BLM & "Black Marxism", the philosophy of Black Lives Matter.

grief and outrage in texas after a white
police officer fatally shot an african-american woman inside her own home on police body cam video an officer is seen approaching a door of jefferson's home in fort worth the screen door is closed the solid door is open and the lights are on inside the officer walks the perimeter of the house then as he approaches a window put your hands up the officer had fired within only a couple of seconds after shouting his verbal command and never did he identify himself as police tatiana jefferson 28 years old died on the spot in her bedroom early saturday morning this has happened again and i think a big factor for a lot of people that i'm seeing online is that this woman was just inside her home playing video games with her nephew it makes you not want to reach out and call law enforcement if you think something like this is going to happen it has to be admitted right off the top that the left-wing critique of black lives matter is [ __ ] yes i said it of course the right-wing critique of blm is [ __ ] that's no surprise to anyone basically what the right wing says is that it's some conspiracy set up by george soros etc but the left-wing critique also is [ __ ] for the most part what you find on the far left the group of people complaining that black lives matter is not marxist enough not socialist enough not anti-capitalist enough that it's implicitly or secretly a pro-capitalist movement yes yes once again the left-wing claims it's secretly orchestrated by george soros just trying to get mainstream corporate democrats re-elected you know who that means in the year 2020 that that's all this is there is a left-wing critique of blm that is just as awful as the right wing critique but between the two you'll notice one interesting difference the right wing complains that black lives matter is implicitly or secretly marxist whereas the left wing is complaining that the problem is they're not marxist enough or not marxist at all so it took some time and did some research into what are the intellectual sources of the black lives matter movement and there are some positive surprises there is good news and bad but i'm happy to say i actually do have some good news in this video and one good book to recommend both for the history and the future of black lives matter [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] in this video we're dealing with two books attached to four very different political personalities and myriad possibilities for the future of black lives matter as a movement each of them linked in a dynamic way to the reevaluation of african americans radicalism in the past so book one here is called revolution in the air and this has a forward by alicia garza if you don't know who alyssia garza is she is the co-founder of black lives matter she has her own podcast she has her own twitter she is as much the leader and face of voice of black lives matter as anyone else can be she's one of the first names you're gonna find if you're googling around trying to figure out who is black lives matter who defines what this movement was is and ought to be now this book revolution the air is a reevaluation of and a re-valorization of black communism so it's looking back to communists and marxists in the united states of america primarily in the 1960s and 1970s and then naturally it's drawing conclusions about their failure because that movement was a failure and looking forward to the future and what's very interesting to note is that alicia garza in the introduction has the honesty to really reflect that when she first discovered this book she was a young aspiring radical a young aspiring revolutionary political organizer she did not find in the pages of this book at all the answers that she was looking for and now a new generation of young black revolutionaries intellectuals etc are going to be discovering this book partly because alicia garza's name is on the cover and she wrote the introduction and they also are not going to find the answers that they're looking for the very fundamental question that this book sort of asks and then refuses to answer we'll see in just a moment what alicia says i appreciate her honesty in the introduction but she can only be honest up to a point the fundamental question is wasn't it a tragic awful mistake for these african-americans who are only a tiny tiny minority of black people understands america wasn't it a tragic and awful mistake for them to try to attach their dreams of a better future to stalin mao zedong lenin and even karl marx wouldn't they have been better off drawing inspiration from any other source imaginable now the second book i'm going to mention here which again even a quick google search you're very likely to find this named as the main um i don't know intellectual touchstone for or locus classicus for what's going on in black lives matter today is a book titled black marxism the single greatest surprise about this book is that of course people buy it they look at the cover they assume that because the title is black marxism the implicit thesis of this is going to be that black people ought to be marxists or that it's going to be an african-american approach to marxism that's fundamentally pro-marx and it's not this book is a brilliant and highly erudite demolition of marxism it completely destroys the intellectual legacy of karl marx and it does so in a in an elegant and fascinating way