Aren't leftists meant to be pro-gun? I thought that was what distinguished them from plain old liberals. That they wanted to arm the proletariat and never disarm them. So why pretend the lasg decade or so of gun discourse hasn't happened and go back to 2012 discourse?
>>2473967>aren't the left wing of capital pro-gun?It depends if its profitable. Unless you're asking if the real movement against the present state of affairs is pro-gun? If you're asking that then you haven't read Marx:
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”
>>2473967Perhaps the problem is that the U.S. is a highly capitalistic society based on individual self-interest. There is no sympathy for losers. If you're woke, you're a loser in 2025 because you lost the election, but the problem is – did these disagreements actually disappear? Did the people who oppose Charlie Kirk go away? Actually disagreements are inevitable so there needs to be basis for consensus and mutual trust. That has been weakened a lot. We're finding out that it doesn't work very well to be like "suck it, losers."
The state apparatus is also inherently violent. At the same time, the Constitution provides people with the tools to combat state violence, and perhaps this person identified Kirk with the American state. Perhaps the solution would be to arm Americans with small nuclear grenades to ensure mutually assured destruction. If everyone was equipped with a small nuclear bomb that triggers the moment you die, the blast wave would have also killed the shooter.
>>2473967>>2474330>>2474335I will have to again leave a quote from Lenin here for those who are confused by clinging to the superstitions of the bourgeois state of not seeing the state as an instrument of one class to oppress another class and therefore are targets to be manipulated by opportunists:
<Secondly, civil war is just as much a war as any other. He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle. That has been confirmed by every great revolution. To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.
<Thirdly, the victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all wars in general. On the contrary, it presupposes wars. The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise under commodity production. From this it follows irrefutably that socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will for some time remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois. This is bound to create not only friction, but a direct attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the socialist state’s victorious proletariat. In such cases, a war on our part would be a legitimate and just war. It would be a war for socialism, for the liberation of other nations from the bourgeoisie. Engels was perfectly right when, in his letter to Kautsky of September 12, 1882, he clearly stated that it was possible for already victorious socialism to wage “defensive wars”. What he had in mind was defense of the victorious proletariat against the bourgeoisie of other countries.
<Only after we have overthrown, finally vanquished and expropriated the bourgeoisie of the whole world, and not merely in one country, will wars become impossible. And from a scientific point of view it would be utterly wrong—and utterly unrevolutionary—for us to evade or gloss over the most important things: crushing the resistance of the bourgeoisie—the most difficult task, and one demanding the greatest amount of fighting, in the transition to socialism. The “social” parsons and opportunists are always ready to build dreams of future peaceful socialism. But the very thing that distinguishes them from revolutionary Social-Democrats is that they refuse to think about and reflect on the fierce class struggle and class wars needed to achieve that beautiful future.[…]
<An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot, unless we have become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, forget that we are living in a class society from which there is no way out, nor can there be, save through the class struggle. In every class society, whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, wage-labor, the oppressor class is always armed. Not only the modern standing army, but even the modern militia—and even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, Switzerland, for instance—represent the bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat. That is such an elementary truth that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it. Suffice it to point to the use of troops against strikers in all capitalist countries.
<A bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat is one of the biggest fundamental and cardinal facts of modern capitalist society. And in face of this fact, revolutionary Social-Democrats are urged to “demand” “disarmament”! That is tantamount of complete abandonment of the class-struggle point of view, to renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap. And the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before.
<If the present war rouses among the reactionary Christian socialists, among the whimpering petty bourgeoisie, only horror and fright, only aversion to all use of arms, to bloodshed, death, etc., then we must say: Capitalist society is and has always been horror without end. If this most reactionary of all wars is now preparing for that society an end to horror, we have no reason to fall into despair. But the disarmament “demand”, or more correctly, the dream of disarmament, is, objectively, nothing but an expression of despair at a time when, as everyone can see, the bourgeoisie itself is paving the way for the only legitimate and revolutionary war—civil war against the imperialist bourgeoisie.[…]
<On the question of a militia, we should say: We are not in favor of a bourgeois militia; we are in favor only of a proletarian militia. Therefore, “not a penny, not a man”, not only for a standing army, but even for a bourgeois militia, even in countries like the United States, or Switzerland, Norway, etc. The more so that in the freest republican countries (e.g., Switzerland) we see that the militia is being increasingly Prussianized, particularly in 1907 and 1911, and prostituted by being used against strikers. We can demand popular election of officers, abolition of all military law, equal rights for foreign and native-born workers (a point particularly important for those imperialist states which, like Switzerland, are more and more blatantly exploiting larger numbers of foreign workers, while denying them all rights). Further, we can demand the right of every hundred, say, inhabitants of a given country to form voluntary military-training associations, with free election of instructors paid by the state, etc. Only under these conditions could the proletariat acquire military training for itself and not for its slaveowners; and the need for such training is imperatively dictated by the interests of the proletariat. The Russian revolution showed that every success of the revolutionary movement, even a partial success like the seizure of a certain city, a certain factory town, or winning over a certain section of the army, inevitably compels the victorious proletariat to carry out just such a programme.
<Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1916, The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolutionhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/miliprog/i.htmhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/miliprog/ii.htmhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/miliprog/iii.htm >>2473967>I thought that was what distinguished them from plain old liberals. You are so dumb. What products you purchase or hobbies you follow does not define ones politics.
>>>/QTDDTOT/ - Sage & Report.
Another thought - one notable thing about the gun is that it was the first human invention designed primarily for the purpose of destroying other human beings. Guns offer little practical advantage over bows when it comes to hunting; they're loud, complicated, heavy, dangerous, prone to misfiring, the noise scares away every living creature in the vicinity, etc. Guns were developed primarily for war, for the purpose of destroying human life, not sustaining it. If humans were a peaceful species that did not engage in warfare, we probably wouldn't have even invented guns. In a more intelligent society with a more cohesive understanding of society and its function, people would probably be apalled at the mere idea of humans using technology for such a destructive and illogical purpose.
>>2498979>Guns offer little practical advantage over bows when it comes to huntingI don't like it when people with zero experience with hunting talk about hunting. there are three major benefits to guns
>longer range>easier to hit a moving target>more likely to kill quicklylike yes you're going to spook the other deer in the vicinity. but when the deer you shot with your bow starts running away, so too will the other deer
you also can't fowl with a bow like you can with a shotgun
>>2474273>The US doesn't have a proletariat>>2474335>allowing any random crackhead neo-nazi to buy an assault rifle and gun down a schoolHistorical materialism shows its not random and gun ownership is tied to bourgeois dictatorship of Jeffrey Epstein rape culture guys (women aren't even allowed to fire a warning shot to deter a man lol):
>Zionist Marxists: "We need guns to do genocide of our goy slaves to protect settlers">American Marxists: "We need guns to do genocide of our nonwhite ethnic slaves to protect settlers"DSA socialists supported their fellow settler ally John Fetterman because they think its good that he is a deputized settler colonialist who can legally run around with a shotgun to threaten random black people for "invading" and "terrorizing" his PMC socialist constituents. There's a reason why the anarchists at the CHAZ explicitly called the black children they murdered "terrorists", they are materially the same as their Israeli counterparts who also see a black child and think "I'm being terrorized!!! I need weapons to protect my woke whites only trans community"
>>2474335>>2489340>>2498846>>2498905>>2498979Again I find this anti-marxist tendency for superstition about the concept of the state in many people here who do not realize that the state is an instrument of oppression of one class against another that result from the irreconciliation of social classes by the contradictions of private property between those are owners against other owners and those without property. There is no sensitive law of arms, this is to give the bourgeois state power to prevent workers from arming in a popular militia free from the bourgeoisie that is necessary to start a communist revolution and defend workers' interests outside police control and the bourgeoisie to intensify class struggle.
Remembering that it is only the dictatorship of the proletariat that will form by the popular councils that can disarm the bourgeoisie, landowners, agents of the capitalist superstructure that maintain the bourgeoisie in power, agents of the capitalist state, counterarevolutionaries and all who deny the political domination of the proletariat. Not to mention workers' training for conflict with weapons and defense of an invasion by imperialists it will be necessary for workers if they hope to consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat to socialize the economy that will need expropriations and defense of this collective property of imperialists and sabotagers.
There is no revolution or dictatorship of the proletariat without arming as many workers as possible with weapons, and anyone who denies this is betraying revolutionary socialism for fear of the chaos necessary to intensify the class struggle. Whether the petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat engage in shootings is irrelevant because the proletarian state has not yet been established.
Here is an example of Marx speaking about arming workers against the petty bourgeoisie who will try to consolidate power:
<To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.
<Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1850, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist Leaguehttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm >>2499299Wrong. All countries have proletariat, including Israel and the United States, even the labor aristocracy is only a minority that exists in the workers' movement to weaken it, but they would also win if other workers get more victories fighting their collective interests.
Let's see what Lenin talks about the labor aristocracy and if his explanation fits what you say of resenting against the first world workers clinging to a moralistic view rather than seeing the collective class interest of the proletariat with all the workers of the world in solidarity:
<In a letter to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote: “…The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.” In a letter to Sorge, dated September 21, 1872, Engels informs him that Hales kicked up a big row in the Federal Council of the International and secured a vote of censure on Marx for saying that “the English labour leaders had sold themselves”. Marx wrote to Sorge on August 4, 1874: “As to the urban workers here [in England], it is a pity that the whole pack of leaders did not get into Parliament. This would be the surest way of getting rid of the whole lot.” In a letter to Marx, dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks about “those very worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie.” In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.”
