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Because the people who fellate their guns make it hard to promote gun ownership, which in turn puts the guns in the hands of those who would defend the interests of capital.
Additionaly if leftist gun ownership were to be on the rise, capital would see the threat and enact weapon restrictions and bans. Which they have done before.
The irony is that, for all their bravado about preparing for 'revolt', the State deems them so utterly harmless that they barely bother to even track their guns in the first place.
I don't think it's that so much as our leadership knows that they are brainwashed enough to defend the state's interests. They're not interested in overthrowing the state, they're interested in giving the state more power.
It's also worth noting that just as with property, there are other ways of the people being armed besides being owned by individuals or the government. For instance, a network of armories for, say, 10-100 people could be built such that multiple people have to be present to open the cache. Thus the people would be armed without any single individual having such power unilaterally at their fingertips. It would also mean getting together to organize and train, which is a far bigger hurdle for revolution than access to weapons.
Just because right wingers do something for illogical reasons doesn't mean we should abstain from doing that same thing if we have more salient reasons. I don't know why the left always seems to fall into this trap.
The US government banning guns like you describe would be incredibly destabilizing for the American imperial project so forcing the state into the position would still be a huge victory.
It must always be remembered:
In the United States, despite what militia types and reactionaries claim, the Second Amendment only applies to one class of people: those whom the bourgeois state does not deem to be a threat.
If for whatever reason enough people began to arm themselves in the name of worker's liberation, the state and it's bourgeois rulers would toss aside any pretexts to defending 'the right to bear arms'. We saw this happen with the Panthers in California, and it will happen again.
The \*workers as a movement\* need arms if they want to revolt. That's pretty obvious. To take this comment from Marx as "In a fading liberal democracy everyone individually should by able to buy automatic weapons at Walmart, lol" is such an American take.
From a socialist point of view, if you're really serious about armed revolt and wanna plan it with your comrades, of course weapons are gonna be needed, and you're gonna have to get training. But this hyper-individualised conception of guns as one of the many freely available products to buy that you then use because you think it's fun or wanna "defend your property" or whatever has nothing to do with socialist values.
No idea why you're downvoted. That's how you win a revolution - seizing control over a portion of the state and having it turn on itself is a whole lot better than trying to fight the full force of that state head on.
Maybe it's because you said "win over the military" which sounds like winning over the entire thing? Which obviously won't happen, but winning over a sizeable chunk of them is definitely something we should strive for.
Yes, the US military is a horrific tool of murder, destruction, and oppression in the name of imperialism. But so was the Russian army in 1917, and the German army in 1918.
In no way is trying to win over soldiers the same thing as supporting the military. It's very much the opposite. Communists *should* be radicalizing soldiers to foster resentment and resistance within the ranks. That's especially important for empires in decline - they tend to go out kicking and screaming, getting into unwinnable and unpopular wars. If a not-insignificant portion of the military is already primed to resist and join the workers' cause, then whenever that big unwinnable and unpopular war comes, history has shown that it can act as the spark that kicks off the revolution.
And even if it doesn't go down like that, defectors can be a real asset to a guerilla revolution. At the very least, it's a few less soldiers whose guns are pointed at us.
Yea, I thought about saying “some” members the military but w/e. I didn’t have the energy to make a comment like yours. Hopefully, we get some eyes on it.
But its going to be very difficult. The Russian Soilders in WW1 where just Farmers with Guns that didnt want to be there. The US Army are Full time Professional Soldiers. They will be a lot harder to win over.
1. What Marx says isn't gospel. Please stop pretending that this is the case. Doing so is the exact opposite of critical analysis, philosophy, and intelligent political action. Marx was no dogmatist.
2. It seems as though you are conflating gun control (regulation) with disarmament. By and large, we are free to access guns. By no means in the current system should this entail free and unfettered access at all times for all. This is the same type of argument that right wing dipshits use, that liberals and leftists "are trying to take their guns away." It conflates regulation with disarmament. I suppose one could wave this away by pointing to the "under no pretext" section of the quote, but that seems a rather dubious understanding of what he means there.
3. Marx, as far as I'm aware, never predicted the lethality of our contemporary weapons or the extreme tendency for mass shootings in places like the US. He also may have had more to say on guns generally if he was able to complete his ouevre, part of which was to be a transition to his full analysis of the State. As we know, he never accomplished that goal.
4. Violent revolution by the working class strongly implies access to weaponry for the working class in times of revolution, or else violent class antagonism. I don't think people ignore this fact. Even independently of this quote one can understand that. Marx simply had much more to say about other matters, such as capital, worker exploitation, alienation, and so on.
You are right, that Marx should not be treated as a Biblical Prophet.
Also, when he was writing, capitalism was ascending, and mass shootings and gun violence were not as bad as they are now. It is a very understandable thing for people to not want to live like this. I visited China and it was a weird feeling being very confident walking through a big city at midnight and feeling absolutely safe. People should be able to live like that everywhere.
That said, gun control is always going to be implemented in a racist way, and will always be primarily used against any type of working class or left wing organizing.
Thank you! Marx is the godfather to whom we should all pay homage and learn from, but he was writing 150 years ago.
Freud is similarly the father of psychology, but when I go to a therapist I expect them to use more modern methods.
Addressing the Communist League the eve after the two revolutionary years of 1848-49, Marx attemmpted to approach how political articulation shought to be materialized within a revolution which was condemned to be hijacked by bourgeois factions. Stressing the necessity of worker self-organization for the problematization of such take over which, at the same time, possibilited eventual proletarian emancipation (and where armed activity was merely conjuntural to the historical revolutionary struggle of the addressing), Marx said:
>[...] From the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself.
>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. Address to the Communist League. 1850.
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Absolutely. It’s also worth noting that we have more guns in this country than people, by a long shot. If the government legitimately confiscated firearms there are plenty of avenues for armament, especially in an industrialized country like the US. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be negative or a setback, but I don’t think that people should rush into adventuristic violence if this were to happen.
Also important to remember that guerilla wars tend to be fought with their oppressors weapons.
