I agree, but you also shouldn't completely discredit yourself before negotiation has started. What do you even bring to the table? The end of protests? Protests are only being tolerated because of presumed public support, which has been dwindling due to some ugly scenes.
> The politicians and leaders need to work out the details and compromises.
The politicians only need to care about votes. In many areas, the majority already voted in Democrats with the intention of having them fix things, which they didn't.
I would argue that Democrats are generally less principled than Republicans, they're only following what they believe the majority to believe. See the Dixiecrats or their position on gay marriage.
So, without the majority vote you don't have Democrats and without the Democrats, who do you have to support? Republicans? Greens?
> The point of these protests is that one side has not been listened to, and it is getting people killed, and we're sick of it.
I noticed as much, but that doesn't magically bring you into a good bargaining position. MLK was successful because he stayed within the overton window. Malcom X wasn't, because he didn't.
The end of protests and a society that works better for everybody, yes. I'd love to have a public safety force that I felt I could rely on. Currently, I don't.
> In many areas, the majority already voted in Democrats with the intention of having them fix things, which they didn't.
Well, sort of. Here in the Twin Cities, the elected Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to change the city charter to no longer require the Minneapolis Police Department. The charter change would require a vote to approve, which would have let us actually see how locals felt about it. But, it required review by an un-elected Charter Commission, which doesn't reflect the demographics of the city, and chose to use a procedural delay tactic to prevent the question from being put on the ballot this year. So it's not fair to say that they "didn't fix things," but rather weren't allowed to by state law, which requires the charter commission. Republicans control the state Senate.
> So, without the majority vote you don't have Democrats and without the Democrats, who do you have to support?
Progressive candidates, like members of the DSA and politicians they endorse. One thing that has come out of these protests is a rise in progressive candidates, both running at all, and actually winning some primaries. The progressive candidate who won the primary for my state House seat over the long-time Dem incumbent chose to run after the Floyd murder.
The protests themselves have moved the overton window. A single recent example is how public support for protesting athletes has changed. Consider in particular the NFL apology from earlier this year https://abcnews.go.com/US/nfl-apologizes-listening-players-r... . It's a long road, and mistakes will be made, but on the whole I think the protests have had a huge positive impact on the problem.
You don't actually bring that society to the table. That's outside of your power. If anything, you promise that this society will somehow come about if only your demands are met. Kind of like the politicians that might promise almost anything, if only you elected them.
> Progressive candidates, like members of the DSA and politicians they endorse. One thing that has come out of these protests is a rise in progressive candidates, both running at all, and actually winning some primaries. The progressive candidate who won the primary for my state House seat over the long-time Dem incumbent chose to run after the Floyd murder.
Sure, but that only happened because these progressives were compatible with voter behavior. Show me the successful progressive Democrat who also supports completely abolishing all prisons. Well, maybe in Portland.
> The protests themselves have moved the overton window.
Have they really? In the public perception, these protests were against police brutality, which virtually everyone is sympathetic with. If the protests had been perceived as being in favor of dismantling the criminal justice system, virtually nobody would've supported that.
> A single recent example is how public support for protesting athletes has changed.
Supporting or not supporting someone's right to protest has been inside the overton window all along. What hasn't been within the overton window would be a position like "protesting athletes should be imprisoned" or "athletes should all be forced to attend a protest".
Similarly, defunding the police is within the overton window, but abolishing policing outright is not.
FWIW the ballot amendment to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department had about 61% support, vs 32% opposed, among Minneapolis residents. https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/survey-suggests-su... . These proposals are not as outlandish as you might think, especially among the people who are impacted by them.
I didn't say it was the only demand, it just cancels out all the other more reasonable demands. Suppose a political party promises to "strengthen national unity", "eliminate unemployment", "provide economic stimulus" and "start a war for more territory culminating in an unprecedented genocide". It then doesn't really matter that I think 75% of these goals sound alright.
> These proposals are not as outlandish as you might think, especially among the people who are impacted by them.
I think it really depends on how the question is phrased. Dismantling a particularly unpopular police force is one thing, ending all policing and imprisonment is another, and it's also not just a "local" thing.
> According to an early 1968 Harris Poll, the man whose half-century of martyrdom we celebrate this week died with a public disapproval rating of nearly 75 percent, a figure shocking in its own day and still striking even in today’s highly polarized political climate
And [2]
> Back in the 1960s, when King was actually leading protests, just 36 percent of white Americans thought he was helping “the Negro cause of civil rights,” according to historical polling data compiled by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. In a 1966 Gallup poll, more than 60 percent of the public rated King more negatively than positively.
> After King was assassinated, two-thirds of Americans said their strongest reaction to his death had been sadness, anger, shame or fear, another survey found. Another 31 percent, however, said they “felt he brought it on himself.”
This idea that MLK was the respectable, acceptable face of the civil rights struggle is a modern fiction, and worth considering before denouncing those currently seen as going too far:
MLK was seen as going too far. He was hated.
The turning point was his death, and even then millions thought he had it coming. It took many years of reappraisals after his death for him to become the popular icon he is today.
Worth considering when considering what future generations will think about those demonstrating now.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-kin...
[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/in-1968-nearly-a-thir...
I've read a lot of lists of demands, and most of them seem reasonable to me, and I suspect more would seem reasonable to the general population than you think. I have yet to encounter the demand that private property be abolished in favor of collective ownership, or much else that conforms to actual Marxist ideology.
They're only "Marxist" in the sense that a certain American demographics calls anyone and anything they disagree with "Marxist."
FFS they've called Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama radical Marxists. Greta Thunberg is a Marxist. Literally any leftist, liberal, Democrat and progressive with any visibility is a Marxist. The entirety of mainstream media and social media is Marxists. Fox News criticized the President? Marxists. It doesn't mean anything anymore, it's just a scare tactic.
