> What I mean is, where you seem to see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as evidence of some sort of vast generational conspiracy to subvert the US and replace its current government with some kind of Stalinist totalitarianism, I see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as a totally unsurprising and if anything long delayed response to the mounting evidence that four straight decades of untrammeled capitalism on the Reaganite model has had catastrophic results for almost everyone in the United States, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
I didn't say I was worried about Marxism as a pre-text to Stalinist totalitarianism. Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone. In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled. In that same time period, Singapore's and Hong Kong's increased by more than a factor of 10. That was the legacy of putting Marxist ideas into practice. Capitalism, by contrast, particularly the Anglo-American variety, has been responsible for turning at least three poor countries into rich ones in the 20th century, and is on pace to turn a dozen more into at least middle income countries. These ideas have been the most powerful engine of enabling prosperity in the 20th century. Having seen the suffering socialist ideas caused in my home country, and seeing how much life has improved after we abandoned those ideas, I regard their re-introduction as an alternative to the basic Anglo-American economic system to be extremely alarming. (Note, I'm not talking about, and you don't appear to be talking about, the notion that everyone should pay "a little bit more" in taxes to fund more social services. My understanding is that we are talking about something more invasive than that.)
> Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.
The story of the 20th century is that academics with ideas are often very dangerous people. (We don't think of fundamentalist Islam as academic, but in many respects that's what it is. It's a set of ideas borne out of theory, in that context theological theory, rather than learned experience, and transmitted by teaching it in schools and radicalizing young people who lack the life experience to know better.) In Bangladesh, people who had grand visions of a better world used schools to replace our practical, moderate version of Islam with a radical one. That makes me tremendously skeptical of people who want to tinker with the basic structure of society, and in doing so invoke theories that exist in books rather than the learned experience of successful societies.
> Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale
I think you fundamentally misperceive the conservative viewpoint. We point to Stalinism, Maoism, etc., as the logical outgrowth of Marxism in practice. But our concern isn't merely the Stalinist outcome. We think that Marxism is dangerous in and of itself. Western Europe's lost decades of stagnation under socialist ideas, or India or Bangladesh's lost decades, wouldn't be as bad as Stalinism, obviously. But they'd be bad, and insofar as Marxists want to tinker with the basic structure of our economy, we perceive them as a threat to our prosperity. We view their attempts to submarine Marxist ideas into schools as a bid to make our children ignorant about what created the prosperity they see around them. Most importantly, we by nature view civilization as fragile. We are grateful that we stumbled across a formula that basically seems to work—because there are few ideas that work and many more that don’t—and view attempts to rethink that formula from first principles with deep skepticism. I agree that conservatives can go too far with this (calling Obama a socialist, etc.) And they can fail to perceive important distinctions, such as the difference between BLM as a corporate entity, versus what most people who are completely unaware of the Marxist connection believe they are supporting: https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-an.... But the Reagan/Thatcher-ite opposition to Marxism was basically a good thing, and destroyed it as a going concern for a good 25 years between 1990-2015. And now, as I think you even agree, it's back.
I suppose I don't understand what you're saying about the situation you saw in Bangladesh. Were the fundamentalist Islamists you described having taken over the country, via the educational system, also ideological Marxists? Is there a history of some sort that I can read, to understand better what you're describing? Just based on what you've said today, it sounds like you're adjusting the goalposts to suit the argument of the moment, but I'm sure that can't be the case. So I'd definitely appreciate the ability to develop a better understanding of the events that seem to form the basis of your argument.
With regard to the whole Marxism-and-BLM thing - I have to say, at this point, I honestly don't know. On reflection, I decided it might be better, instead of just taking your word (and Newsmax's, and it turned out also Breitbart's!) for what's in that video, if I saw and heard for myself what it contained. So I did that [1], and found that your representation of what it contains (and Newsmax's, and Breitbart's) is, and I say this with all possible charity, extremely tendentious in a way that leads me to suspect it's been deliberately stripped of context in order to sound maximally frightening to people already predisposed to be suspicious of BLM activists' motives.
In particular, when I investigated the quote of which you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) make so much, I found that it was said in the context of answering a question raised by among others Jalil Muntaqim (born Anthony Bottom) [2], a former Black Panther imprisoned since 1974 for the murder of two police officers, over whether the Black Lives Matter movement has a coherent enough ideological direction to avoid simply "fizzling out" as Occupy Wall Street did.
Cullors' answer is, as you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) imagine, a political one. But it's not political in the way that you think it is. Here's a transcription I made just now from the video, covering the entirety of Patrisse Cullors' answer, rather than just the part that has been so frequently taken out of context with what appears to me very strongly to be deliberately deceptive intent.
"I think that the criticism is helpful; I think a lot of things. The first thing I think is that we actually do have an ideological frame; myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers, we are trained Marxists, we are super versed on sort of ideological theories, and I think that what we really try to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk. We don't necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement; I think we've tried to put out a political frame that's about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the Black community, to really fight for all of our lives, and I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don't believe it's going to fizzle out; it just gets stronger, and we see it, right? We've seen that after Sandra Bland, we're seeing it now with the interruption of the Netroots Nation Presidential Forum. What I do think, though, is [that] folks, especially folks who've been trained in a particular way, want to hear certain things from us, [and] we're not framing it in the ways that maybe another generation has. But I think it's important that people know the Black Lives Matter movement doesn't just live online, although there's many people who utilize it online. We're in a different set of circumstances, a different generation, [and while] social media may feel like it's diluting the larger ideological frame, I argue that it's not."