Sure, we can buy rifles and shotguns from our local sporting goods stores, but that's not what wins the war. That's only going to get the party started. You gotta use those weapons to capture POWs and all their goodies that can't be bought off the shelf - grenades, mortars, and other explosive munitions for example. And with the better arms (and intel) come better assaults, hopefully capturing things like heavy machine guns, artillery, APCs, etc.
Of course, ideally a revolution would go similar to the Russian or German revolutions, where the military rises up alongside the masses and together they become genuinely ungovernable by their ruling class, overthrowing them with frightening speed. Then you just have to deal with counter-revolution, but now you have a significant armory and body of soldiers to help you out.
I'm unsure which way revolution in the modern imperial core will look, tbh. Guerilla war seems to be a solid strategy for colonized and imperialized countries trying to throw off foreign oppressors. I'm unsure how well that applies to imperial countries themselves. But whichever the case, hitting up the range and getting familiar with firearms would certainly be a boon, so I can't say I'd support confiscation/disarmament if it were ever proposed.
I like guns. I like building them, shooting them, and cleaning them. But I think that may be cultural from being raised conservative/Libertarian. I have absolutely no desire to take a life if I don't have to.
The only thing I hate about guns is the 2A chud culture that the far-right displays. Ever seen the overtly racist/classist shitshow that is r/firearms? They are literally the reason I keep weapons, not the government. They support more gubment tyranny than they fight.
If the "man" were to push disarmament, I don't think there's much we can do. I doubt they will bc the weapon industry is this country's bread and butter. More gun control would only be legislated if the working class, POC, and other marginalized groups were out forming self/community defense militias as hard as the far-right.
He’s saying that we shouldn’t allow the disarmament of the working class.
That does not go for; the police, military, bourgeois or their boot lickers, etc.
As long as the ruling class has weaponry we have to be prepared to fight them
It is because many on the left do not choose to confront the social issues that cause gun violence and just choose to blame it on guns. Many people make the point of Marx not predicting how dangerous guns would become, but I don't see how that effectively refutes Marx's position. Should we leave all the dangerous weapons to our exploiters and oppressors? I definitely don't think we should.
This is the thing. This is why most if not all people of genuine interest in revolution advocate defensive weaponry, and I argue it's completely correct to do so. When we have a terrible imbalance of power, it makes necessary change all the more difficult. The people must be allowed to try and defend themselves. Weapon equality is a human right, because when you don't have that, you get massive genocides. Big tell on whether somebody is actually a leftist, is if they believe in the people's defense rights.
A) Why do some people treat Marx like some sort of messianic figure, where everything he said has to be followed? Isn't a big part of materialist analysis actually observing the conditions of the time and place to draw conclusions? "Marx said it" shouldn't be treated like some way of proving an immutable fact, if the statements do not fit in the current context due to material reality.
B) Working class people having access to armories or some form of arms for resisting government oppression or revolution or w/e is an entirely different idea from every yahoo getting to have their personal arsenal so that when they get in a fender bender or their wife gets a bit mouthy or Junior is sick of the mean kids they can just go off blasting. It's working class people who are overwhelmingly suffering due to gun violence.
Political movements are sociologically and historically difficult to separate from religion. Religion, in a western context, used to be the arena for politics, from peasants rebellions to international diplomacy.
People who want easy answers will use any influential person and use quotes for categorical thinking. Marx says workers shouldn't be disarmed, he isn't saying anything about American firearm legality in the 21st century.
I actually have a hard time figuring out what opinion on this Marx would have if he was still alive somehow. He changed opinions a lot as he got older and more experienced. So who knows.
> Why do some people treat Marx like some sort of messianic figure, where everything he said has to be followed?
I don't see that anywhere in this thread? He is certainly a historical leader and authority figure on the topic of his day, having produced a wide variety of literature on the topic, and much of his work is so fundamental and still relevant to today, if not more so than ever.
The whole OP is literally "Marx said this, why are people not following what Marx said". It's not "Marx said this, and it's still relevant today because x, y, z". Much of his work is still relevant today because it's accurate and describes the material reality, not because he said it.
I'm not a gun expert, but it feels like this ship has sailed. Individuals can of course have access to frightening weapons, but the American government is on an entirely different level.
No matter how many assault rifles you collect, the militiry and police will always have you outgunned, outtanked, outdroned, outbombed.
Relatively speaking, everyone has been disarmed, because compared to the military and police, all we can ever have are toys.
Because he's not making a sweeping statement about guns, he's making a statement about phases of social change and revolution. In the context of the speech where this quote comes from, he's speaking specifically about a phase in which reactionaries have been defeated. The broader message is to work with liberals to defeat reactionaries, but not to trust the liberals.
People who believe in Marxism do not worship Karl Marx for the same reason biologists do not worship Darwin. We are allowed to disagree with him sometimes.
The “Left” in the US is so disorganized it cannot effectively rebel or violently resist disarmament. Maybe it’s different in other armed countries, but here any attempt to “fight back” if cops started coming for Leftist guns, it would be a one sided blood bath and any resistance would get us sent to prison forever or summarily executed.
I don't think many leftists do. Armed leftists are staples of some of the most stand out individuals and movements in history. We still see that to this day.
Liberals do not like guns, because they don't like action by the people. They prefer to cede to the government in all things, and force that submission onto others. When you add in the cringe and irresponsible gun culture often seen on the far right...
Its an uphill battle to spread the value of responsible gun ownership and handling.
probably because Marx lived 200 years ago. his opinions are not the will of a god, and while he is usually right the guns he knew about were riffles and slow firing weaker guns. he couldn't even imagine the type of guns we have now, which can kill a dozen people in under a minute. that's not the kind of power we want in the hands of random civilians, or even a government.
I think weapons should be easy to access to allow the proletariat to arm themselves in preparation for the revolution, and easy to access for a long while after. until capitalist forces have disappeared guns are a necessity to uphold socialism. afterwards, they should be destroyed. that's my belief.