it's a great read i've only read the first two chapters i'll probably read the rest of it the next few weeks but let me tell you something the chapter one alone really could be a standalone book the style of cedric robinson is such that it absolutely presumes you are the type of highly erudite reader who recognizes the name ali piren that you're someone who has already read on repeat that you're in a very very high level of sophistication and education to uh to appreciate this he assumes you're someone who's already well versed in and even a little bit bored with the academic fad of world systems theory it so rapidly goes through the whole history of i was going to say the western world but it's it's most of the world frankly in the first chapter that in an era before the invention of wikipedia it's very difficult to imagine uh a teenager or even someone in their 20s being able to sit down and appreciate this book because there are so many things you'd have to google you'd have to look up on wikipedia you'd even have to find a map for that are dealt with rapidly and again this book much like black lives matter itself it ended up not having any audience to appreciate it during the author's lifetime the author just recently died i believe in 2016. but during the author's lifetime he alienated himself because people who really know marxism they figure out soon enough that this book is actually profoundly hostile to marx even though it states its conclusions in these kind of elegant and erudite ways he'll say things like in the 19th century all of these facts were misinterpreted as heroic narratives of the so-called working class were constructed so this sort of thing he doesn't directly say karl marx and his work is garbage but if you know marx already if you don't understand marx and marxism if you're at a high level of education in that area you know these are really zingers this is you know this really has a lot of verve to it the way he's just you know giving kind of backhanded slaps to the whole tradition of marxism indeed he's making orthodox marxists look like a laughingstock look like fools now he does not do that for no reason one of the recurring elements here both in the appreciation of senator robinson's black marxism and in the left-wing denunciation of black lives matter as a movement today one of the factors is the marxist commitment to class struggle and class analysis only which leads them to and really this is just insane it leads them to dismiss any discussion of race racism and even nationality and nationalism it leads them to dismiss all of that as so-called false consciousness some of you may have heard and even joked about this phrase no struggle but the class struggle well orthodox marxists take that tremendously seriously and it leads them to insist that race really isn't important at all obviously in the history the united states of america raises important and what cedric shows cedric robinson shows in chapter one of this is no slavery wasn't new racism wasn't new let's really talk using a lot of the language of world systems theory let's really talk about how the system of european colonialism developed and european industrialization developed going all the way back to ancient greece and rome let's really point to the profound continuities you know and he does make really useful comparisons between racism against jews anti-semitism and racism against blacks he talks about the way in which racism against the irish in england was co-evil with the emergence of the plantation economy um the creation of plantations really the the colonization or recolonization of ireland by the english going on concurrently with the colonization of places like virginia you can already tell just from these these little snippets of the book i'm alluding to here this is a very dense very factual uh you know profound reevaluation of history that is coming to the conclusion that probably everyone in this audience shares yes race matters yes racism matters yes this was a crucial component of what happened in the history of europe in the history of north america the caribbean south america and this is however not the only thing that is profoundly wrong with marxism so what this book moves on to do in the later chapters that i admittedly haven't read yet is he goes on also to examine some of the black revolutionary leaders or i guess you could say would be revolutionary leaders intellectual leaders people like uh uh du bois so in proper french his name is dubois but his preferred pronunciation was dubois w.b du bois uh you know he became a card card-carrying communist he had a complex relationship company that was a african-american black leader who became a communist naturally the black communist party and black congress was tried to make a hero of him and what he's really showing is you know in the first say first half of the book he shows you that marxism is completely the wrong theory for african americans and africans in africa and south america and uh the caribbean he's interested in the asp the the black diaspora as well as both staff it's like well marxism is completely the wrong theory it's asking the wrong questions and giving us the wrong answers and then he moves on to the critique of particular black leaders like this black leaders who are often just uncritically adulated uh in the 20th century and in the 21st century even more it says hey look here are all the ways that they were wrong here are all the ways that they were led into