman who shot Trayvon Martin (apparently in self-defense), it is not logical to speak of “murder“.
Language, being a most immediate expression of logic, the one “thing” that makes humans human, matters (most of all).
You’re absolutely right. “Innocent of the murder accusation” would’ve been more accurate. I appreciate the clarification.
Although all this does not exactly fall into our core interests, it is interesting and impressive nonetheless, and we found this response to the Gilbert film worth noting and linking to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxPV9G8G9xM&t=568s.
If more people were to discuss the issues at hand in a matter-of-fact(-and-logic) way as Gilbert and the two commentators “of color”, awkward as it feels being “prompted” to use this meaningless attribute for human beings, the world might eventually return to reason and normalcy.