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Make no mistake – BLM is a radical neo-Marxist political movement
ALEXANDRA PHILLIPS 12 June 2020 • 5:35pm The Telegraph
The rapid spread of protests across the West under the Black Lives Matter banner has left a political breathlessness from Baltimore to Berlin. Those in positions of authority are scrambling to show they are addressing endemic racism, and in the commercial sphere, not ending up on the wrong side of the debate and risking Twitter storms and boycotts. In a world where nothing is exempt from moral judgment, being on trend means signing up to radical political movements.
That is what Black Lives Matter is. Don’t take my word for it. Take theirs. The form of words that appears on most online posts connected to the group riffs on ‘the black radical tradition’ which counts among its past contributors the Black Panther Movement and Malcom X. BLM happily self-identifies as a neo-Marxist movement with various far left objectives, including defunding the police (an evolution of the Panther position of public open-carry to control the police), to dismantling capitalism and the patriarchal system, disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure, seeking reparations from slavery to redistribute wealth and via various offshoot appeals, to raise money to bail black prisoners awaiting trial. The notion of seizing control of the apportionment of capital, dismantling the frameworks of society and neutralising and undermining law enforcement are not just Marxist, but anarchic.
Desperate to appease a vociferous clamour, celebrities and companies are queuing up to endorse. Airbnb has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars, an ironic move for a company that enables profiting from real estate through casual lets, driving up rental prices and gentrifying neighbourhoods, impacting on affordable leases in inner cities.
Nike, which has come under fire for using sweatshops to manufacture unaffordable, ‘aspirational’ footwear to pitch to the poorest in society, is now striving for racial equality. Amazon has banned the police from using their facial recognition software in tackling crime, yet are happy to push for greater intrusion in the private sphere.
UK tea manufacturers, whose business was built on the back of slavery and operate under neo-colonial plantation models where tea is grown and picked through agrarian toil in the developing world to be shipped for production, packaging and profits in the West have jumped on the hashtag #Solidaritea. Post-truth absurdity is where we have reached. Yet as companies commercially conflate the tagline Black Lives Matter, with the movement Black Lives Matter, momentum builds for an organisation with little scrutiny or accountability, that is able to mobilise millions and encourage, wilfully or not, outpourings of vandalism, looting and violence across the West.
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