a terrible dead end because they blindly followed marxism so another one of his little erudite you know twists of the pen that are you know just as cutting as a twist of the knife is that he says well you know um these abstract concepts that the marxists are are addicted to you know um they began as our servants but soon enough they became our masters you know some of the abstract reasoning that marxists engaged in it was kind of useful up to a point but they they got it they let it get out of control and at this point marxists are lying about history and misrepresenting history to make history fit their ideological and political narrative to suit their political purposes and he's saying look that's not the real history of the world at all marxism has become like a cult of lying about history and that doesn't tell us anything meaningfully about the past present or future of black radicalism black revolutionary movements so this leads him into discussing i guess in the middle part of the book uh at least i'm just discussing that's always been fascinating to me actual historical black revolutions rebellions slave revolts and independence movements that strangely seem to get overlooked i mean all the attention is on someone like dr martin luther king jr but there's remarkably little interest in for example the revolution in haiti the various revolutions and slave revolts and the existence of maroon communities so slaves that broke away and basically like had their own colony or their own community partly just due to escaping from a slave plantations but also rebelling against and burning down slave mandates then going to live separately in the mountains looking at that seriously and saying okay you want to talk about black radicalism you want to talk about revolutions let's get rid of all this marxist [ __ ] let's learn from the real history let's look at what actually happened when the slaves rose up and killed their masters so black marxism is a completely brilliant and genuinely inspiring book written by a guy you know i've got to say this is like the most impressive book i can remember reading from a modern american period it's very very rare to encounter a book with this level of every edition scholarship and also just verve and tenacity it's a fun read unfortunately it requires an unbelievably high level of education on the part of the reader like i felt like i was marshaling and drawing to the fore like my own decades of scholarship on a whole crazy variety of chapters of history and politics right i was like oh yeah right uh angry piranha oh yeah right world systems theory oh yeah right the history of the english civil war and the french civil war and napoleon and i've done my own reading about the history of slavery and all those things too this is really asking you to kind of uh explore your your own intellectual resources while you're reading it just to keep up and if you were reading this as a kind of optimistic would-be young black revolutionary or activist i can imagine how profoundly alienated would be just because of how demanding it is of the reader but then above and beyond that sooner or later as readers are going through this they're going to realize despite the title black marxism is itself an anti-marxist book [Music] [Music] we now return to alicia garza and her introduction to revolution in the air quote my first reading of revolution the air left me profoundly confused as a young organizer i read this book as if each page should contain a ready-made solution to the challenges i was grappling with how could we build a million strong movement when our organization and those we work closely with only engaged hundreds could anything be done to close the gap between paid staff organizers and the membership of organizations who were largely working class people of color of course this approach was misguided but certainly fit the stage of development that i was in i hadn't yet spent enough time building the movement to understand its nuances i hadn't yet studied much of the origins of marx selena's tradition that i was loosely trained in i made it all the way through the first part and then skimmed the rest i'll come back to it i said to myself we can and must make a commitment to learning new lessons and more specifically making new mistakes i'm still struck by how many of the endeavors described in this book are things that i and my peers have done or experienced so to be clear she's saying that it's remarkable for her that in reading about the errors of black communism african-american marxism in the 1960s and 1970s she's struck by how many of these mistakes are the same mistakes she and her peers made more recently than the year 2000 this would have been in the 2000s she's talking about make no mistake there will never be a successful internationalist left in the united states if we cannot learn from mistakes that have been plaguing us for decades staying grounded in the actual material conditions while reaching for the sky though a measure of revolutionary romanticism was involved for some most of those who quote turned to lenin mao and che probed and studied before making this life-changing decision they concluded that third world marxism embodied the most penetrating insights into the working of u.s society that u.s style racism capitalism and empire building were structurally and historically intertwined that quote the wretched of the earth close quote people of color at home and abroad would have to be at the center