I definitely agree with the basis for this: slavery never ended, it simply changed from pure chattel to "slavery with extra steps."
However, when it comes to BLM, I am far more hesitant to agree. Besides the fact that the organization has received TONS of corporate & billionaire funds, as well as all the corporate media coverage, government support, etc.
The founders are admitted Marxists, and generally the supporters I see en masse are the same folks out chanting for cops to be the only people with guns, supporting authoritarians both left & right, paying their taxes, and otherwise supporting & promoting the status quo as a whole.
If BLM was pushing to abolish the police, and stop charging people the "taxes" for them, that would be one thing... but they're not. Most of the message is about replacing "racist cops" with "woke cops" - and the Democrats have already begun using this as a means to bring the UN in to run the police.
As long as the state exists, oppression will be the norm. Anything that doesn't address the root problems of institutional violence, is at best shuffle chairs on the Titanic, imho.
Just published this piece because I feel like I laid out my stance on this pretty well in a FB conversation the other day.
Interesting arguments. I think a key issue here is actually that BLM is a decentralized movement. I mean think about how things work here on HIVE and all the different perspectives in our community. We disagree over things as fundamental as whether there should be downvoting allowed, whether we should upvote our own content, bidbots, etc. Yet who gets to speak for HIVE? Any of us who say we do, right?
Similarly in BLM there is all that you say. However, there is absolutely also a call to defund the police and the platform that I think we would call most "official" is focused primarily on taking money away from the police. It is not socialist. It does not want to expand the state, but rather move the money away from the state.
I haven't heard anything that moves into the taxation arena. I don't think that's a part of the BLM platform one way or the other, not increasing or decreasing taxes. But where I think you and I really disagree is on the idea of incremntalism.
I do think that every step of removing power from institutions like the police is massive progress. You get people realizing experientially that things can work better with less money going to the government (which I firmly believe would be the case) and it opens their minds to more ideas about defunding government. Already the "defund the police" call is morphing into "defund the military." And the fact that powerful players are now feeling they have no choice but to get behind it (not because they want to or think it benefits them, I can assure you) just means that this is a battle we are likely to win!
In contrast, I just don't see getting the popular support at levels needed to make change actually happen with an all-or-nothing approach.
I'll take a look at your piece you linked to now.
It is, and it isn't; it's more like when there was Steem AND Steemit though. "BLM" is used as a rallying cry by all sorts of various people, groups, and communities around the country. But it's also the name of a specific organization, which is bringing it millions of dollars in donations, and funneling most of it to the Bernie Sanders & Joe Biden presidential campaigns.
As I addressed in that article - when it comes to groups (especially amorphous or decentralized ones) it's impossible to ever make a "the movement ______" statement, because at any moment, in any place, the "movement" only means whatever it means to the person you're interacting with.
However, when there is an actual organization (like BLM itself), then we can see where the money flows, who the funders are, etc. When I look at those things, for BLM, it doesn't look good. I see a LOT of media, corporate, and government support. I see the money being funneled to support the democratic party. I'm not saying that there is a difference between the parties, but if a person/movement supports the parties, they by definition support the status quo.
But the plan has always been (at least since Agenda 21 was laid out 30 years ago) to eliminate city/state/national police & military and replace them all with the UN/NWO version - which is exactly what the #DefundThePolice movement is currently being used as the justification for.
Very interesting. Thanks for the comments here and for your post, which I just commented on.
Thanks. I do want to say that I really agree with a lot of your points, regarding policing, prison, and the socio-economic focus there.
The part that I highlighted here is one that I find to be extremely important, and one of my main problems with the rallying cry of BLM. I have always been a fan of separate, hyper-focused activist groups/movements, that then support each others work where alignments exist.
There are a LOT of folks who fall into the right/trump/tea/libertarian/etc range of things that would absolutely support a push to cut down on militarization of police, prison-industrial-complex, and so on... if it wasn't the the fact that currently jumping on that bandwagon seems to require accepting/agreeing to a lot of extremely left/socialist/marxist/intersectional assumptions & beliefs.
Have you ever heard of Dale Brown and the Threat Management Centers in Detroit?
He's new to me. Will check him out.
What you're describing is the very problematic "all or nothing" viewpoint that tends to be more prevalent on the left than on the right. It's like you can't work together unless you are in 100% agreement about everything, which is going to necessarily be a small percentage of people. Meanwhile there are issues the needle could be moved on where there is agreement by like 80% of the population, but it just doesn't happen because of this all or nothing mindset. Both sides of the ideological divide do it, but it happens more on the left.
I think it would be impossible for far left and far right to work together on anything at this point. I see anarchists as something else entirely though, and hope to see alliances with the left there.