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I'm mostly inclined to agree with you, at least on the modern view of BLM and related movements. But I've been thinking lately about the Communist movements of the late 1800s through early 1900s and wondering, to what extent did they actually have a reasonable point? I'm not going to say I support authoritarian Communism or anything, but it didn't come from nowhere, at least some of the problems they were complaining about were real at the time.
I don't really know what things were like in the 1910s Russia. Maybe the Tsars really were both incompetent and authoritarian themselves, and industry may have been dominated by a clique-ish elite who hoarded the wealth and kept the working-class down. Around that time in America, that wasn't too far away from being the case as I understand it. It was the peak of the time of robber-baron capitalism, with lots of workers getting the shaft. Long hours, terrible working conditions, indifference towards injuries, low pay. Sometimes even worse when it gets into company towns and piles of other abuses that I haven't even heard about. I can see where those of a more angry, retributive, perhaps even revolutionary frame of mind might get the idea that overthrowing the whole system and giving this whole Communism thing a try might be a good idea.
Fortunately for all, we managed to improve things gradually and more smoothly. It turns out that further advances in industry, unionization, market forces making skilled workers more valuable, and relatively lightweight and limited government intervention while maintaining the fundamental tenets of capitalism did a much better job at improving the lots of the ordinary workers than any dictatorship of the Proletariat ever did.
Okay then, but what does that say about the behavior of modern Progressives? I can see how the Bolsheviks weren't right, but at least has a point. Damned if I can see the point of modern Progressives though. How does it make sense that they get all up in arms over a police shooting of a black guy who, upon review of the situation, probably had it coming, but don't care at all about dozens of black men getting killed in the inner cities every weekend for decades, and it actually getting worse when their prescribed solution of "abolishing the police" gets implemented? If Lenin and the rest of the inner circle of Bolsheviks were taking advantage of a shitty situation with legitimate grievances to leverage in their authoritarian tendencies, are the elite of the modern Progressive movement leveraging total nonsense to support theirs?
Start earlier. Remember progressivism started from the very real discrimination faced by black people in the US historically, just as Bolsheviks may too have had a real grievance about conditions. If you have already lost trust in authority (as many black people have) then that makes sense.
Many Catholics to this day distrust the Northern Irish police service due to how it was used back in the day. And that is after disbanding the RUC, renaming it and mandating a Catholic quota in officers.
That is where BLM comes from. Trust once lost is hard to regain. They are not starting with a neutral view. As for black on black violence, white progressives also don't want to be seen to be racist and paternalistic in forcing solutions on black communities that they did not ask for. And black communities are hopelessly divided on that issue. If they (or at last a large majority) could agree a solution, white progressives would be happy to champion it as they did BLM.
I actually draw a distinction there. I have a greater level of sympathy and understanding towards actual black communities that are wary of trusting the police, since they've actually experienced historic oppression by them. For the whole Ferguson situation, my impression was that the shooting of Michael Brown was technically justified, but it might have been the only correct thing the cops had done there in a long time. Michael Brown's actions were technically wrong, but more understandable, and did succeed in shining a light onto lots of actual misconduct. I admit I don't have any great ideas on how to create law and order in black communities when the relationship with the police is already so poisoned in so many of them.
However, my impression is that I don't see a lot of those people or communities in the BLM movement. That, as far as I can tell, is mostly a wealthy white people movement. Whatever actual black people took part in it are mostly upper-class and already pretty disconnected from actual oppression, even if there may have been some history of it.
I believe that our society has a more general problem of militarization of the police and over-policing of many things that applies to all people. I think that the recent racial focus is misguided and serves to obscure the real problem by insisting on a false narrative and thereby causing people to take the opposite position of excessively defending the police when they see the lies.
Right the BLM movement is spawned from but not controlled by the black communities that are impacted by it one way or the other. I'd agree there.
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Technically, my ass. The only reason Wilson didn't get railroaded by a system that badly wanted to was because it wasn't remotely a close case. Wilson's actions were fully justified by large margins, and he had extensive physical evidence to prove it.
And see, I would agree with all of this, except for the "excessively defending the police" claim in the same post where you seem to present the Michael Brown case as somehow borderline! Police misconduct absolutely exists, and absolutely should be punished, but you need to use valid examples.