if the world was to be transformed the new communist movement was their attempt decisively shaped by dominant perspectives in the international left of the time to turn these insights into a practical political force to join together as comrades across barriers of race nationality gender and age to sink roots among workers and the oppressed now i have just added the comment and it utterly failed even if we only compare it to the nation of islam it was a failure there were actually many highly eccentric african-american political movements in the same period 60s 70s and 80s like including even like the black hebrew israelites various black nationalists black separatist movements but obviously the nation of islam that in case you didn't know had malcolm x as its main leader and uh you know public figure for quite a few years there he later broke away from it of course uh you know the nation of islam that also had a famous boxer you might have heard of cassius clay changed his name to be uh muhammad ali muhammad ali promoted nation of islam there were failures that were nevertheless vastly more successful than black communism or black marxism so i appreciate alyssia's honesty here in as much as she's capable of being honest about it however this fundamentally remains i mean the introduction of this book and i would say the book as a whole and one dangerous aspect of black lives matter in 2020 remains you know this kind of stubborn attempt to revalorize and romanticize the failures of marxism the failures of communism instead of just coming out honestly and saying look guys this failed this was a total failure compared even to something as obvious as you know the poor people's movement that was briefly led by dr martin luther king jr coming of age in the utopian climate of the 1960s embracing a marxism leninism billed as an all but initiate science these young militants thought they could fast forward history through hard work and adherence to correct ideas throughout the whole introduction she indicates that she is really sick and tired of the puritanical attitudes the holier-than-thou attitudes of marxists and communists i guess she's lived around a lot of them long enough to know and probably she's heard some of the same criticisms i mentioned at the start of this video people claiming that she's not a marxist at all or not a real marxist that she's secretly pro-capitalist or that any discourse about race and racism is just quote-unquote false consciousness the allegations that she's just a tool of the mainstream democrat party all that stuff is being flung at her from the far left all the time she is sick and tired of the puritanical attitudes she encounters in marxism and communism however she is not quite willing to let go of this label marxist yet she's not willing to just recognize historically communism was a failure on a massive scale in russia in china in laos and vietnam in cuba et cetera she's not willing to recognize that but she's also not willing to recognize that it's been a failure on the tiny scale of the horrible effect it had in the lives of the people who believed in it most uh in the united states of america flexibility openness generosity of spirit and a democratic culture of respect for every individual are indispensable footnote also all of those things are not marxist again she's not quite willing to come out of the closet and say she's against marxism maybe ten years from now maybe five years from now she'll really re-evaluate this and make a clear statement about where her own you know feelings lie but flexibility opens generosity of spirit and a democratic culture in the rights of the individual none of that is in the marxist canon none of that no none of those are the attitudes cultivated by members of the so-called communist vanguard quite the contrary quote one of the most counterproductive and painful features of the new communist movement was its tendency to mistake toughness for commitment rigidity for steadfastness attacks on other leftists for adherence to principle to construct a welcoming and sustaining political culture rooted in the american experience it would be wise to look beyond the marxist pantheon and learn all we can from the towering intellectual moral and political contributions of dr martin luther king now with that statement of course i agree but this leaves us with the open question of how marxist or how anti-marxist is black lives matter i think the most honest answer you can give is twofold related to the two different leaders of the black lives matter room the two different founders who are now most vocally stepping up to represent that movement giving interviews to tv news stations and on their twitter and social media so and so forth i think we can say that alicia garza remains uh profoundly ambivalent about the history of marxism and is very unsure of what marxism will mean for the future of black radical activism however she's not quite willing to part ways with it she's not quite willing to face up to the failures of the past and it seems to me that her main sort of creative response to what she dislikes about or even what she despises about communists and marxists whom she's known and collaborated with for many many years is to embrace this very informal very folksy very chatty very personable style of politics the podcast i just heard from her she describes how she uh drinks hard liquor at the end of a hard day she makes jokes about uh going to the hairdresser and hair and nails