Re the armed leftist groups under discussion -- I am not knowledgeable about the various groups mentioned by Jeffrey Masko, and criticized by Louis Proyect. I think both may be conflating a variety of groups that need to be examined individually.
All I know about the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA) comes from a 2018 piece by NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. They seemed to be reasonable folk -- not people who fetishize guns, armed struggle, and armed self-defense. From Goldberg's column: Brad, a 36-year-old math professor, is a founder of the S.R.A.’s North Georgia chapter and a member of the S.R.A.’s central committee. “Some people are scared with what’s going on in the country right now,” he told me. He only recently started carrying a gun, after getting death threats for the socialist organizing he was doing in his small town. “People want to be able to protect themselves,” he said. [snip] The members of the S.R.A. I met were more sober and responsible than I might have inferred from the group’s bullet-strewn Twitter feed. Far from being cosplay revolutionaries, they’ve adopted bylaws banning members from advocating violence, and they have strict rules about carrying weapons at protests. As their bylaws say, they don’t want to be seen as a “militia or anti-fascist action group.” Brad said they try to screen the people who are invited to their monthly range days, weeding out those who seem like “adventurers.” “We don’t want the John Wayne of the left showing up to our range,” he said. Indeed, the S.R.A. comes off more like a wholesome civic organization than a revolutionary underground. It recently became a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, and its members spend a lot of time on mutual aid projects like collecting funds and supplies for hurricane relief. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/opinion/socialist-left-guns-nra-trump.html ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/opinion/socialist-left-guns-nra-trump.html ) On the other hand, the John Brown Gun Club people in Seattle brought their weapons to the "autonomous zone" in Seattle -- they were not democratically designated to "defend" liberated territory -- they took it upon themselves to strut around with weapons and be the "defenders" of an area ostensibly no longer subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. There's a difference between groups of political activists possessing weapons for literal self-defense, and small groups organizing to "demystify" weaponry, engaging in armed civil disobedience, or practicing self-defense by going out with their weapons to confront rightwingers. I think both Masko and Proyect err in lumping them together (though, I'd much rather "err" in Proyect's direction than trumpet Masko's line). -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5289): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5289 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79488065/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