Rather, in terms of public perception, Marxism is probably best defined as "a bunch of loony leftist ideas". Some of these demands fit that bill perfectly.
Secondly, many BLM protestors are clearly brandishing symbols that are associated with Marxist/Communist ideology, many self-identify as "Marxist", and even officially they refer to each other as "comrades":
The public has been effectively propagandized and made to turn against one another rather than a corrupt system. If you accept the thesis that endemic racism and corruption in the American justice system exists, that the reason for the anger behind these riots and protests is legitimate, then your personal ideological polarity shouldn't matter.
Unfortunately, it's easy to get people to dismiss the movement wholesale by associating it with the specter of Marxists and Angry Black Men.
And that still leaves reasonable demands being ignored. If you don't support completely defunding and disbanding the police, you could agree that de-escalation training and shifting of funding priorities might be effective. That doesn't need to be slotted into a left-wing political agenda.
>Secondly, many BLM protestors are clearly brandishing symbols that are associated with Marxist/Communist ideology, many self-identify as "Marxist", and even officially they refer to each other as "comrades":
And a lot of BLM protestors, likely a large majority, aren't and don't. There's a difference between some Marxists supporting the movement and the movement itself being Marxist or having a Marxist intent. Black Lives Matter is clearly not about Marxism.
There are Marxist extremists associated with BLM, and while "disbanding the police" may not be textbook Marxism, it is a "loony leftist idea" and therefore interchangeable with Marxism in the public discourse.
Similarly, very few of the people arguing for making the US a white ethnostate are literally "National Socialists". Yet, we call them Nazis.
Except for, y'know, the founders of BLM explicitly describing themselves as Marxists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCghDx5qN4s&feature=youtu.be...
What she didn't do is describe BLM as Marxist, or its purpose as advancing Marxism. I listened to the entire rest of that video and the only thing that was mentioned in regards to BLM was advocacy for black issues, not Marxism.
So no, BLM still isn't Marxist even if its founders are.
That doesn’t compute. An organization is ultimately inseparable from the real ideological positions and goals of its leadership. The entire 20th century is replete with examples of front groups, secretly working for the extreme positions held by their founders while using rhetoric that the public would view as more middle-of-the-road, and enlisting supporters and low-level employees that remained apart from the founders’ thought. (Marxist, capitalist, whatever – such front groups existed on both ends of the ideological spectrum of the Cold War era.) Why should we believe that a contemporary organization like BLM cannot be the same?
You can certainly argue that the ordinary people protesting in a general BLM-inspired movement are not necessarily to be identified ideologically with the founders of the BLM organization. But the criticisms of the BLM organization remain valid. And participants in the general movement who attend protests led by the BLM organization can be accused of unwittingly lending support to extreme positions, of neglecting their duty to look into who exactly has planned and organized a particular event beforehand.
Those of us who protested the Iraq War in certain street protests that turned out to have been organized by Communist parties for their own shady purposes, have been burnt and we don’t want antiracism protestors to be exploited in the same way.
You're assuming the "real" ideological position of a black Marxist starting a black advocacy movement protesting police violence against black people is actually Marxism, whereas the actual evidence from her own mouth is that the "real" ideological position is the black advocacy.
>Why should we believe that a contemporary organization like BLM cannot be the same?
Occam's Razor. It seems far more likely given the context in which the organization arose that it is what it claims to be, rather than that being a front for something else.
>Those of us who protested the Iraq War in certain street protests that turned out to have been organized by Communist parties for their own shady purposes, have been burnt and we don’t want antiracism protestors to be exploited in the same way.
It's entirely possible that a movement like BLM can be co-opted by another agenda, and that's something people who support the movement need to watch out for. But all that's being presented here as evidence of the actual purpose behind BLM being the advancement of Marxism is speculation and extrapolation.
Actually, I’m suspecting that the “real” ideological position of the BLM organization is both an end to police-on-black violence and certain extreme economic-socio-political goals, except that its leadership tries to keep the latter aims covert. After all, even in its overt public platform the BLM organization makes certain demands (like for empowering trans people) that go beyond the matter of police violence against black people. So, you cannot claim that the BLM organization is tightly focused just on antiracism.
You're talking about a hypothetical, as-yet unrealized (and possibly unfounded) form of BLM in the future. As mentioned earlier, BLM supporters protesting on the ground likely didn't join for a Marxist agenda and aren't supporting it, and if it's the case that "extreme economic-socio-political goals" are being kept quiet (IE, not part of the common dialogue,) then it isn't correct to consider BLM currently Marxist, and labeling it as such is only useful to distract people from its legitimate grievances.
>After all, even in its overt public platform the BLM organization makes certain demands (like for trans issues) that go beyond the matter of police violence against black people which has drawn the public to BLM-led events.
Support for trans rights, LGBT issues, feminism and the like isn't that radical and it isn't Marxist per se. Reading their "what we believe" page[0], posted elsewhere in this thread, it's clear that they're trying to include other marginalized groups in the movement, but also trying to stay on message, doing so in the explicit context of the black community. That's just good PR, and apart from the overt language not much different than progressive mission statements put out by many organizations.
>So, you cannot claim that the BLM organization is tightly focused just on antiracism.
Ok. I still don't see the radical Marxist agenda. When they stop talking about racism and start talking about seizing the means of production I'll believe it.
"We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable."
If you don't like the Marxist label, we can call it Soviet. The exact type of anti-family ideology isn't worth arguing over.
Encouragement of fatherless homes isn't going to make life better. You can see it even in the word choice when they say "mothers, parents" instead of "mothers, fathers". They can't even bring themselves to say the word!