Democratic Socialists Must Oppose the “Social Liberal” Push For Gun Control
“…any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”- Karl Marx
No man or woman of the genuine left who has carefully thought the issue out can generally oppose citizen firearm ownership or support the preservation or implementation of highly restrictive gun control measures in any society.
Only meaningfully armed groups of citizens can effectively defy violent harassment of democratic socialist educational effort, demonstration, and strike action on the part of state, “organized criminal”, “organized religious fundamentalist”, alt-right, self-described anarchist, and tankie actors.
Only meaningfully armed groups of citizens could through mass nonviolent civil disobedience, and, if they were fired upon or assaulted, justified violent self-defense, convince the oligarchs of societies in which popular elections are not held to surrender power and open the door for popular elections that could provide a pathway to legitimate seizure of power and establishment of socialism by the people. Only meaningfully armed groups of citizens could defy rejection of and violent reaction to electoral expression of democratic socialist consensus.
Only meaningfully armed groups of citizens could see that power, that control and management of the means of production and natural resources, would not by the force of guns and cudgels be centralized in the hands of a dictatorial pseudo-socialist few, of an unaccountable committee or clique, after the old forces of capital were vanquished- only meaningfully armed groups of citizens could dissuade power hungry opportunist revolutionaries from aborting the workers’ republics or, after their successful establishment, degenerating them into unfree states of state capitalism, hierarchy, and general non-democracy.
Yes, firearms are regularly abused by private citizens. Highly restrictive gun control measures do indeed reduce the number of civilian-committed atrocities, from mass shootings to family and spousal murders. Reactionary bourgeois and non-class conscious working class civilians do indeed organize and form militias to either defend capitalist cartels or work toward the establishment of new reactionary regimes. Violence is never a good thing in itself. The fetishization of the spilling of blood and guts extremely common among self-described anarchists and tankies is a disgusting disease of the mind. Blanquist violent revolution is not a democratic and legitimate means of seizing state power or a section of any path toward the establishment of democratic socialism- state power can only be legitimately held by an informed and meaningfully participatory democratic majority of the whole of the people, and thus state power can only be justly seized by an informed majority of the whole of the people through electoral demonstration of informed consensus on the part of the people accompanied by general acknowledgement on the part of the whole of the people and acknowledgement on the part of their elected representatives of the right to recall. Forces of democratic will should only use violence in direct response to violence from violent actors and should never initiate violent exchange.
That all being said, we democratic socialists simply must see that legitimate democratic socialist will could defend itself against reaction, that it could defend itself against those who would attempt to thwart it by force. As strongly preferable as the totally peaceful transition of power is to the alternatives, the simple fact is that a good many of the oligarchs of capital will violently react if the tide begins to turn strongly against them. It is our duty as democratic socialists to see that the meaningfully armed common people of the world (indeed, even those who are as of now totally stymied by reactionary disinformation and those as of yet only the embryonic stage of class consciousness)retain their armaments and those common people who are presently not armed in any meaningful sense defeat gun control measures and attain access to armaments. It’s that simple. Fellow traveling with “social liberals” who call for the confiscation of citizens’ weapons is nothing short of outright betrayal of the dream of the socialist revolution.
-Strom McCallum
