Nice try but Black Lives Matter started after the Michael Brown shooting, which was during the Obama administration.
correction: first started after George Zimmerman was acquitted on murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin, which the year before Michael Brown was killed, still during the Obama administration.
What does that mean though? Why would Marxism be a signal for avoiding the movement?
I don't know anything about Marxism.
Marxism is socioeconomic analysis of class structures. Marx and Engel’s book Capital is largely a critique of capitalism. Vladimir Lenin expanded on these ideas with methods to transition to a communist society (another thing Marx wrote about). After Lenin died Stalin took power over the USSR and committed atrocities against mankind, fighting Nazis, and leading the country through an industrial revolution. Mao expanded on these ideas in China and is still on track with their 100 year plan written ~70 years ago (as far as I know).
Dismissing Marxism is good for capital and the ruling class as it views BLM as its enemy.
According to other comments Marxist governments have committed heinous crimes. I have asked questions about whether or not those crimes are the result of Marxism or the people who enforced it.
I understand that there is a large stigmatisation against criticizing capitalism and the free market in America. Capitalism and free market politics seem, as I have no real education for this type of thing, as though they've become symbols of America. And symbols and ideology are usually venerated.
I am left to wonder a few things:
If Marxism truly is responsible for suffering at scale, then why are there people still fervently attached to the idea? Is it a lack of historical context? Is it the same kind of idea why some people become neo-nazis; some romanticized ideation how the world should work?
Further despite any of this, why do people still espouse the idea of class distinctions? (This sounds like a very right sounding question).
Regardless of any political or economic theory or ideas, I personally think that there is a distinction between the interests of people who work for a wage ,the "average"person, and the people who govern / own property/production/govern. To dismiss this would ignore the whole industry of lobbying. With which the entire point is to further corporate interest in government. Whereas these interests may not necessarily be maligned against the average person, they are not in the interest of the average person.
I apologize for my ramblings as I don't have anybody to discuss this with. My final question becomes this: is Marxism a flawed system but still has some good ideas in it?
As a citizen of a former eastern bloc country, there is more than one reason. The first and most straightforward is the group who held jobs under socialism that barely created any economic value. Since being unemployed for a longer period of time was a criminal offense, a lot of these "bullshit jobs" were created to keep everyone occupied. These people had a rude awakening when a free market based economy had no need for their work.
The second group of people that are deeply disillusioned by the current status quo for various reasons. This group is much harder to define as their ideals combine both economic and social reform. I recommend reading Theodore Kacynski's Industrial Society and It's Future where he articulates his opinions better than I could in this reply. One notable catchphrase of this group is "real communism hasn't been tried" which is followed up by denying the atrocities committed by the soviets.
It's also a brand and national symbol in some places like you mentioned with capitalism. China is a de-facto capitalist dictatorship that is only socialist in name.
>is Marxism a flawed system but still has some good ideas in it?
Of course it has some good ideas. Nothing is black and white. And besides, one man's seized property is another man's government issued living space :^)
It will fundamentally change how you view that system.
It shows that the Bolshevik Revolution really was bottom up. They implemented the teachings of Marx down to the letter. The violence and death was considered necessary by Marx himself.
The gulags started under Lenin and were simply continued under Stalin.
Most interestingly, people were so indoctrinated into the Marxist religion that they could be charged for a crime they knew they didn’t commit, be tortured for the required 6-9 months, sentenced to 10-25 years in a Gulag, find out that almost everyone else was innocent (often just captured to fulfill the prison quota), somehow survive the process, and come out the other side still singing the praises of the people and system that did all this to them.
Marxism is the most dangerous cult the world has ever seen and is responsible for more death and suffering than any other organization that has ever existed.
So it seems that leaders who have tried to implement Marxist ideas have committed great atrocities. Did they commit those atrocities in the name of Marxism, or were they corrupt and used Marxism as a guise for totalitarist actions?
Because class struggle is such a Hot Topic in Marxism, is the above the reason why the idea of class struggle is completely dismissed in America? The reason I ask is because there is a good long history of employers taking advantage of employees. And those employers having government support to do so. Although, most of my examples come from 1850-1920, there are still some issues that working people face today from their employers and the government. Unions aside, did the atrocities committed by Marxists contribute to stigma against questioning the status quo?
Read or listen to The Gulag Archipelego and decide for yourself. Given the HUGE political push in this direction, you should at least become acquainted with those who went there before, what happened to them, and why they believe it happened. This book tells stories of hundreds/thousands of people who survived that system and passed them on to be written in this book (which was itself something worthy of outright execution in Russia at that time).
The Red Terror campaign under Lenin killed over a million people. Let's not pretend Stalin is the only one responsible for atrocities.
> Mao expanded on these ideas in China
Under Mao's brain-dead economic policies, China suffered the worst man made famine in history. China's recent acendency only came about after Deng Xiaoping's far reaching economic reforms. The idea that China is still following Mao's plan is ridiculous.
Is Marxism a form of Socialism? And are the failings of the implementations throughout history a direct result of the ideology itself?
Kids, don't do Marxism, not even once.
When heaven doesn't come, you need a scapegoat, and the Marxists start killing people.
Ukrainian pogroms, Great Leap Forward, Khmer Rouge, there's enough examples to be convinced that Marxism is inherently genocidal.
Because lots of people have been affected by propaganda (both Leninist and capitalist) equating Marxism with Leninism (and it's descendants), and Leninism has a legitimately horrifying track record.
What?
My understanding is that it's more of a collection of local initiatives.
It’s not like the NAACP that has a central leadership and a board.
How so? What are the signals of Marxism within the BLM movement?
What's the difference between Marxism & just unrealistic idealism?
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/jul/21/black-lives-m...
I do find it a bit odd though how someone who describes herself as a Marxist now owns multiple luxury homes.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/blm-co-founder-patrisse-khan...
Ah yes that thing that famously only happens in Marxist political regimes.
Difference between Marxism and unrealistic idealism, not between Marxism and other political regimes.
But I'd love to see an example of a Marxist regime bigger than a kibbutz that does not display that pattern, if you have one.
Kibbutzim are questionably successful at best - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_crisis for example, but they seem to be an upper scalability limit.
While BLM can refer to a number of different things, there happens to be a non-profit called "Black Lives Matter", the founders of which explicitly claimed to be trained Marxists.
Whether this organization was rightfully the face of the BLM movement is debatable, but regardless it enjoyed a fair degree of prominence for a time.
It's "appeal to emotion", and it works.
> Amir Locke
This event was one administration too late to make a splash, unfortunately.
> BLM
They got exposed as Marxists, and everyone started distancing themselves, thankfully.