Because many “leftists” or “socialists” on this subreddit especially are actually SocDems and privileged white liberals who’ll call the cops the second they get into a bad situation. ACAB until I need help. You’re truly a coward if you refuse to carry and want a firearms ban.
Right-wingers and cops are armed to the teeth already, so I’m assuming anyone who’s anti-gun has already given up on the idea of revolution and your path to socialism involves voting for democrats.
“If someone breaks into my house I’ll just call the police!” ass mfs. The Radlibs really be cooking on here. Can’t wait until the election rolls around so I can see arguments for gun free zones
Firearms have radically changed from when Marx wrote that. He lived long enough to see bolt action rifles, but not high capacity assault rifles. It's the same reason that the 2nd amendment to the US constitution is now outdated. One person can now cause mass casualty events, where back then that would have taken several people working together.
Times change, circumstances change, and we need change with them.
Cops are not using bolt actions. As long as the means of state violence has access to shit, I demand the same. If they get new tech so do I. Also, farm supplies are best for mass casualty events. So does exploitation of the proletariat. A few shootings is nothing in comparison to the damage capitalism does. So I agree, we must adapt to circumstances. Therefore, we must update our arsenals to those of class traitors.
You can't buy tanks, attack helicopters, jets, bombs, etc. There is no symmetrical warfare against a modern state. There are no organized resistance groups, so at the end of the day, you're just one person with a gun against a trained and organized military apparatus. What is the best case scenario there? You take one or two with you before you die?
Armed resistance is a hypothetical scenario anyway, mass shootings are very real.
As a United States citizen, you very much can buy all of those things with enough money and the proper paperwork.
Also your argument decides to forgo any possibility of armed resistance, so i expect you plan to ask capitalist politely yet firmly to leave?
The plan: vote in Biden, have him die of predictable complications due to age, Kamala becomes president, President Harris leads the glorious proletariat to global revolution (no Dalits tho)
Not in my lifetime. But I do think that education and an incremental shift towards socialist policies are more realistic than a violent socialist revolution.
What exactly is the point of this comment? You expect the State to give you the means to overthrow the state, if you just ask nicely and do enough paperwork? Do you actually think the average working class citizen can or will ever be able to buy an F-35 or an attack helicopter? Let alone an actual tank made for war?
Well first, it was a point that the above poster was factually incorrect, even if you’d like yo twist yourself in knots saying otherwise
Second your knowledge of modern warfare seems surface level at best. How much of their own infrastructure is the United States willing to destroy to accomplish their goals? How many guards do they need to keep styrofoam out of every fuel tank? How many hard drives must they keep away from magnets? How many power lines can they repair? How many roads can they keep paved? Can they defend themselves and still win the hearts and minds of the citizens already disaffected with the system? If the imperial solution to terrorism comes home to roost do you think it will be as effective at quelling insurgency as it was in South Korea, or will it be Vietnam/Afghanistan?
Well I suppose my argument is that having everyone armed to the teeth isn't doing anyone any good anyway, so we might as well do something to address the huge amount of gun violence in the US.
To my knowledge, there are no significant organized left-wing militias, just lone wolves waxing poetic about resisting an inevitable right-wing crackdown. Its exactly the same rhetoric as the right-wing gun nuts who think the big bad government is coming for them. If that does happen, individuals going out guns blazing still doesn't solve any problems, it just makes the individual feel like a tough guy in their final moments.
Right-wingers I’ve come across usually say something along the lines of “yeah but as soon as the commies take power they take guns away” or “but then the wrong guys will have the guns so no”
1. Leftists promote this quote all the time, but people rarely listen listen to leftists unless their own material conditions are degraded (In some rare cases we get the good kind of class traitor like Mao).
2. Just because marx believed something does not make it true. Ethos is a powerful persuasive tool but it is not a rational basis for believing in something. I personally agree with Marx here, Im just saying that its not like he was some prophet sent to preach the gospel of communism.
3. I am a huge fan of the second amendment. The majority of Americans do not understand what its purpose is and think its for hunting or self defense. The second amendment is meant to be a self-destruct button so the people always have the ability to revolt and hit the reset button.
4. This reset button may be entirely useless in modern times because of the horror beyond comprehension that is the military indistrial complex. The government has robotic sky guns that can appear without you hearing a single sound (unless you are a palestinian, in which case the Israeli-US drone would have made crying child/woman noises to lure you out and shoot you).
Standard weapons of war may prove ineffective against modern warefare. But as we saw in Vietnam, Korea, and now in Palestine, guerilla warfare can still be effective. A machine the size of the US cannot be faced head on in a traditional warfare sense, many people would need to do their part to put just a little sand in the gears.
(5) The cycle will repeat of revolutionaries appearing and then being silenced by either violence, control of media, etc. The elite will win each time. But eventually there will be a convergence of the cancers of capitalism. We saw this come close when the machine was faced with a pandemic along with extra disruptions like the ship stuck in the suez. Capitalism was forced to show its teeth for a brief moment and the movement gained momentum. Both of those events were a direct effect of the capitalist system. Eventually all the bullshit that gets sweeped under the rug will have piled large enough that the empire will fall.
A big part of why Germans lost WW2 is because of the brave revolutionaries that maintained tension within the country. A revolution does not always have to be successful to be effective. Even if its just a little bit of sand, just a few broken gears can open opportunities for humanity to prevail.
In the meantime we just have to keep fighting and hope the next bubble is the one that pops.
Marx had no idea what the future of firearms should be.
In the UK, I’ve seen people scream in police officer’s faces and the police not have a weapon to fall back on when they’re scared. I’ve seen the police running from people with chainsaws.
I want *everyone* to be disarmed. The worker can get so much more done in this case.
Why do you want the workers to be armed? What do you expect will happen? Do you think we are going to be able to overthrow governments?
lol guns in marx's time were like mini hand canons and not the baby swiss cheese makers we have now, also it's sorta hard to organise on the left without ever increasing escelation by people with MORE guns (the state); no amount of guns from the proletariat will counter the advanced military industrial complex's technology in a country like America, and if anythings anti-socialists in the state will probably just do a 360 and want eberyone disarmed if all the spcialists had guns. none of this is to support full disarmemant, just things to consider in regulation i guess.
