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Notes -
Would you classify Black Lives Matter as a Marxist movement, or no?
I would not, no.
I'm aware of that time a couple of its founders identified as Marxists, but I don't think that makes the movement Marxist.
BLM is amorphous enough that it's difficult to nail down any specific principles, but some are outlined here, and I don't think they're Marxist. Based on that page alone I think there's a clear anarchist influence on BLM, with a heavy emphasis on the abolition of punishment, end of coercion, and mutual aid, but I think that to be Marxist specifically, there would need to be something about the ownership and distribution of capital.
So, anarchist or at least anarchist-adjacent, yes, but Marxist, no.
Mm.
So in your opinion, when some guy spraypaints #BLM, multiple hammers and sickles, and the publication date of the Communist Manifesto on a public structure, what do you think is going on in that guy's head? Would you expect the misconception he's suffering from to be common or rare?
I think that someone who paints hammers and sickles and 'CPUSA' on to a block is almost certainly a communist. That imagery is pretty unambiguous.
(You can't see the BLM in that image, but the reverse of the block shows it.)
But all that proves is at least one person supports both communism and BLM. My priors on the kinds of people who go around spray-painting slogans on skate parks make me think it's quite likely that the person is an idiotic, edgy teenager with no developed political platform. At any rate, I do not draw conclusions about the ideologies of entire movements supported by millions of people from individual graffitos.
Would you expect American Communists, or indeed communists generally, to not support BLM?
If you were persuaded that hammers and sickles were a common addition to BLM-riot graffiti, would this be weak evidence of a connection between the two movements? To be clear, the best I can do after a brief search is two instances, and the vague memories of seeing many more at the time. I'm more curious about your reasoning process.
More generally, do you think the examples linked in this comment are likewise lacking a "developed political platform"? Are those people Marxists, in your view?
...Could it be that you were mistaken, and the hammer and sickle in that first example only represented "a union of social classes"? Maybe that guy wasn't a communist at all?
Given the history of ‘а вас негров лунчают’, almost certainly, but that just makes them fellow travelers from a common enemy.
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