The reason I say that that's a political answer is, again, in the context of it being a response to critique by someone who is widely regarded as a political prisoner and, as the show host notes, an "elder of the struggle". It really comes across as kind of a "gotcha" question, and Cullors' answer is consequently phrased with care. She opens by declaring credentials of a sort that should resonate with "elders of the struggle", as it's put, and afterward quickly redirects into what she wants to talk about, which essentially is to say that, yes, Black Lives Matter is a coherent movement with a specific purpose, and as such is not liable to the same problems that hampered and eventually undermined the Occupy movement.
It's an answer in which Cullors has to triangulate between the outdated perspective of a past generation who, while still meriting respect for their own efforts toward a more equitable US society for black people, no longer have a firm grasp on the issues of the present moment, and the need to demonstrate that her own work very much is rooted in the issues of the present moment. It's political, yes, but in the office-politics sense rather than that of some sort of conspiratorial Marxism that you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) apparently choose to see here.
And it's an answer I can respect, both because I agree that black people in the United States have literally never had a fair shot and they deserve better, and because I'm not too proud to admit that she's a hell of a lot better at that kind of interpersonal and intergenerational politics than I've ever managed to be, a lack I've often regarded with a measure of regret. I mean, I usually just say "ok, boomer". Cullors is positively gentle about it, and maybe I should learn something from that.
I have to say, I really appreciate you taking the time to engage on this subject today. Absent that, I don't know that I'd ever have had the motivation to go and find original statements of this sort from BLM organizers. I have to say, my respect for that movement, and the work that's gone and continues to go into making it a force for good in American politics, has really increased as a result of this conversation.
> Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone.
Marxist notions have been one of the key driving forces in the transition between late 19th Century capitalism and modem mixed economies in the developed world (though never without compromise), and haven't been even attempted to be applied anywhere outside of advanced capitalist democracies directly, only through the lens of Leninist (and later, derived from that, Stalinist and Maoist) totalitarianism, since robust capitalism with developed working class consciousness is a prequisite for the post-capitalist development in Marx’s theory, a pre-requisite abandoned and replaced with the vanguardism in Lenin’s work and it's derivatives.
> In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled.
Not sure what that has to do with Marxism, since Marxists (even in the sense of Leninists, etc.) weren't in charge most of that time, and were violently targeted by right-wing military dictatorships for substantial stretches of it.
I mean, unless you mean that Marxist notions are dangerous because holding them might get you murdered by right-wing dictatorships, which I'll grant is valid point, though not the one you seemed to be arguing for.
I didn't say I was worried about Marxism as a pre-text to Stalinist totalitarianism. Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone. In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled. In that same time period, Singapore's and Hong Kong's increased by more than a factor of 10. That was the legacy of putting Marxist ideas into practice. Capitalism, by contrast, particularly the Anglo-American variety, has been responsible for turning at least three poor countries into rich ones in the 20th century, and is on pace to turn a dozen more into at least middle income countries. These ideas have been the most powerful engine of enabling prosperity in the 20th century. Having seen the suffering socialist ideas caused in my home country, and seeing how much life has improved after we abandoned those ideas, I regard their re-introduction as an alternative to the basic Anglo-American economic system to be extremely alarming. (Note, I'm not talking about, and you don't appear to be talking about, the notion that everyone should pay "a little bit more" in taxes to fund more social services. My understanding is that we are talking about something more invasive than that.)
> Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.
The story of the 20th century is that academics with ideas are often very dangerous people. (We don't think of fundamentalist Islam as academic, but in many respects that's what it is. It's a set of ideas borne out of theory, in that context theological theory, rather than learned experience, and transmitted by teaching it in schools and radicalizing young people who lack the life experience to know better.) In Bangladesh, people who had grand visions of a better world used schools to replace our practical, moderate version of Islam with a radical one. That makes me tremendously skeptical of people who want to tinker with the basic structure of society, and in doing so invoke theories that exist in books rather than the learned experience of successful societies.
> Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale
I think you fundamentally misperceive the conservative viewpoint. We point to Stalinism, Maoism, etc., as the logical outgrowth of Marxism in practice. But our concern isn't merely the Stalinist outcome. We think that Marxism is dangerous in and of itself. Western Europe's lost decades of stagnation under socialist ideas, or India or Bangladesh's lost decades, wouldn't be as bad as Stalinism, obviously. But they'd be bad, and insofar as Marxists want to tinker with the basic structure of our economy, we perceive them as a threat to our prosperity. We view their attempts to submarine Marxist ideas into schools as a bid to make our children ignorant about what created the prosperity they see around them. Most importantly, we by nature view civilization as fragile. We are grateful that we stumbled across a formula that basically seems to work—because there are few ideas that work and many more that don’t—and view attempts to rethink that formula from first principles with deep skepticism. I agree that conservatives can go too far with this (calling Obama a socialist, etc.) And they can fail to perceive important distinctions, such as the difference between BLM as a corporate entity, versus what most people who are completely unaware of the Marxist connection believe they are supporting: https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-an.... But the Reagan/Thatcher-ite opposition to Marxism was basically a good thing, and destroyed it as a going concern for a good 25 years between 1990-2015. And now, as I think you even agree, it's back.