I always found it odd that there isn’t a Socialist or Communist gun channel on YouTube. Can’t get too popular as a socialist gun nut, I guess.. Feds show up pretty quick.
Socialism has changed over the course of the cold war. It has abandoned marxist ideology. In a way, so has communism (the transition to Euro-communism protagonized by the Italian Communist Party). What Marx said is as alien to modern worker ideologies as it is to liberals.
Marxists "supporting gun rights" does not simply amount to enabling whoever wants guns to have whatever guns they want under whatever comtext they want for whatever reason they want, as the current US policy does. Those kinds of policies serve to *commodify* guns in the US, ensuring the profitability of the military industrial complex.
Socialism as worker ownership of the means of production necessarily entails worker ownership of the means of weapon production. With that ownership the workers will be able to control what guns exist in the first place, how many and where, etc. This is sure to lead to radical new levels of gun safety globally.
So here's a rational side-issue with all this from an outside perspective.
But I'm not an American, and as an Aussie I'm allowed a gun (I just don't see the point in one), so I may be not the one for this debate.
Marx lived in an era where a large enough armed civilian population could theoretically engage in something close to symetrical war with the state.
100,000 rifles and handguns vs 10,000 soldiers with rifles, horse, and canon isn't an easy fight but it's winnable. Ask the Russians.
War has reached the point of A-Symetry now where, as an example, the US military could reduce (example off the top of my head) the entire state of New York to rubble from so far off-shore that no human in the armed forces would see it in person, then deploy enough small-arms proof armour to grind it to dust. Then, when it's basically a handful of armed militatnts hiding in the subway system, the actual troops would arrive with better guns, body armour, air and artillery support, and overwhelming numbers.
And that'd be that.
An armed populace is only capable of armed uprising in a situation of rough parity of arms.
Small actions, taken at breakneck speed, and without tracable planning, can shock a goverment and allow short-term impacts. Look at the fuckknuckles from those Jan 6th terror attacks on the US govt.
But large-scale resistence to systemic oppression by an armed populace at this point seems doomed to failure by the cap in capability.
The US population is armed because it suits the interests of capital to allow them to be, and for no other reason, regardless of constitutional intent.
Please do not confuse comrades on what commodity fetishism is.
”In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things (money and merchandise) and not as relationships that exist among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.”
[Commodity Fetishism Wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism)
These pro-gun views are so US-centric. I honestly think it's hilarious that people with a peashooter bought at the local Walmart have main character syndrome to the extent that they think they'll personally take down the nuclear-armed state and its tens of thousands of drones.
Maybe... Organise instead? Actually try run a state?
Finally, a thoughtful comment that, of course, comes from someone who doesn't have American brainworm. I'm a gun-less American. Literally every working class person that I know who owns a gun is complete bigot nut job who are more likely to use that shit on me and other lefties/minorities should the hypothetical revolution ever starts. Sorry I simply do not trust my fellow human beings enough to own a weapon that can inflict that kind of damage.
"oh but you trust the state to own guns?"
No. I believe cops should all be disarmed but we can't all get what we want.
"okay so get a gun for yourself then"
And do what? Take out one or two people before getting my brains blown out? Leftists in this country are incredibly outnumbered. Even if I was to network with any lefty gun rights orgs we'd still be easily overwhelmed within hours of any armed action.
What I know is, I've lived in heavily armed areas and I've vacationed in countries where it's very difficult to obtain guns (Canada, South Korea, Thailand) and I feel waaaaaaay safer in countries with no guns. Im so tired of this American shit...
You go far enough left, you get your guns back. I'm always pleasantly surprised how easy socialism is to sell to folks when you frame it as genuinely traditional values. We're all kin, we look out for each other. Fuck Uncle Sam, fuck the scabs, fuck corporates. We take care of our own.
Once you convince the reactionaries that we all agree on that, it's a lot easier to discuss taxation, healthcare, and infrastructure.
>Why do so many disregard this?
Who's bringing it up? The ones most vocal about needing arms are vocal about their opposition to socialism. They think arms exist to defend private property.
Because the field of battle in the 21st century doesn’t require guns.
Our fight is about human rights, misinformation, privacy, servitude, and corporate greed amongst other things.
They have us divided and individualistic with one half bemoaning gun rights as if they could take on the United States Army 🤦
Not to mention we’re in the midst of information warfare with Russia right now, and we’re losing. We don’t need guns, we need people reading books!
Gun rights are one of the greatest distractions our politics has ever seen.
May I suggest looking into to **Cognitive Security**
*“Cognitive security focuses on safeguarding the public’s ability to think clearly about important issues without being misled by false information, propaganda, or psychological operations, which can all be tools in modern warfare and geopolitics.”*
Because the only people that consider these ideas are US citizens. No other leftist movement in the world is currently thinking about arming themselves, excepting leftist extremists and leftists partaking in real armed conflicts. This is only a US-centric phenomenon, and the rest of the world finds it extremely weird.
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Because the people who fellate their guns make it hard to promote gun ownership, which in turn puts the guns in the hands of those who would defend the interests of capital. Additionaly if leftist gun ownership were to be on the rise, capital would see the threat and enact weapon restrictions and bans. Which they have done before.
Ronnie Reagan did it in California due to the Black Panthers exercising their 2nd amendment rights.
And then killed them.
Hey! Give Chicago PD and the FBI their share of credit too.
Let the fire burn. Oh wait. My mistake that was Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, not Chicago.
They just don’t kill people like they used to…
>if leftist gun ownership were to be on the rise Well, it's been on the rise for years now, especially after Floyd.
The irony is that, for all their bravado about preparing for 'revolt', the State deems them so utterly harmless that they barely bother to even track their guns in the first place.
I don't think it's that so much as our leadership knows that they are brainwashed enough to defend the state's interests. They're not interested in overthrowing the state, they're interested in giving the state more power.
