The 18th Brumaire of Black Lives Matter
The tragedy of the civil rights movement, the farce of BLM
Above: Malcolm X in 1963
“Great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice…the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” So goes one of Marx’s most famous lines, quoted so many times by intellectuals that it’s a bit of a cliché. It’s therefore surprising that no one has ever applied it to a comparison of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter—two things which are otherwise compared a great deal.
The quote originates from the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, an analysis of the recent fall of France’ Second Republic, which then became a dictatorship under Emperor Napoleon III. But Marx wasn’t focused on the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew so much as the botched revolution that opened the door for him.
Today it seems fair to speak of BLM as a failed revolution that opened the door for the current regime. Few people believed in the movement as much as I once did, enough to get arrested at protests associated with the cause multiple times. Like many, I caught the fever watching the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri uprising. This was a spontaneous working-class rebellion against over-policing that was inevitable in a town that was drawing a full quarter of its revenue from fines on poor people. As much as some conservatives tried to paint it as a “Soros riot” from top to bottom, Ferguson was in the tradition of the uprisings that erupted in the spring of 1963 when Black youth across America rallied for Martin Luther King’s agenda in Birmingham, but went beyond his nonviolent tactics.
There was nothing partisan about Ferguson, an event that embarrassed a Democratic governor and president, and which The New York Times initially didn’t seem to know how to react to ( leading to the “Mike Brown was no angel” controversy ). The national protest movement that developed around police killings shortly afterward was largely grassroots and anarchic, and it stymied liberal mayors like Bill de Blasio as much as it did conservatives.
But parallel with the post-Ferguson movement was something more cynical. In 2012, Trayvon Martin had been killed in Sanford, Florida. In contrast with Ferguson, there was no rioting in Sanford, nor was there any dramatic video, as would later be the case with the killing of Eric Garner. Local media barely reported the story initially. Yet in less than a month, The Los Angeles Times noted, Al Sharpton flew in to lead a massive protest that was “a coronation of sorts for Sharpton” to “become the most recognizable figure fighting” to prosecute George Zimmerman.
The primary reason that mass media seized on the killing after ignoring it for more than a week was its elevation by various assets of the national Democratic Party. An academic study of the case notes the central role of GlobalGrind (owned by Russell Simmons) and Color of Change (run by Van Jones) in bringing Trayvon Martin to national attention. Veteran Democratic operatives Philip Agnew and Andrew Gillum designed and implemented the movement on the ground. This well-oiled machine set the stage for Sharpton—FBI informant turned Obama advisor—to bring the ruckus to a Republican-controlled Southern state. While he campaigned for re-election, Obama explicitly identified with Martin, holding himself up as the Dream Defender-in-Chief fighting the lynchers in the GOP.
This was the episode that the hashtag “BlackLivesMatter” was originally created for. And there was indeed a George Soros connection. #BlackLivesMatter co-creator Opal Tometti ran Black Alliance for Just Immigration, a group which received $100,000 (more than half its revenue) from the billionaire hedge-funder in 2011. Despite its ample connections, BLM barely had any impact on the streets nationally until after Ferguson. Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted. It’s only initial victory, and perhaps only initial purpose, was getting Obama re-elected.
Long before Candace Owens and Kanye put the spotlight on the phenomenon, it was becoming clear to organizers and writers within the movement that a corporately-led hashtag and organization were exploiting the working-class mobilizations that arose independently of it. Black Lives Matter Cincinnati broke from the corporate network in 2018, writing that:
The continuous shift towards electoral and liberal Democratic Party politics and away from revolutionary ideas is too great. The consequences for Black, brown, and poor people are too great…BLM did not create or build this new grassroots movement against police brutality and racism; they capitalized off a nameless groundswell of resistance sweeping the nation, branded it as their own, and profited from the deaths of Black men and women around the country without seriously engaging, as a national formation, in getting justice for fighting families. All the while raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from high-end speaking engagements and donations from foundations that support the Black struggle (or want to co-opt it).
A formal coalition between some of the populist groups and the elite hashtag creators had been formed in 2015 and dubbed The Movement for Black Lives, but the elitists had the upper hand in the corporate setting. By the time of the George Floyd protests, BLM was able to steer the most militant outrage into a narrowly anti-Trump, pro-Biden election year campaign.
The shadowy partisanship of national BLM contrasts sharply with the classical Civil Rights Movement. When Martin Luther King first went to the White House in 1957, he was greeted by Vice President Richard Nixon. King’s leanings toward John F. Kennedy came only after the Democratic candidate intervened with Alabama politicians to release King and other protesters from prison, and pledged to support voting rights organizing in the South. When that support was found wanting, particularly when it came to the FBI failing to investigate the relentless attacks on activists, King was ready to criticize the federal government openly.
Victories of A Maverick Movement
One could argue that the 1960s movement was most successful when it was operating beyond left and right. As it built towards its greatest victories, Black America was beginning to gravitate towards Malcolm X, who was then spokesman of the socially conservative Nation of Islam. Malcolm soon left the NOI, but showed no affinity for liberalism, going so far as to say that Barry Goldwater, the father of modern conservatism, might be preferable to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential race. At the very same time, Malcolm was appearing with the Socialist Workers’ Party.
Malcolm’s example was a direct influence on the African-American delegates who literally walked out of the Democratic National Convention in 1964 after it had seated white supremacist delegates from Mississippi over ones who’d won a non-Jim Crow primary. Working-class organizers of the Civil Rights Movement, affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), decisively broke with liberals over their support for the war in Vietnam. When LBJ hosted a White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1966, SNCC not only boycotted it, some members actively protested it.
SNCC began forming local third-parties to challenge Democrats, which helped inspire the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Members helped form organizations like the Peace and Freedom Party which ran in the presidential election of 1968. Third party actions spoiled elections for Democrats, but also pressured them to finally reject the Vietnam War and the Dixiecrats. The disruptions of the independent Black Power/ Civil Rights Movement even pushed Nixon to end the draft. There was relentless tragedy in the FBI-backed assassinations of leaders like Malcolm X and Fred Hampton, but there was also hope and heroism.
In a speech that liberal news sites will co-opt today, Dr. King said the “revolutionary spirit” of his movement was not mere ethno-politics, it was “eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism.” But the poverty of inflation driven by sanctions on Russia doesn’t provoke opposition from the post-BLM left, much less riots. Neither does the militarism that sends $100 billion to Ukraine to expand NATO. There is no national insurgent action against a housing crisis and falling wages, only a puppet movement that Democratic operatives switch on and off as they please.
End of part one.
Very probing and informative; thank you!