Why oppressed communities need to safeguard their right to bear arms

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The Newtown, Conn., shooting on Dec. 14 has pro­ duced a wave of fear. Like other violent tragedies that shake confidence in humanity and heighten feelings of vulnerability, the shooting has widened openings for reactionary politics that threaten the struggles of working and oppressed people.

The two prominent responses to the Sandy Hook shooting appear to be opposed, but are in fact based on compatible political outlooks. Right-wing racists promote the arming of “law-abiding citizens” as the only defense against the “unlawful” and “criminal.” Liberals instead call on the bosses’ state to protect these same “law-abiding citizens” from “criminals” by disarming civilians, or at least by confiscating as many of the more high-powered weapons as possible.

Despite their strategic (and often merely tactical) differences, both perspectives are based on fear of the dispossessed and poor, and lack of confidence in ruling institutions. While right-wingers like Alex Jones may rail against the government, they are very careful to restrict their defense of armed civilians to those holding American citizenship who “abide by U.S. law.”

Anyone familiar with law and the criminal justice system of the United States knows which groups are on and off this list. While the wealthy can steal and murder with impunity, the poor get prison time for unpaid parking tickets, sending their kid to the wrong school, and falling down the stairs while pregnant.

Jones’s formula effectively excludes anyone from the right to bear arms who is targeted for state re­ pression. This of course includes political dissidents, whose activity is periodically outlawed.

Both liberal gun-control proponents and right-wing arms-rights advocates call for the capitalist state to decide who will have arms. This is the political reality underlying the euphemisms of “gun rights” and “gun control.” It’s one reason expanded criminal back­ ground checks have emerged as the most politically viable solution: Both sides agree that the oppressed and disobedient are not fit for gun ownership, and that the bourgeois state should decide who is.

To see where these two paths meet, we need only look to Maricopa County, Ariz., where anti-immigrant sheriff Joe Arpaio has combined the best of both worlds—an armed volunteer force of 3000 to patrol areas around schools—the same force he uses to car­ ry out anti-immigrant raids.

The left wing of gun-control advocacy may recog­ nize the serious threat that state-backed armed rac­ ist vigilantes pose to immigrants, people of color, student activists, teachers, staff, and their unions (to name a few groups). Yet the state that sponsors these vigilantes is the same state that they call on to enforce gun regulations, and with all the force and selectivity and that it enforces other laws.

History shows that the capitalist class and its state apparatus often employ violence to repress militant mass movements for workers’ rights and significant social change. Such repression is generally carried out by police and the military, but when these means are insufficient, the ruling power unleashes racist vigilantes and fascist thugs.

The fascists have little to fear from the capitalist state. On the contrary, they are its most valuable de­ fenders, its defense of last resort. Apart from the cap­ italist class itself, they are the most loyal social base available. In Greece, where the class struggle is reach­ ing a breaking point, the police have begun openly fa­ cilitating the fascist Golden Dawn’s many physical as­ saults on immigrants, journalists, and others. In some neighborhoods the Golden Dawn appears to have be­ come the de facto police force.

Labor unions and other organizations of struggle have found through bitter experience that they often needed to possess arms in order to survive these at­ tacks. The U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s provides an example that is often overlooked. Guns and the civil rights movement In a 1988 interview with Judy Richardson, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), a former leader in the Stu­ dent Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, explained how SNCC workers persistently found themselves working with local community members who would return fire against white supremacists. One activist, in grappling with this question, asked other mem­ bers of SNCC, “If they are returning fire, the terrorist groups, what is my position as a SNCC person?”

Said Carmichael: “Nobody in SNCC answered the question. Nobody. And when the question was not an­ swered, it was clear then every SNCC person should make their own individual decision and the decisions were clear … we began to carry guns, ah, probably even a little bit before this statement, which is in the early ’60s, but I’m sure that by 1963, I would say 90 percent of your field staff in SNCC were carrying guns.”

Carmichael related how SNCC organized protection for voters when the Lowndes County Freedom Orga­ nization was running Black candidates. In the run-up to elections, white terrorist groups made it clear that Black voters would face serious violence on election day. Recognizing that the Klan was likely to draw on its forces from not just Lowndes County but all across the state, SNCC recruited serious Black youth from several Northern cities to defend voters. Carmichael Two examples of Black self-defense:

(Left) Lowndes County Freedom Organization ran candidates in 1966 elections but had to counter threats of violence from the Klan.

(Below) Robert F. Williams, head of Monroe, N.C. NAACP in 1950s and ’60s. Activists used arms to defend the community against racist terror.

stated: “They brought heavy guns, much materials. And we also let it be known to the terrorist groups that we were bringing people with guns and we were going to meet fire with fire.”

Like everyone else in the community, the local members of Lowndes County Freedom Organization, many of whom were quite elderly, were already well armed. Carmichael recalled: “You know, the law said, you have to leave your guns X number of feet away from the polling place. So all of them, old women, brought their guns. And this really shocked these young brothers and sisters who were in Chicago and New York and thought, to see these old people carry­ ing guns.”

This kind of practice was hardly confined to SNCC. In “The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement,” Lance Hill argues that the appearance of a consistent and pure practice of non-violence was cultivated as part of a political strategy to appeal to white liberals, despite the reality that civil rights activists commonly possessed arms for self-defense against racist violence.

