Which is why he’s bringing Obama back!! If he’s not wiretapppppppping your phones, that just means he’s stealing your guns!
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The main problem today, almost everywhere in the world, is that class consciousness is in a stage too low yet to simply talk about arming workers.
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Except that WE as USians already have them. I personally have driven away with armored military vehicles from the National Guard, and I am not especially competent. And they can be made. I am not saying that it is easy, but I am complaining that most people give up before anything has even been tried.
But “who has the most weapons” is, in itself, not great military strategy. Nor is resigning oneself to not having any! National militaries are optimised for engaging other nation’s militaries, or at least causing mayhem to root out groups in faraway foreign lands. Such imperialism presupposes and requires some solidarity and goodwill at home. It is not very helpful when you have dangerously alienated yourself from half of your own populace. You can’t firebomb your own city without destroying your infrastructure and killing both sides. There is no easy “win” - unless you can intimidate them into biding their time indefinitely as the noose tightens. [quote=“Brainspore, post:19, topic:96541”]
Bringing more guns into the community hasn’t exactly been a winning strategy so far.
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Because “guns” don’t fight battles, people do.
It depends upon how you define “get away with”. Do YOU let them off the hook? The right aren’t the only ones who can make lists of troublemakers to deal with. The word of some judge isn’t going to help Officer WhoopAss if a few dozen people string them up.
The real strength of police departments is not their guns, it is their radios. That if you overcome a cop or two, more will be called in their place. Their force comes from their organization. The Panthers were able to hold their own and take their community back when they were also organized, and fell apart when they lost their ability to organize and had to rely upon guns alone.
Sure, of course The State regards police (and military) with a double-standard, that’s their whole strategy. Their real victory comes from getting you, me, the average person to internalize this double-standard ourselves, and resign to letting them get away with it.
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Um, no - those fuckwits are hopefully the only ones stupid enough to ignore the statistics.
Well there you go. It’s not about arming ourselves, it’s about winning over minds—including the minds of the people who have control of all the tanks and whatnot. If most people support the fascists then a handful of leftists with handguns isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference.
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I agree. It’s a common tendency among Maoists for example, Here in Brazil some MST comrades would get quite paranoid about police infiltration.
In the England and Wales session of the CWI (the international organization that the local tendency I’m organized with is a member), they had a case of infiltration, and the bastard even married a comrade. You are bound to get at least a little paranoid. And flattered, as it means you matter?
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If you check that quote from Marx @the_borderer cited, see that he talks about organization in the same sentence. Being organized to be able to use guns in an effective way during struggle, tactically, is the real objective. Take your teacher’s example: he is right, but only if we consider that in order for them to have guns and use it right, they would have to be highly organized and in a solidarity campaign with (most of) the rest of the working class, Only them they could make a show of force that maybe would convince part of the military to rise against their generals and etc.
Bringing more guns into the community hasn’t exactly been a winning strategy so far.
As individuals, no, it hasn’t. But imagine if class consciousness is developed enough that you can put forward the demand for neighborhoods to be self-policed. That’s the seed for self-organization right there.
The question of arming the working class and of self-defense is also a didactic one. If the masses are convinced to use guns when necessary, it means they abandoned petty-bourgeois moralism and is ready to take power by force.
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Artillery more than firebombs:
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I’d rather avoid an empirical test of the question; but I would be curious to know how well, and how long, the US or other fancy-developed-world-military could function if it developed differences of opinion with some of the people who make up its supply chain.
Direct confrontation with a technologically superior adversary(especially if you don’t have a vibrant local tradition of artisanal munition manufacture and irregular warfare) seems likely to go poorly; but one of the downsides of being technologically superior is that just getting replacement hardware on the open market isn’t necessarily an option. In addition to the sometimes fairly limited group of foreign users who you could otherwise tap for spares; some decades of Glorious Free Market Triumph has seriously reduced the amount of logistical and support stuff that the military handles directly, rather than contracting out. Contractors know where their bread is buttered; which promotes cooperation; but unless you go full expropriation on them any that do fail to cooperate are potentially guilty of a variety of contract law violations; but aren’t subject to military jurisdiction directly.
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Weapons, but also unit training and cohesion, logistics, support and chain of command.
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I don’t like this kind of counterfactual arguments… there is no way to know that. And as you said, this is based on the notion that the Germans wouldn’t have taken extreme measures, BUT THEY WERE ALREADY DOING SO anyway.
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Since its topic disappeared, I am posting a link to Mark’s post about liberal gun stores, which could be seen as tangentially relevant to this:
One problem/opportunity I see with this is the usual focus upon weapons ownership, and artefact of commerce. A more progressive approach I think is to push for weapons to be communal rather than privately owned. This allows for going beyond “parity” with the right and establishing something fundamentally different.
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Yes, that’s basically what they did.
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Self care is a must, and led you to a responsible decision. Just wanted to acknowledge that : )
And a losing record in this century when directly involved with guerrilla war.
And the fifty years prior.
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Crowdfund the cache
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Like a lending library.
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Note the casualty figures:
Peasant militias do not beat professional soldiers in pitched battles, and guerrilla tactics lose much of their effectiveness when the opposition is willing to annihilate the local population.
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The problem with guerrilla war is of substitutionism. It’;s not about arming the workers anymore, but a clique of enlightened guerrilla fighters detached from the day-to-day of class struggle.
I’m not sure I follow your inference here. My point was mostly a jokey rejoinder on the inability of symmetrical, numerically/logistically superior forces to bring an end to guerilla hostilities in any sort of efficient fashion, not on the character of guerilla/revolutionary forces themselves.
The comment I responded to specifically, from my point of view, is one that represents a typical US citizen’s analytical conception that revolution in this country is Borgian- resistance is futile. Using the capacity of US armed forces as the firmament for the argument negates the role that other social structures play in determining the course of events for any insurrection, reducing the discussion essentially to decontextualized statistics.
From my point of view, this scenario is probable, perhaps likely. But I don’t think it’s a given and depends on a range of factors whose outcomes we can only guess at. Horizontal political organization is crucial, in any event.
As an aside, a friend of mine was once drinking with some fellow travelers in Croatia, and one of them said something to her that I found very interesting. They said something to the effect of, in Croatia, the people have a direct and immediate cultural conception of revolution and because of that are more intimately aware of the capabilities of social solidarity. In the United States, however, because revolution exists primarily as a mythical origin story our cultural conception of revolution is more generally conceived as an isolated historical event, not a continually occurring evolutionary construct. I think this certainly helps buffer the masses at large from adopting revolutionary ideology.
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