<On December 7, 1889, Engels wrote to Sorge: “The most repulsive thing here [in England] is the bourgeois ‘respectability’, which has grown deep into the bones of the workers…. Even Tom Mann, whom I regard as the best of the lot, is fond of mentioning that he will be lunching with the Lord Mayor. If one compares this with the French, one realises, what a revolution is good for, after all.”[10] In a letter, dated April 19, 1890: “But under the surface the movement [of the working class in England] is going on, is embracing ever wider sections and mostly just among the hitherto stagnant lowest [Engels’s italics] strata. The day is no longer far off when this mass will suddenly find itself, when it will dawn upon it that it itself is this colossal mass in motion.” On March 4, 1891: “The failure of the collapsed Dockers’ Union; the ‘old’ conservative trade unions, rich and therefore cowardly, remain lone on the field….” September 14, 1891: at the Newcastle Trade Union Congress the old unionists, opponents of the eight-hour day, were defeated “and the bourgeois papers recognise the defeat of the bourgeois labour party” (Engels’s italics throughout)….
<That these ideas, which were repeated by Engels over the course of decades, were so expressed by him publicly, in the press, is proved by his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892. Here he speaks of an “aristocracy among the working class”, of a “privileged minority of the workers”, in contradistinction to the “great mass of working people”. “A small, privileged, protected minority” of the working class alone was “permanently benefited” by the privileged position of England in 1848–68, whereas “the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement”…. “With the break-down of that [England’s industrial] monopoly, the English working class will lose that privileged position…” The members of the “new” unions, the unions of the unskilled workers, “had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited ‘respectable’ bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated ‘old unionists’” …. “The so-called workers’ representatives” in England are people “who are forgiven their being members of the working class because they themselves would like to drown their quality of being workers in the ocean of their liberalism…”[…]
<The bourgeoisie of an imperialist “Great” Power can economically bribe the upper strata of “its” workers by spending on this a hundred million or so francs a year, for its superprofits most likely amount to about a thousand million. And how this little sop is divided among the labour ministers, “labour representatives” (remember Engels’s splendid analysis of the term), labour members of War Industries Committees, labour officials, workers belonging to the narrow craft unions, office employees, etc., etc., is a secondary question.[…]
<The last third of the nineteenth century saw the transition to the new, imperialist era. Finance capital not of one, but of several, though very few, Great Powers enjoys a monopoly. (In Japan and Russia the monopoly of military power, vast territories, or special facilities for robbing minority nationalities, China, etc., partly supplements, partly takes the place of, the monopoly of modern, up-to-date finance capital.) This difference explains why England’s monopoly position could remain unchallenged for decades. The monopoly of modern finance capital is being frantically challenged; the era of imperialist wars has begun. It was possible in those days to bribe and corrupt the working class of one country for decades. This is now improbable, if not impossible. But on the other hand, every imperialist “Great” Power can and does bribe smaller strata (than in England in 1848–68) of the “labour aristocracy”. Formerly a “bourgeois labour party”, to use Engels’s remarkably profound expression, could arise only in one country, because it alone enjoyed a monopoly, but, on the other hand, it could exist for a long time. Now a “bourgeois labour party” is inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries; but in view of the desperate struggle they are waging for the division of spoils it is improbable that such a party can prevail for long in a number of countries. For the trusts, the financial oligarchy, high prices, etc., while enabling the bribery of a handful in the top layers, are increasingly oppressing, crushing, ruining and torturing the mass of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat.[…]
<On the economic basis referred to above, the political institutions of modern capitalism—press, parliament associations, congresses etc.—have created political privileges and sops for the respectful, meek, reformist and patriotic office employees and workers, corresponding to the economic privileges and sops. Lucrative and soft jobs in the government or on the war industries committees, in parliament and on diverse committees, on the editorial staffs of “respectable”, legally published newspapers or on the management councils of no less respectable and “bourgeois law-abiding” trade unions—this is the bait by which the imperialist bourgeoisie attracts and rewards the representatives and supporters of the “bourgeois labour parties”.
<One of the most common sophistries of Kautskyism is its reference to the “masses”. We do not want, they say, to break away from the masses and mass organisations! But just think how Engels put the question. In the nineteenth century the “mass organisations” of the English trade unions were on the side of the bourgeois labour party. Marx and Engels did not reconcile themselves to it on this ground; they exposed it. They did not forget, firstly, that the trade union organisations directly embraced a minority of the proletariat. In England then, as in Germany now, not more than one-fifth of the proletariat was organised. No one can seriously think it possible to organise the majority of the proletariat under capitalism. Secondly—and this is the main point—it is not so much a question of the size of an organisation, as of the real, objective significance of its policy: does its policy represent the masses, does it serve them, i.e., does it aim at their liberation from capitalism, or does it represent the interests of the minority, the minority’s reconciliation with capitalism? The latter was true of England in the nineteenth century, and it is true of Germany, etc., now.
<Engels draws a distinction between the “bourgeois labour party” of the old trade unions—the privileged minority—and the “lowest mass”, the real majority, and appeals to the latter, who are not infected by “bourgeois respectability”. This is the essence of Marxist tactics!
<Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.
<The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.
<V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm Unique IPs: 18