On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 8:40 PM, David B. Shemano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Serious question regarding the Obama remarks regarding guns and religion. I > think it is hard to dispute that there is a general right/left dispute over > gun ownership, but why? Is there something in Marxism that speaks to gun > ownership? Is there a relevance of gun ownership to economic class? I > really have a hard time conceptualizing why there is such a strong > correlation between opposition to gun ownership and other left-wing views. > > David Shemano >
Do you really believe that there is a strong correlation (especially in the USA) between "the Left" and "something in Marxism?" I think you've been reading Bill Krystal's version of reality a bit too long. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/14/lieberman-good-question-t_n_96647.html?page=6 I'm not sure who should find this kind of red baiting more insulting and disorienting: the so-called leftists who have to read it in their so-called liberal rag or people who are actually Marxists and have to put up with what passes for "the Left" in this country. As for gun control, it is probably better to ask why people on the right who defend the second amendment on the grounds that it could help in the case of the government overstepping its bounds are so quick to condemn other people who do this in other countries--and, recently, so slow to actually take up arms to "defend the constitution," as it so obviously has been needed in recent years? Not to say that they SHOULD, but if they were being consistent, the average defender of gun ownership on these grounds would thereby be supportive of revolutionary violence in general? On the other hand, what kind of archaic movement believes that allowing the government to have a gun registry would be bad, but seems to have little qualm with allowing the EXECUTIVE unrestricted access to all your other personal data, allowing them to snoop willy nilly through every phone call, e-mail, or credit transaction, just as easily creating the information database that could be cross-referenced to create such a registry in practice? I mean if they were serious about this constitution thing, they'd call for general defense of privacy, less of a state run military, and the actual distribution of those moronic "terrorist hunting permits" I see on people's bumpers. Instead, they seem content to have Washington types put on some camo once every 4-6 years and act like they know how to kill a duck (or at least shoot old men in the face.) As for "Marxism" on gun control, it would seem that they'd be for it under certain circumstances: controlling the guns that are used to force people to submit to the power of the (capitalist) state. This, of course, has nothing to do with contemporary gun control, which is generally about trying to prevent things like what happened in Virginia a year ago today. Not much explicitly about that kind of "gun control" you mean in the "Marxists.org" archive, but the few mentions of the word "gun" that actually have any significance are more along the lines I mention above--especially in relation to African anti-colonial and US labor rights movements. Obviously these would be bad examples for the average gun owner on the "right" because, in general, they would likely find these uses of guns fairly benign if not correct. From the "Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congress:" "South Africa was conquered by force and is today ruled by force. At moments when white autocracy feels itself threatened, it does not hesitate to use the gun. When the gun is not in use, legal and administrative terror, fear, social and economic pressures, complacency and confusion generated by propaganda and 'education', are the devices brought into play in an attempt to harness the people's opposition. Behind these devices hovers force. Whether in reserve or in actual employment, force is ever present and this has been so since the white man came to Africa." From Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa:" Ch. 4: "It has already been indicated that in the 15th century European technology was not totally superior to that of other parts of the world. There were certain specific features which were highly advantageous to Europe-such as shipping and (to a lesser extent) guns..." "Before the 19th century, Europe was incapable of penetrating the African continent, because the balance of force at their disposal was inadequate. But the same technological changes which created the need to penetrate Africa also created the power to conquer Africa. The firearms of the imperialist epoch marked a qualitative leap forward. Breech-loading rifles and machine guns were a far cry from the smooth-bored muzzle loaders and flintlocks of the previous era. European imperialists in Africa boasted that what counted was the fact that they had the Maxim machine gun and Africans did not." "In the Portuguese territories, the origins of the black colonial police and army also went back into the 'pre-colonial' trade period. Around the forts of Luanda and Benguela in Angola and Lourenço Marques and Beira in Mozambique, there grew up communities of Africans, mulattoes and even Indians who helped 'pacify' large areas for the Portuguese after the Berlin Conference. Traders in Mozambique and in the rest of East, West and Central Africa who had experience with Europeans previous to colonialism were the ones to provide porters to carry the heavy machine guns, cannons and the support equipment; they were the ones who provided the would-be European colonialist with the information and military intelligence that facilitated conquest; and they were the interpreters who were the voice of the Europeans on African soil." Ch. 5 "Trading companies made huge fortunes on relatively small investments in those parts of Africa where peasant cash-crop farming was widespread. The companies did not have to spend a penny to grow the agricultural raw materials. The African peasant went in for cash-crop farming for many reasons. A minority eagerly took up the opportunity to continue to acquire European goods, which they had become accustomed to during the pre-colonial period. Many others in every section of the continent took to earning cash because they had to pay various taxes in money or because they were forced to work. Good examples of Africans literally being forced to grow cash crops by gun and whip were to be found in Tanganyika under German rule, in Portuguese colonies, and in French Equatorial Africa and the French Sudan in the 1930s." "It was only after European firearms reached a certain stage of effectiveness in the 19th century that it became possible for whites to colonise and dominate the whole world. Similarly, the invention of a massive array of new instruments of destruction in the metropoles was both a psychological and a practical disincentive to colonised peoples seeking to regain power and independence. It will readily be recalled that a basic prop to colonialism in Africa and elsewhere was the 'gun-boat policy', which was resorted to every time that the local police and armed forces seemed incapable of maintaining the metropolitan law and the colonial order of affairs. From the viewpoint of the colonised, the strengthening of the military apparatus of the European powers