I find it amusing that in this thread, I'm being taken to task both for saying that most people shot by cops "had it coming" - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the suspect, and also for saying that a police shooting was "technically" justified - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the police officer. I don't know guys, I'm just trying to be neutral here!
My actual position is more like, I believe both that there is significant police misconduct and that the vast majority of actual police shootings are fully justified. Misconduct takes place more in the smaller stuff, like excessive force and hostility. Felony car stops for paperwork errors, SWAT raids on houses based on flimsy evidence of minor crimes, raiding the wrong house entirely, destructive searches with flimsy justification, etc.
You're misrepresenting my criticism. My point was that your description of this specific situation was wrong, not the degree of sympathy you showed. It is in fact quite a big deal that people know where the line is between good behavior and bad, and saying that Wilson was "technically" in the clear is simply not true. In order to avoid further unjust treatment, it had to be proved that Wilson was innocent beyond a reasonable doubt--a complete inversion of the standards of criminal law--and he did so, meeting an unjust burden. Again, this was not a close case!
Splitting the difference between the truth and a lie is not admirable.
I largely agree with your second paragraph; one of my biggest meta-problems with BLM at the time was that it would prevent meaningful, productive police reform for a generation. I was wrong in that assessment in my undue optimism--the fallout has been much worse than I anticipated.
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Their behavior is indeed baffling if you assume that they are trying to implement a rational plan to achieve the goals they claim to have. But I don't think that is what is going on. If you ignore what they say and watch what they do, what objective does it point to?
As an aside, I think it's a bit cold blooded to say that the offender "had it coming". I suspect that if you or I had been his shoes, and walked in his shoes a while, we might have acted the same way he did -- or at least understood and empathized with his motives. I think it's more accurate to say that the shooting was justified.
I mean "had it coming" in a more immediate sense. Not that the person as a whole deserved to die in the abstract, regardless of what he had done at any particular moment. More that yeah if you try to beat or choke or stab or shoot a cop, he's probably going to try to shoot you, regardless of what motivated you to do that and to what extent it was understandable.
On the first, it's pretty standard for the leaders of a movement to be disingenuous about their real goals. It's the behavior of the on the ground individuals that I find bizarre. It sure doesn't seem like they're sophisticated enough to have a more sinister real goal and to be pushing the beliefs they claim as a cynical ruse to achieve that goal. They seem to be true believers, but about something that's completely fabricated and nonsensical.
When an animal gets rabies, it seems to decide to stop drinking water. That is why it is called "hydrophobia". This causes excess viruses to build up in the animal's mouth instead of being washed down, which would happen if it were drinking normally. The little spit that is left in the mouth is thick with rabies virus, so he is said to "foam at the mouth". Then the animal seems to decide to get mad at the world -- so mad that a skunk will attack a German Shepherd, and a German shepherd will attack its owner. To himself the rabid animal is probably thinking the equivalent, "You called my momma a name and I heard it". But what is really happening is that a rabid animal is not in control of itself; it is carrying out the plan of some other agent that has infected it, and the goal of that plan has evolved to spread the virus that carries it.
The locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; [Proverbs 30:27, ESV]
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But I don't think Russia was very industrialized—my impression was that that mostly happened with Stalin? There were many more peasant farmers.
When I read this (especially including low pay), what I hear is that labor was cheap relative to the goods people wanted, unless there's something keeping the markets out. So a large part of what made lives better was labor becoming more expensive relative to the goods it can buy—employers would give more for it.
Overpopulation was one of the reasons why the revolution happened. Cities used to be population sinks, but Russian cities weren't big enough to absorb surplus peasantry. A large supply of industrial workers meant that the price of labor was low, turning the proletariat into literal incels, since the only housing they could afford was not a room, but a single bunk.
Forced land redistribution started even before the Bolsheviks took power, they were the one smart enough to legitimize and endorse it (Decree on Land). The resulting yeomanization of Russia bought them about ten years of goodwill, until peasants started switching to cash crops and fodder from wheat.
