The death of George Perry Floyd, Jr. on May 25, 2020 was universally condemned by American society. Citizens of all races, colors, and creeds watched the video and saw a problem in need of redress. Millions of citizens across the entire country marched peacefully to petition our government to address something. The challenge was: how to reform the police to restore to the mindset of “to protect and to serve” when some portion of officers seem to have come to view their role as “to oppress and to rule”?

Such peaceful protests continue today; however, Marxist political organizations—such as Antifa, BLM, and the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)—operate alongside the movement for police reform and seek to create the appearance that the millions of peaceful protestors in the streets support their radical agenda to transform America into a socialist state.

The Marxist roots of Antifa, short for Antifaschisitsche Aktion, have previously been documented and explained succinctly in these pages. Rather than recapitulate those arguments, I will focus my attention on BLM’s and M4BL’s relationship to Marxism.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

In the first instance it must be said: the observation that BLM and M4BL are Marxist does not imply that every person who says “black lives matter,” or places a sign in the window of their shop, or tweets a hashtag, is a socialist. That would be to wrongly conflate the universal recognition and vocalization of the truth that black lives do matter with support for the shared political agenda of BLM and M4BL, a political agenda of which most people are ignorant.

While BLM brings the activists, M4BL formulates the policy, and it is precisely when one examines BLM’s guiding principles and the M4BL’s policy proposals that the Marxist character of these organizations becomes apparent.

For example: Marx and Engels’s call to abolish the family in the Manifesto of the Communist Party is clearly an antecedent to BLM’s commitment “to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, and especially ‘our’ children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.”

This Communist antecedent is likewise seen in M4BL’s demand for “A progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state, and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth,” as well as its commitment to “an end to the privatization of education.”

The concept of “democratic control” (which is Democratic Socialists of America-speak for state control) is the root of M4BL proposals such as the nationalization of land ownership and management:

A right to restored land, clean air, clean water and housing and an end to the exploitative privatization of natural resources—including land and water. We seek democratic control over how resources are preserved, used and distributed and do so while honoring and respecting the rights of our Indigenous family.

And yet, one need not rest content with deduction from principles and policies. You can take their word for it.

M4BL explicitly says: “We are anti-capitalist.” As do the three co-founders of BLM—Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. As reported by the New York Post, Cullors explicitly asserted in an interview with Jared Ball of the Real News Network that both she and Garza “are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”

Opal Tometi, the third comrade in the founding trio, was not only photographed with socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro, but penned a lengthy letter of support for him and the socialist revolution he leads, praising the work of Cuban doctors (who are trafficked by the Cuban regime) and condemning the “defamation of late President Hugo Chavez [by] labeling him a dictator.”

The observation that BLM and M4BL are Marxist political organizations ought not to be controversial. It is simply a fact. That so many supporters of both react with anger when the observation is made demonstrates that American Marxists understand Marxism does not appeal to the majority of Americans. And in the end, the American ideals of human equality and liberty, which transcend race and serve as a ground both for our common citizenship and the condemnation of racism, are a bulwark against their totalitarian ambitions.