Why We Must Move Beyond the Liberal Response to BLM.

Marxist Revolutionary Fred Hampton. At the age of 21, Hampton was murdered in his own home by the FBI and Chicago PD. One reason Hampton was considered so dangerous was his role in leading and creating the muliti-racial “Rainbow Coalition”, and uniting black inner-city struggles with working class whites and Puerto Rican gangs. The thread that tied their struggle together was anti-capitalism.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, nearly every mode of organizing with the potential to create fundamental change has been antagonized by the liberal consensus. Effective radical action, by virtue of its threats to existing class structures, has historically faced repression and retribution, both legal and rhetorical. That has been the case with every revolutionary achievement of modern history; look no further than the repression of Mandela and the MK, the socialist labor movements behind the New Deal, the Suffragettes, or any number of anti-colonial struggles.

Today, it remains the case with the liberal response to the Black Lives Matter movement. While putting faith in strictly “by-the-book” peaceful protest and conventional electoralism might provide a sense of comfort, the independent successes of such tactics have been greatly limited. Now, in the popular conception of progress, symbolic victories are celebrated endlessly by hegemonic liberalism (reinforcing an important narrative — that the existing structure is fundamentally just and adaptable), while viable struggles for substantive material change are silenced and discredited. It must be confronted that the means and modes of thought necessary to effectively resist structures of white supremacy will be swiftly rejected by ‘decent’ moderates, as they always have been.