• cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
    14·
    2 days ago

    What country are you talking about? Are you talking about a socialist country like China or are you talking about a capitalist dictatorship like the US? Because as always the answer will differ and depend on what kind of society you are talking about. One in which the state is hostile to the working class or one in which the working class controls the state? Only in one of those does the working class need to be armed independently of the state in order to defend itself from the state (and eventually overthrow it). In the other, the working class is already armed because the workers’s state controls the army and police.

    “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

    But also

    “Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.”

    Also, when the fascists are armed it would be irresponsible for leftist organizations to disarm their own members. Mind however that individual ownership of weapons is not the same as an armed working class. Arming the working class means having weapons in the hands of the organized vanguard of the working class. Without an ideologically disciplined organization you don’t have an armed class, you just have a bunch of random idiots with guns.

    • La Dame d'Azur@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      I mean this as a genuine question and not a gotcha: what if the halls of power are taken over by counter-revolutionaries? e.g. what happened with the Eastern Bloc.

      • the rizzler@lemmygrad.ml
        8·
        2 days ago

        it would be an odd combination for a counterrevolution to be so incompetent as to create the conditions for an armed revolt yet so competent as to be able to destroy the revolution. in other words, i suspect that gun ownership rates will be immaterial as they are in the US today. i don’t have a whole lot of certainty in that, so maybe a comrade familiar with albania could solidify things in one direction or the other? i mention them because, tentatively, it seems to me as though the high gun ownership didn’t stop that particular counterrevolution.

      • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
        7·
        2 days ago

        Civilian gun ownership doesn’t stop counter-revolutions. If the people are motivated and organized enough to mount an armed defense of the revolution then the conditions would not have arisen in the first place to where that defense is necessary. Counter-revolution happens when the accumulation of errors made is so grave that the people are too demoralized to fight the reactionary takeover.

        The Soviet Union didn’t fall because the people lacked weapons. The Soviet army had plenty of weapons, why didn’t they stop it? Why didn’t the security forces? Power doesn’t come from simply “occupying the halls of power”, it comes from the consent of an entire apparatus of state, which in turn rests on having the consent of at least a certain part of the population and the compliance of the rest.

        There is this Chinese documentary that analyzed and summarized the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union that might be interesting for you to watch if you want to understand the conditions that were present in 1991 which made it so that, weapons or no, the population was no longer willing to defend the system. Preventing counter-revolution can only be done by not letting things get to that critical point in the first place.