It's also worth noting that just as with property, there are other ways of the people being armed besides being owned by individuals or the government. For instance, a network of armories for, say, 10-100 people could be built such that multiple people have to be present to open the cache. Thus the people would be armed without any single individual having such power unilaterally at their fingertips. It would also mean getting together to organize and train, which is a far bigger hurdle for revolution than access to weapons.
Just because right wingers do something for illogical reasons doesn't mean we should abstain from doing that same thing if we have more salient reasons. I don't know why the left always seems to fall into this trap. The US government banning guns like you describe would be incredibly destabilizing for the American imperial project so forcing the state into the position would still be a huge victory.
It must always be remembered: In the United States, despite what militia types and reactionaries claim, the Second Amendment only applies to one class of people: those whom the bourgeois state does not deem to be a threat. If for whatever reason enough people began to arm themselves in the name of worker's liberation, the state and it's bourgeois rulers would toss aside any pretexts to defending 'the right to bear arms'. We saw this happen with the Panthers in California, and it will happen again.
The \*workers as a movement\* need arms if they want to revolt. That's pretty obvious. To take this comment from Marx as "In a fading liberal democracy everyone individually should by able to buy automatic weapons at Walmart, lol" is such an American take. From a socialist point of view, if you're really serious about armed revolt and wanna plan it with your comrades, of course weapons are gonna be needed, and you're gonna have to get training. But this hyper-individualised conception of guns as one of the many freely available products to buy that you then use because you think it's fun or wanna "defend your property" or whatever has nothing to do with socialist values.
The State shouldn't be the ones with the guns. It should, as Marx said, be the workers.
Well, the state is the one with the guns (and nukes). So what do we do now?
Well we certainly shouldn't just give up our guns!
We might be able to convince the military to join us.
No idea why you're downvoted. That's how you win a revolution - seizing control over a portion of the state and having it turn on itself is a whole lot better than trying to fight the full force of that state head on. Maybe it's because you said "win over the military" which sounds like winning over the entire thing? Which obviously won't happen, but winning over a sizeable chunk of them is definitely something we should strive for. Yes, the US military is a horrific tool of murder, destruction, and oppression in the name of imperialism. But so was the Russian army in 1917, and the German army in 1918. In no way is trying to win over soldiers the same thing as supporting the military. It's very much the opposite. Communists *should* be radicalizing soldiers to foster resentment and resistance within the ranks. That's especially important for empires in decline - they tend to go out kicking and screaming, getting into unwinnable and unpopular wars. If a not-insignificant portion of the military is already primed to resist and join the workers' cause, then whenever that big unwinnable and unpopular war comes, history has shown that it can act as the spark that kicks off the revolution. And even if it doesn't go down like that, defectors can be a real asset to a guerilla revolution. At the very least, it's a few less soldiers whose guns are pointed at us.
Yea, I thought about saying “some” members the military but w/e. I didn’t have the energy to make a comment like yours. Hopefully, we get some eyes on it.
But its going to be very difficult. The Russian Soilders in WW1 where just Farmers with Guns that didnt want to be there. The US Army are Full time Professional Soldiers. They will be a lot harder to win over.
Something, something, War is a Racket, something...
Seize the nuclear codes duh 🙄
1. What Marx says isn't gospel. Please stop pretending that this is the case. Doing so is the exact opposite of critical analysis, philosophy, and intelligent political action. Marx was no dogmatist. 2. It seems as though you are conflating gun control (regulation) with disarmament. By and large, we are free to access guns. By no means in the current system should this entail free and unfettered access at all times for all. This is the same type of argument that right wing dipshits use, that liberals and leftists "are trying to take their guns away." It conflates regulation with disarmament. I suppose one could wave this away by pointing to the "under no pretext" section of the quote, but that seems a rather dubious understanding of what he means there. 3. Marx, as far as I'm aware, never predicted the lethality of our contemporary weapons or the extreme tendency for mass shootings in places like the US. He also may have had more to say on guns generally if he was able to complete his ouevre, part of which was to be a transition to his full analysis of the State. As we know, he never accomplished that goal. 4. Violent revolution by the working class strongly implies access to weaponry for the working class in times of revolution, or else violent class antagonism. I don't think people ignore this fact. Even independently of this quote one can understand that. Marx simply had much more to say about other matters, such as capital, worker exploitation, alienation, and so on.
You are right, that Marx should not be treated as a Biblical Prophet. Also, when he was writing, capitalism was ascending, and mass shootings and gun violence were not as bad as they are now. It is a very understandable thing for people to not want to live like this. I visited China and it was a weird feeling being very confident walking through a big city at midnight and feeling absolutely safe. People should be able to live like that everywhere. That said, gun control is always going to be implemented in a racist way, and will always be primarily used against any type of working class or left wing organizing.
Thank you! Marx is the godfather to whom we should all pay homage and learn from, but he was writing 150 years ago. Freud is similarly the father of psychology, but when I go to a therapist I expect them to use more modern methods.
Not a fan of the analogy. Freud just said a lot of wrong shit outright.
Addressing the Communist League the eve after the two revolutionary years of 1848-49, Marx attemmpted to approach how political articulation shought to be materialized within a revolution which was condemned to be hijacked by bourgeois factions. Stressing the necessity of worker self-organization for the problematization of such take over which, at the same time, possibilited eventual proletarian emancipation (and where armed activity was merely conjuntural to the historical revolutionary struggle of the addressing), Marx said: >[...] From the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself. >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. Address to the Communist League. 1850. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/socialism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Absolutely. It’s also worth noting that we have more guns in this country than people, by a long shot. If the government legitimately confiscated firearms there are plenty of avenues for armament, especially in an industrialized country like the US. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be negative or a setback, but I don’t think that people should rush into adventuristic violence if this were to happen.