through colonial exploitation was doubly detrimental. Not only did it increase the overall technological gap between metropole and colony, but it immeasurably widened the gap in the most sensitive area, which had to do with concepts such as power and independence." And finally, "In the capitalist struggle to keep off the challenge of Socialism as a competing mode of production and way of life, Africa played at least two key roles – one being to provide for the capitalist militarists, and the other being to provide a wide range of raw materials essential for modern armament industries. The most vital of these raw materials were uranium and other radioactive substances for atomic and later nuclear weapons, including the hydrogen bomb. Almost rivalling uranium in importance were certain rare minerals (like lithium from Rhodesia) needed for the special steels that went into new aircraft rockets, tanks, guns, bombs, etc. Colonial powers already had small military establishments in each colony, and right up to the end of the colonial era, it was considered necessary to strengthen those. For instance, in the 1955 French budget there was a special vote of six billion francs (16.8 million dollars) for the improvement of military installations in the colonies, and notably for strategic bases in Dakar and Djibouti. Some time previously, the Belgians had completed a huge air base near Kamina in the Congo." In the old US of A, there are some entertaining (and informative) discussions about the use of guns from the Autobiography of Mother Jones: Ch II: "The years preceding 1886 had witnessed strikes of the lake seamen, of dock laborers and street railway workers. These strikes had been brutally suppressed by policemen's clubs and by hired gunmen. [. . . .] The employers used the cry of anarchism to kill the movement. A person who believed in an eight-hour working day was, they said, an enemy to his country, a traitor, an anarchist. The foundations of government were being gnawed away by the anarchist rats. Feeling was bitter. The city was divided into two angry camps. The working people on one side hungry, cold, jobless, fighting gunmen and police clubs with bare hands. On the other side the employers, knowing neither hunger nor cold, supported by the newspapers, by the police, by all the power of the great state itself." Ch V: [on a victory won by non-violent strike in Arnot, PA] "Those were the days before the extensive use of gun men, of military, of jails, of police clubs. There had been no bloodshed. There had been no riots. And the victory was due to the army of women with their mops and brooms." Ch XVII: {Victory in West Vriginia} "Here the miners had been peons for years, kept in slavery by the guns of the coal company, and by the system of paying in scrip so that a miner never had any money should he wish to leave the district. He was cheated of his wages when his coal was weighed, cheated in the company store where he was forced to purchase his food, charged an exorbitant rent for his kennel in which he lived and bred, docked for school tax and burial tax and physician and for "protection," which meant the gunmen who shot him back into the mines if he rebelled or so much as murmured against his outrageous exploitation. No one was allowed in the Cabin Creek district without explaining his reason for being there to the gunmen who patrolled the roads, all of which belonged to the coal company. The miners finally struck – it was a strike of desperation. The strike of Cabin Creek spread to Paint Creek, where the operators decided to throw their fate in with the operators of Cabin Creek Immediately all civil and constitutional rights were suspended. The miners were told to quit their houses, and told at the point of a gun. They established a tent colony in Holly Grove and Mossey. But they were not safe here from the assaults of the gunmen, recruited in the big cities from the bums and criminals [. . . .] I traveled up and down the Creek, holding meetings, rousing the tired spirits of the miners. I got three thousand armed miners to march over the hills secretly to Charleston, where we read a declaration of war to Governor Glasscock who, scared as a rabbit, met us on the steps of the state house. We gave him just twenty-four hours to get rid of the gunmen, promising him that hell would break loose if he didn't. He did. He sent the state militia in, who at least were responsible to society and not to the operators alone. [. . . .] One day a group of men came down to Elksdale from Red Warrior Camp to ask me to come up there and speak to them. Thirty-six men came down in their shirt sleeves. They brought a mule and a buggy for me to drive in with a little miner's lad for a driver. I was to drive in the creek bed as that was the only public road and I could be arrested for trespass if I took any other. The men took the shorter and easier way along the C. and O. tracks which paralleled the creek a little way above it. Suddenly as we were bumping along I heard a wild scream. I looked up at the tracks along which the miners were walking. I saw the men running, screaming as they went. I heard the whistle of bullets. I jumped out of the buggy and started to run up to the track. One of the boys screamed, "God! God! Mother, don't come. They'll kill ..." "Stand still," I called. "Stand where you are. I'm coming!" When I climbed up onto the tracks I saw the boys huddled together, and around a little bend of the tracks, a machine gun and a group of gunmen. "Oh Mother, don't come," they cried. "'let them kill us; not you!" "I'm coming and no one is going to get killed," said I. I walked up to the gunmen and put my hand over the muzzle of the gun. Then I just looked at those gunmen, very quiet, and said nothing. I nodded my head for the miners to pass. "Take your hands off that gun, you hellcat !" yelled a fellow called Mayfield, crouching like a tiger to spring at me. I kept my hand on the muzzle of the gun. "Sir," said I, "my class goes into the mines. They bring out the metal that makes this gun. This is my gun! My class melts the minerals in furnaces and roll the steel. They dig the coal that feeds furnaces. My class is not fighting you, not you. They are fighting with bare fists and empty stomachs the men who rob them and deprive their children of childhood. It is the hard-earned pay of the working class that your pay comes from. They aren't fighting you." Several of the gunmen dropped their eyes but one fellow, this Mayfield, said, "I don't care a damn! I'm going to kill every one of them and you, too!" I looked him full in the face. "Young man, said I, "I want to tell you that if you shoot one bullet out of this gun at those men, if you touch one of my white hairs, that creek will run with blood, and yours will be the first to crimson it. I do not want to hear the screams of these men nor to see the tears, nor feel the heartache of wives and little children. These boys have no guns! Let them pass!" "So our blood is going to crimson the creek is it!" snarled this Mayfield. I pointed to the high hills. "Up there in the mountain I have five hundred miners. They are marching armed to the meeting I am going to address. If you start the shooting, they will finish the game." And some more where that came from...thanks for asking, that was an interesting exercise. s
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