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There's at least three groups among modern progressives. The "Resigned" are very liberal but don't really do much about it. They feel betrayed and left behind by the system and this depresses them and leads to apathy and inaction. There's the College Crusader who are usually white and well-educated, and very politically active, and have socialist sympathies. They are usually the stereotype, where they are in favor of equality and equity and want drastic solutions to accomplish it. They typically don't have much sympathy for opposing viewpoints. Economic and racial lenses on many issues are very common views. Then you have the Radicals. They are a bit harder to define, probably because as a demographic group, they aren't very big (Progressives broadly are only like 12% of US adults, using Pew's numbers). These are the people where actual Marxism might start showing up more overtly. And they are the only ones for which, at least in my opinion, Bolshevik comparisons should be made for.
Zooming out, and looking at one actual mass movement, BLM had broad appeal beyond conservatives because some of the core pieces of the message were generic enough for large parts of the liberal coalition to get behind, on top of a few highly-publicized cases of cops actually doing some pretty horrifying things (not all the time, of course as you note, but the cop kneeling on his neck is a pretty powerful image, whether you think drugs were a big factor in his death or not). But notice how ACAB and stuff specifically didn't actually gain much traction beyond Fox News which loved to use it as a very easy boo-outgroup target.
And when you get into the apparent apathy behind Black deaths, you actually do start to see a split, and not a new one -- it dates back to at least the Civil Rights era. You have some people who think that white people should do something about it -- but feel powerless, and thus redirect this energy into anti-gun and so a lesser extent, anti-police crusades. As noted, much of this group is white, and thus this is all they "can" do. You also have the more Malcolm-X style progressives who think the solution has to come from Blacks themselves.... but the problem? Blacks are rarely progressives. Most Blacks are vaguely generic establishment Democrats on the spectrum, or uninvolved in politics. Here you can see that not only are only 10% of Progressives (themselves only 12% of the total population) Black, but the density of Black adults falls much more among other Democratic sub-groups. So basically, white College Crusaders leave the problem to Black true-believers, but there aren't enough of them to make meaningful amounts of noise in the general space.
Ngl guys it’s pretty cringe that this really interesting comment got a bunch of downvotes.
As an aside I wonder if it’s worth subclassifying your Radicals into further groups around eg the “class-reduction” debate with StupidPol/bro socialist types vs the queer Marxists etc. Then again the former has effectively been exiled from mainstream progressivism so maybe they wouldn’t even count.
The asks question -> receives answer -> downvotes response is so bizarre to me. It's like the forum version of the Who killed Hannibal meme. It makes me think that, in aggregate, the "why can't I understand progressives" question is more rhetorical and boo-outgroup than an actual attempt at seeking understanding, which is sad.
Regarding the actual makeup or splits among Progressives, it's hard to know. Progressives are at least somewhat loud by themselves, but they are also signal-boosted by both right wing outlets looking for a boogeyman as well as left wing outlets who don't want to talk back too loudly or they will betray some cause. But my main point was that they aren't actually a very big group! At least according to the best polling data we have. And at some point, attempting to slice and categorize such a small group becomes both statistically and philosophically questionable.
You bring up a great point however. Classifying them all as Radicals is a bit lazy and is also a bit of centrist bias. Maybe I should do a deeper dive and see if there's some good polling data specific to progressives.
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I still see it in women's online dating profiles.
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And not exclusively liberals either. I remember at least one person who's conservative reacting to Floyd dying after being restrained at his neck. Though he wasn't in favor of the riots, of course.
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Basically, all of this is true. In particular, the use of Russian working-class men as cannon fodder in World War I, the inhuman conditions they lived under while at war, and the indifference of the upper classes to any of this, created morbid resentment among the lower classes toward the upper. While the common soldiers had to live under ghastly conditions of privation, cold, lice, disease, and lack of medical care, they witnessed first-hand the relatively cushy lives of the officers, and even more cushy lives of the commanders. It resonates with the American situation in Vietnam, where, because of the college draft deferment, working class and underclass men were often sent abroad to risk their lives for values held more closely by the upper classes. It also resonates with Plato's description of how the working classes lose respect for the rich when they serve side by side in war:
The question is how to move forward from it. The Russians picked the wrong answer. Dead wrong.
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