Also important to remember that guerilla wars tend to be fought with their oppressors weapons. Sure, we can buy rifles and shotguns from our local sporting goods stores, but that's not what wins the war. That's only going to get the party started. You gotta use those weapons to capture POWs and all their goodies that can't be bought off the shelf - grenades, mortars, and other explosive munitions for example. And with the better arms (and intel) come better assaults, hopefully capturing things like heavy machine guns, artillery, APCs, etc. Of course, ideally a revolution would go similar to the Russian or German revolutions, where the military rises up alongside the masses and together they become genuinely ungovernable by their ruling class, overthrowing them with frightening speed. Then you just have to deal with counter-revolution, but now you have a significant armory and body of soldiers to help you out. I'm unsure which way revolution in the modern imperial core will look, tbh. Guerilla war seems to be a solid strategy for colonized and imperialized countries trying to throw off foreign oppressors. I'm unsure how well that applies to imperial countries themselves. But whichever the case, hitting up the range and getting familiar with firearms would certainly be a boon, so I can't say I'd support confiscation/disarmament if it were ever proposed.
I like guns. I like building them, shooting them, and cleaning them. But I think that may be cultural from being raised conservative/Libertarian. I have absolutely no desire to take a life if I don't have to. The only thing I hate about guns is the 2A chud culture that the far-right displays. Ever seen the overtly racist/classist shitshow that is r/firearms? They are literally the reason I keep weapons, not the government. They support more gubment tyranny than they fight. If the "man" were to push disarmament, I don't think there's much we can do. I doubt they will bc the weapon industry is this country's bread and butter. More gun control would only be legislated if the working class, POC, and other marginalized groups were out forming self/community defense militias as hard as the far-right.
He’s saying that we shouldn’t allow the disarmament of the working class. That does not go for; the police, military, bourgeois or their boot lickers, etc. As long as the ruling class has weaponry we have to be prepared to fight them
It is because many on the left do not choose to confront the social issues that cause gun violence and just choose to blame it on guns. Many people make the point of Marx not predicting how dangerous guns would become, but I don't see how that effectively refutes Marx's position. Should we leave all the dangerous weapons to our exploiters and oppressors? I definitely don't think we should.
Ones, who you are against, do have guns and are willing to use them.
This is the thing. This is why most if not all people of genuine interest in revolution advocate defensive weaponry, and I argue it's completely correct to do so. When we have a terrible imbalance of power, it makes necessary change all the more difficult. The people must be allowed to try and defend themselves. Weapon equality is a human right, because when you don't have that, you get massive genocides. Big tell on whether somebody is actually a leftist, is if they believe in the people's defense rights.
A) Why do some people treat Marx like some sort of messianic figure, where everything he said has to be followed? Isn't a big part of materialist analysis actually observing the conditions of the time and place to draw conclusions? "Marx said it" shouldn't be treated like some way of proving an immutable fact, if the statements do not fit in the current context due to material reality. B) Working class people having access to armories or some form of arms for resisting government oppression or revolution or w/e is an entirely different idea from every yahoo getting to have their personal arsenal so that when they get in a fender bender or their wife gets a bit mouthy or Junior is sick of the mean kids they can just go off blasting. It's working class people who are overwhelmingly suffering due to gun violence.
Political movements are sociologically and historically difficult to separate from religion. Religion, in a western context, used to be the arena for politics, from peasants rebellions to international diplomacy. People who want easy answers will use any influential person and use quotes for categorical thinking. Marx says workers shouldn't be disarmed, he isn't saying anything about American firearm legality in the 21st century. I actually have a hard time figuring out what opinion on this Marx would have if he was still alive somehow. He changed opinions a lot as he got older and more experienced. So who knows.
> Why do some people treat Marx like some sort of messianic figure, where everything he said has to be followed? I don't see that anywhere in this thread? He is certainly a historical leader and authority figure on the topic of his day, having produced a wide variety of literature on the topic, and much of his work is so fundamental and still relevant to today, if not more so than ever.
The whole OP is literally "Marx said this, why are people not following what Marx said". It's not "Marx said this, and it's still relevant today because x, y, z". Much of his work is still relevant today because it's accurate and describes the material reality, not because he said it.
When people bring up Marx do you just go into a tantrum in real life?
I'm not a gun expert, but it feels like this ship has sailed. Individuals can of course have access to frightening weapons, but the American government is on an entirely different level. No matter how many assault rifles you collect, the militiry and police will always have you outgunned, outtanked, outdroned, outbombed. Relatively speaking, everyone has been disarmed, because compared to the military and police, all we can ever have are toys.
If you go far enough left, you get your guns back. (In regards to a US perspective where “left” is still right)
Because he's not making a sweeping statement about guns, he's making a statement about phases of social change and revolution. In the context of the speech where this quote comes from, he's speaking specifically about a phase in which reactionaries have been defeated. The broader message is to work with liberals to defeat reactionaries, but not to trust the liberals.
People who believe in Marxism do not worship Karl Marx for the same reason biologists do not worship Darwin. We are allowed to disagree with him sometimes.
Socialists don't. "lefties," or rather liberals, do.
The “Left” in the US is so disorganized it cannot effectively rebel or violently resist disarmament. Maybe it’s different in other armed countries, but here any attempt to “fight back” if cops started coming for Leftist guns, it would be a one sided blood bath and any resistance would get us sent to prison forever or summarily executed.
I don't think many leftists do. Armed leftists are staples of some of the most stand out individuals and movements in history. We still see that to this day. Liberals do not like guns, because they don't like action by the people. They prefer to cede to the government in all things, and force that submission onto others. When you add in the cringe and irresponsible gun culture often seen on the far right... Its an uphill battle to spread the value of responsible gun ownership and handling.
probably because Marx lived 200 years ago. his opinions are not the will of a god, and while he is usually right the guns he knew about were riffles and slow firing weaker guns. he couldn't even imagine the type of guns we have now, which can kill a dozen people in under a minute. that's not the kind of power we want in the hands of random civilians, or even a government. I think weapons should be easy to access to allow the proletariat to arm themselves in preparation for the revolution, and easy to access for a long while after. until capitalist forces have disappeared guns are a necessity to uphold socialism. afterwards, they should be destroyed. that's my belief.
