Some significant illogic within the ideology of “Black lives matter”

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.

1. https://www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/39587/1/black-lives-matter-founder-interview-patrisse-khan-cullors[↩]
2. 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[↩]
3. 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[↩]
4. 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[↩]
5. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-china-marx/huge-statue-of-marx-a-gift-from-china-erected-at-his-german-birthplace-idUSKBN1HK2AA[↩]
6. 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/[↩]
7. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9133.12187[↩]
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat[↩]
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat#Karl_Marx[↩]