and beauty products she's really making this kind of conscious effort to overthrow um the militancy that you know isn't just associated with marxist revolutionaries but you know it's associated with the whole of the heart lab she's really trying to say that no that's not the way she's going to do politics and obviously i have a very informal style here on youtube i can't remember the last time i had a scripted video or even made a list of bullet points on paper nothing was written down for this youtube video it's off top in my head i also embrace informal politics to some extent however i think the more you examine what's going on today in 2020 with black lives matter the more you might appreciate the significance of having party discipline of having a party manifesto of having things that define exactly what the movement is and what it isn't and not just to rely on people having an appealing personality and chit-chatting uh you know on youtube in their podcasts and relying on goodwill and cooperation arising out of messages back and forth over twitter it does indeed start to seem a little bit bourgeois decadent and self-indulgent speaking of which let's for the first time in this video take a brief look at what patrice clore the other uh founder co-founder of black lives matter has been doing with her newfound fame yes that's right artist organizer and freedom fighter never forget that the word artist is their first and foremost and i i drew attention before to how peculiar it is that her university degree earned just a few years ago at ucla how peculiar it was that she chose to study religion in university um rather than selling related to her political activism but we can also say it's a little bit strange that she didn't study something more directly related to her so-called art what is her art no it's not painting no it's not drawing no she can't play the trombone she puts on performances like this in which she is completely naked aside from gold paint all over her body and stands around in a field a recurring element of her performance art seems to be her lying down in a bathtub and i think if you just examine the expressions on the faces of the people in the crowd here you can imagine how awkward you might feel if um you had to attend this particular type of performance art from the co-founder of black lives matter here's her artist's statement on one of these performances quote as a black queer woman living inside a world that is constantly trying to kill me respite reprieve and healing and evening of cleansing is my latest work for my 2019 thesis solo show yes so the idea is that the cleansing here is both metaphorical and literal as she is lying in a bathtub so in looking at the highly diffuse and decentralized phenomena of black lives matter people who are looking for some kind of philosophical or intellectual basis for what it was what it is and what it will be they will be left with much of the same strange ambivalence and confusion that alicia garza expresses in the introduction that book there will be some people on the left who are now looking towards blm hopefully as if this is going to bring about the revival of marxism the united states of america perhaps specifically a revival of black marxism as the title of the book says but could this instead be a moment to look back on this history the same history that max elbaum writes about in revolution in the air and that robinson writes about in black marxism could this be an opportunity to look back at those mistakes and just frankly admit yeah those were mistakes this was the wrong road that black radicals went down in the 1960s and 1970s and we can't even imagine how much better off african americans the united states might be today if they hadn't gone down this road if they'd taken any other path to progress if they'd taken any other path to pursuit of say you know reforming the democracy you're a part of and really improving it rather than engaging in frankly accelerationist fantasies of a violent revolution that would uh you know drag the united states down further to be something more like vietnam or cambodia when i first criticized black lives matter years ago i pointed out the weaknesses in their constitution and that constitution has now been deleted from the internet they're a movement that has chosen to refuse to define itself as a movement they first emerged as merely a hashtag as a catchphrase and the question is can they become something more better bigger can they change the history of the world or are they just going to be a fad loosely inspired by a hashtag and a catchphrase i think that is a tremendous challenge for the uh founders and the leaders of black lives matter's movement and i think it leaves people including people in this audience right now googling around wondering what can i read or what rock do i have to look under to figure out the intellectual and philosophical basis of what this thing is and what its potential in the future can be the answer to the question is black lives matter a marxist movement is maybe because they've utterly refused to define themselves in this way they've utterly refused to provide us with a constitution or a manifesto or a clear sense of direction purpose the goals they're trying to achieve what they are and are not willing to do to get there i think the question could instead be asked as follows are marxists powerful enough to co-opt and take over black lives matter as a movement and in the year 2020 my bet is nah