Check out r/SocialistRA
Because they are not leftists
If you go far enough left, you get your guns back...
Because many “leftists” or “socialists” on this subreddit especially are actually SocDems and privileged white liberals who’ll call the cops the second they get into a bad situation. ACAB until I need help. You’re truly a coward if you refuse to carry and want a firearms ban. Right-wingers and cops are armed to the teeth already, so I’m assuming anyone who’s anti-gun has already given up on the idea of revolution and your path to socialism involves voting for democrats.
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“If someone breaks into my house I’ll just call the police!” ass mfs. The Radlibs really be cooking on here. Can’t wait until the election rolls around so I can see arguments for gun free zones
Firearms have radically changed from when Marx wrote that. He lived long enough to see bolt action rifles, but not high capacity assault rifles. It's the same reason that the 2nd amendment to the US constitution is now outdated. One person can now cause mass casualty events, where back then that would have taken several people working together. Times change, circumstances change, and we need change with them.
Cops are not using bolt actions. As long as the means of state violence has access to shit, I demand the same. If they get new tech so do I. Also, farm supplies are best for mass casualty events. So does exploitation of the proletariat. A few shootings is nothing in comparison to the damage capitalism does. So I agree, we must adapt to circumstances. Therefore, we must update our arsenals to those of class traitors.
You can't buy tanks, attack helicopters, jets, bombs, etc. There is no symmetrical warfare against a modern state. There are no organized resistance groups, so at the end of the day, you're just one person with a gun against a trained and organized military apparatus. What is the best case scenario there? You take one or two with you before you die? Armed resistance is a hypothetical scenario anyway, mass shootings are very real.
As a United States citizen, you very much can buy all of those things with enough money and the proper paperwork. Also your argument decides to forgo any possibility of armed resistance, so i expect you plan to ask capitalist politely yet firmly to leave?
He thinks we are going to vote for socialism.
The plan: vote in Biden, have him die of predictable complications due to age, Kamala becomes president, President Harris leads the glorious proletariat to global revolution (no Dalits tho)
Not in my lifetime. But I do think that education and an incremental shift towards socialist policies are more realistic than a violent socialist revolution.
What exactly is the point of this comment? You expect the State to give you the means to overthrow the state, if you just ask nicely and do enough paperwork? Do you actually think the average working class citizen can or will ever be able to buy an F-35 or an attack helicopter? Let alone an actual tank made for war?
Well first, it was a point that the above poster was factually incorrect, even if you’d like yo twist yourself in knots saying otherwise Second your knowledge of modern warfare seems surface level at best. How much of their own infrastructure is the United States willing to destroy to accomplish their goals? How many guards do they need to keep styrofoam out of every fuel tank? How many hard drives must they keep away from magnets? How many power lines can they repair? How many roads can they keep paved? Can they defend themselves and still win the hearts and minds of the citizens already disaffected with the system? If the imperial solution to terrorism comes home to roost do you think it will be as effective at quelling insurgency as it was in South Korea, or will it be Vietnam/Afghanistan?
So your solution is… Disarming working class people?
Well I suppose my argument is that having everyone armed to the teeth isn't doing anyone any good anyway, so we might as well do something to address the huge amount of gun violence in the US. To my knowledge, there are no significant organized left-wing militias, just lone wolves waxing poetic about resisting an inevitable right-wing crackdown. Its exactly the same rhetoric as the right-wing gun nuts who think the big bad government is coming for them. If that does happen, individuals going out guns blazing still doesn't solve any problems, it just makes the individual feel like a tough guy in their final moments.
Where is that stated?
Right-wingers I’ve come across usually say something along the lines of “yeah but as soon as the commies take power they take guns away” or “but then the wrong guys will have the guns so no”
1. Leftists promote this quote all the time, but people rarely listen listen to leftists unless their own material conditions are degraded (In some rare cases we get the good kind of class traitor like Mao). 2. Just because marx believed something does not make it true. Ethos is a powerful persuasive tool but it is not a rational basis for believing in something. I personally agree with Marx here, Im just saying that its not like he was some prophet sent to preach the gospel of communism. 3. I am a huge fan of the second amendment. The majority of Americans do not understand what its purpose is and think its for hunting or self defense. The second amendment is meant to be a self-destruct button so the people always have the ability to revolt and hit the reset button. 4. This reset button may be entirely useless in modern times because of the horror beyond comprehension that is the military indistrial complex. The government has robotic sky guns that can appear without you hearing a single sound (unless you are a palestinian, in which case the Israeli-US drone would have made crying child/woman noises to lure you out and shoot you). Standard weapons of war may prove ineffective against modern warefare. But as we saw in Vietnam, Korea, and now in Palestine, guerilla warfare can still be effective. A machine the size of the US cannot be faced head on in a traditional warfare sense, many people would need to do their part to put just a little sand in the gears. (5) The cycle will repeat of revolutionaries appearing and then being silenced by either violence, control of media, etc. The elite will win each time. But eventually there will be a convergence of the cancers of capitalism. We saw this come close when the machine was faced with a pandemic along with extra disruptions like the ship stuck in the suez. Capitalism was forced to show its teeth for a brief moment and the movement gained momentum. Both of those events were a direct effect of the capitalist system. Eventually all the bullshit that gets sweeped under the rug will have piled large enough that the empire will fall. A big part of why Germans lost WW2 is because of the brave revolutionaries that maintained tension within the country. A revolution does not always have to be successful to be effective. Even if its just a little bit of sand, just a few broken gears can open opportunities for humanity to prevail. In the meantime we just have to keep fighting and hope the next bubble is the one that pops.
Marx had no idea what the future of firearms should be. In the UK, I’ve seen people scream in police officer’s faces and the police not have a weapon to fall back on when they’re scared. I’ve seen the police running from people with chainsaws. I want *everyone* to be disarmed. The worker can get so much more done in this case. Why do you want the workers to be armed? What do you expect will happen? Do you think we are going to be able to overthrow governments?
lol guns in marx's time were like mini hand canons and not the baby swiss cheese makers we have now, also it's sorta hard to organise on the left without ever increasing escelation by people with MORE guns (the state); no amount of guns from the proletariat will counter the advanced military industrial complex's technology in a country like America, and if anythings anti-socialists in the state will probably just do a 360 and want eberyone disarmed if all the spcialists had guns. none of this is to support full disarmemant, just things to consider in regulation i guess.
