Hello, I just wanted to ask what us communists should think of gun rights, both under capitalism and socialism. Is it a important part of the movement today, why or why not? Tell me what you think of guns and what must happen with them?
Hello, I just wanted to ask what us communists should think of gun rights, both under capitalism and socialism. Is it a important part of the movement today, why or why not? Tell me what you think of guns and what must happen with them?
Law is class power, so we have to ask why the ruling class of the US wants its working class to be armed.
Settlers had to be deputized to tame the frontier, slave owners had to be armed to control the slaves, whites had to be armed to control the freed slaves, and as the US ramped up its imperialist adventurism the recruits had to be made comfortable with guns and inured to violence from the cradle to be effective troops. Kids who grow up with colonial occupation troops patrolling their streets and dodging bullets in the hallway at school become fucked up adults that volunteer to join the police or the army.
Then there’s the effects of gun violence on society, which are all useful to the ruling class. Like Operation Gladio, gun rights act as part of a strategy of tension to make the population receptive to ever more heavily armed police and justify ever more repressive surveillance. Assassination attempts and school shootings become bloody shirts they can wave to get whatever they want.
Not that I am trying to downplay the need for an armed and militant workers’ movement, I’m merely contextualizing it. Perhaps we can use the laws to our advantage, but we can’t lose sight on why the law is the way it is.
Best answer so far.
On the other hand, it is also quite a bad sign that the US ruling class allows the US proletariat to be armed to the extent that it is. It shows that they don’t see the US proletariat, in its current state, as any sort of a threat to their class. And in truth, the US proletariat are not a threat in the present; at most they do a bit of adventurism and let off a bit steam in spontaneous movements.
It’s not the whole US working class that the ruling class is afraid of, because settler-colonialism and imperialism have muddied their class character with the redistribution of land and superprofits. It’s only afraid of its lower caste workers, the ones that don’t get redistribution of land and wealth - nothing to lose but their chains.
That’s why the ruling class starts reacting when minorities arm themselves. Reagan passed gun control laws to disarm the Black Panthers, and today we’re seeing the ATF attacking queer gun clubs and trying to ban trans people from owning guns.
But the land ran out a while ago, and now the superprofits are in decline. Eventually, there won’t really be an upper caste of workers that can be trusted, and when we reach that point we’ll see a rapid turn against gun rights by the whole ruling class.
Anecdotal; my friend owns a gun range in a medium sized, mid-Western US city, and he says that almost a quarter of his clientele now consists of black women. I’m sure that the 2nd Amendment writers didn’t envision that happening.