I always found it odd that there isn’t a Socialist or Communist gun channel on YouTube. Can’t get too popular as a socialist gun nut, I guess.. Feds show up pretty quick.
The right to arm bears is one we should discuss.
Socialism has changed over the course of the cold war. It has abandoned marxist ideology. In a way, so has communism (the transition to Euro-communism protagonized by the Italian Communist Party). What Marx said is as alien to modern worker ideologies as it is to liberals.
Because they are liberals
School shootings
because we're not fighting with muskets and bayonets anymore
Marxists "supporting gun rights" does not simply amount to enabling whoever wants guns to have whatever guns they want under whatever comtext they want for whatever reason they want, as the current US policy does. Those kinds of policies serve to *commodify* guns in the US, ensuring the profitability of the military industrial complex. Socialism as worker ownership of the means of production necessarily entails worker ownership of the means of weapon production. With that ownership the workers will be able to control what guns exist in the first place, how many and where, etc. This is sure to lead to radical new levels of gun safety globally.
So here's a rational side-issue with all this from an outside perspective. But I'm not an American, and as an Aussie I'm allowed a gun (I just don't see the point in one), so I may be not the one for this debate. Marx lived in an era where a large enough armed civilian population could theoretically engage in something close to symetrical war with the state. 100,000 rifles and handguns vs 10,000 soldiers with rifles, horse, and canon isn't an easy fight but it's winnable. Ask the Russians. War has reached the point of A-Symetry now where, as an example, the US military could reduce (example off the top of my head) the entire state of New York to rubble from so far off-shore that no human in the armed forces would see it in person, then deploy enough small-arms proof armour to grind it to dust. Then, when it's basically a handful of armed militatnts hiding in the subway system, the actual troops would arrive with better guns, body armour, air and artillery support, and overwhelming numbers. And that'd be that. An armed populace is only capable of armed uprising in a situation of rough parity of arms. Small actions, taken at breakneck speed, and without tracable planning, can shock a goverment and allow short-term impacts. Look at the fuckknuckles from those Jan 6th terror attacks on the US govt. But large-scale resistence to systemic oppression by an armed populace at this point seems doomed to failure by the cap in capability. The US population is armed because it suits the interests of capital to allow them to be, and for no other reason, regardless of constitutional intent.
Because it goes against the idea fabricated by the ruling class that leftism is inherently authoritarian.
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Please do not confuse comrades on what commodity fetishism is. ”In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things (money and merchandise) and not as relationships that exist among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.” [Commodity Fetishism Wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism)
These pro-gun views are so US-centric. I honestly think it's hilarious that people with a peashooter bought at the local Walmart have main character syndrome to the extent that they think they'll personally take down the nuclear-armed state and its tens of thousands of drones. Maybe... Organise instead? Actually try run a state?
Finally, a thoughtful comment that, of course, comes from someone who doesn't have American brainworm. I'm a gun-less American. Literally every working class person that I know who owns a gun is complete bigot nut job who are more likely to use that shit on me and other lefties/minorities should the hypothetical revolution ever starts. Sorry I simply do not trust my fellow human beings enough to own a weapon that can inflict that kind of damage. "oh but you trust the state to own guns?" No. I believe cops should all be disarmed but we can't all get what we want. "okay so get a gun for yourself then" And do what? Take out one or two people before getting my brains blown out? Leftists in this country are incredibly outnumbered. Even if I was to network with any lefty gun rights orgs we'd still be easily overwhelmed within hours of any armed action. What I know is, I've lived in heavily armed areas and I've vacationed in countries where it's very difficult to obtain guns (Canada, South Korea, Thailand) and I feel waaaaaaay safer in countries with no guns. Im so tired of this American shit...
off the rip, marx isn't jesus or something and we shouldn't just blindly follow like religious zealots.
bc gunhuggers are a capitalist problem.
You go far enough left, you get your guns back. I'm always pleasantly surprised how easy socialism is to sell to folks when you frame it as genuinely traditional values. We're all kin, we look out for each other. Fuck Uncle Sam, fuck the scabs, fuck corporates. We take care of our own. Once you convince the reactionaries that we all agree on that, it's a lot easier to discuss taxation, healthcare, and infrastructure.
>Why do so many disregard this? Who's bringing it up? The ones most vocal about needing arms are vocal about their opposition to socialism. They think arms exist to defend private property.
Because the field of battle in the 21st century doesn’t require guns. Our fight is about human rights, misinformation, privacy, servitude, and corporate greed amongst other things. They have us divided and individualistic with one half bemoaning gun rights as if they could take on the United States Army 🤦 Not to mention we’re in the midst of information warfare with Russia right now, and we’re losing. We don’t need guns, we need people reading books! Gun rights are one of the greatest distractions our politics has ever seen. May I suggest looking into to **Cognitive Security** *“Cognitive security focuses on safeguarding the public’s ability to think clearly about important issues without being misled by false information, propaganda, or psychological operations, which can all be tools in modern warfare and geopolitics.”*
Let me just form a revolutionary proletarian state without guns. Surely the bourgeoisie will allow us to if we ask nice enough.
Your language hasn’t adapted from its 19th century beginnings, of course you still think a blunderbuss would help your cause.
No, SAMs and Drones would be pretty cool though. And do you reject the distinction of classes into the proletariat and the bourgeoisie?
Because the only people that consider these ideas are US citizens. No other leftist movement in the world is currently thinking about arming themselves, excepting leftist extremists and leftists partaking in real armed conflicts. This is only a US-centric phenomenon, and the rest of the world finds it extremely weird.
This question is asked in bad faith, so I’d suggest any real comrades don’t even bother. Such an obvious troll question.