Among numerous other cases Hill cites an account by a visitor to Martin Luther King’s home during the much earlier Montgomery Bus Boycott, who was “alarmed to find an “arsenal” of weapons and discov­ ered that King himself had requested gun permits for his bodyguards.”

Hill’s main subject, the Deacons for Defense, origi­ nally formed in 1964 on a low-key basis to defend civil rights activists in CORE and other organizations. Even when they went public in 1965, they initially justified their defense work in the terms of nonviolent strategy. This changed as the segregationist forces became more violent. Increasingly, the Dea­ cons made their defense measures more public and turned them into a political issue, even engaging local police in armed confrontations.

Hill shows how the Deacons’ challenge to white su­ premacists dramatically pushed back vigilante activ­ ity and inspired Blacks in a fundamentally different way than non-violent civil disobedience had done. He also makes the case that their public presence as a Black armed group forced the federal government into the first significant steps to neutralize the Klan.

The struggle of the Deacons also shows how gun control is implemented in real life. During a heated struggle in July 1965, the Mississippi governor or­ dered state police to seize all weapons found in cars or on persons in the city of Bogalusa, saying, “We’re going to run the Deacons out of business and any­ body else that’s got pistols and rifles and shotguns.” People knew that this talk of disarming everyone was only a cover to dismantle the one armed Black group in town. And so the Voters League organized a non-violent march on July 14 to oppose the seizure of weapons.

Hill comments: “Nonviolence was ultimately a coalition-based legislative strategy cloaked as reli­ gion. In their attempt to assuage white fears of black violence, the national organizations took a stand against self-defense that placed them at odds with lo­ cal movements besieged by police and Klan violence and hobbled by passive stereotypes. … In truth, de­ fense groups like the Deacons used weapons to avoid violence. And they raised important and legitimate questions about a strategy that pinned its hopes on liberals, organized labor and federal government.”

Politics is primary. No amount of guns can substi­ tute for a clear political program and the ability of a political movement to connect to broad masses. Legal, non-violent tactics are usually preferred when possi­ ble. Still, we can learn from the civil rights movement that there are times when the armed self-defense of social movements is not only possible, but necessary.

It is certainly true that much of gun culture in the United States has its roots in white supremacist vigi­ lantism. But the bourgeois state is not an ally that can be counted upon to disarm these groups or defend the targets of their terror. In the final analysis that task is up to the oppressed themselves. n SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2013 3

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... Obama’s inaugural Corporate politics in disguise Tony Savino / Socialist Action (continued from page 1: “Obama’s inaugural: Corporate politics in disguise”) cans, who are compelled to perform near slave labor for corporate business and agriculture at an average wage of 50 cents per hour. Deduct the cost of trivial prison commissary items, and slavery has all but been re-introduced into the fabric of American society. The prison population has doubled over the past decade, and more prisons are built than schools.

Obama proclaimed, “Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers.” But the Obama team increasingly joins the richest corporate magnates in the nation in campaigns to privatize for profit the nation’s schools, to gut state and federal education budgets, and to pre­ side over massive tuition increases that keep working people out of college. Meanwhile, it subordinates the construction of environmentally sustainable pub­ lic transportation systems to the fossil-fuel-guzzling auto and trucking industries and the super-highways designed for their use.

“Together [“together with whom?” one might ask the president], we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” Competition? The norm in the U.S. and world capitalism today is monopoly, not competition. The ever-increasing direction of U.S. law is to advance monopoly control in order to best promote U.S. cor­ porate interests against global competitors. Indeed, giant corporations that drive competitors out of the market have been given preference in the courts in the name of defending the “national security interests” of the U.S. That is, the little guy is driven from the mar­ ket by monopoly practices to ensure that giant multinational corporations gain advantage at the expense of international competitors.

“Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune,” said Obama. Hazards? U.S. corporations employ some 50,000 carcinogenic materials in the course of their daily operations. Un­ der the Obama administration the historic protec­ tion of workers afforded by trade unions has been decimated. Today, only 6 percent of the private sector workforce is unionized, as compared to 36 percent in 1955. A near majority of states today operate as openshop “right to work for less” bastions to serve the profit interests of the elite.

“A decade of war is now ending,” Obama proclaimed. The imperialist wars that the Obama administration pursued in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya have reduced those nations to poverty and ruin while U.S. corpora­ tions emerged with the lion’s share of the conquered and occupied nations’ resource wealth. The Iraq war killed 1.5 million Iraqis to ensure that U.S. oil mo­ nopolies would gain major control of that nation’s oil reserves—the second largest in the world. Afghani­ stan’s rare earth metals, critical for the manufacture (abroad) of computers and related technology, are valued at $3 trillion. And the profits from Libya’s oil, in the main, will now be in U.S. corporate coffers.

These wars are far from over. Half of the 120,000 mil­ itary forces in Afghanistan are U.S.-funded mercenary death-squad armies—sometimes politely referred to as “military contractors”—the largest private army in U.S. history. The occupation of Iraq continues with now-off-shored troops poised to re-enter as required to maintain in power the U.S.-puppet Nouri al-Maliki regime.

Today, U.S. forces are on the increase in Africa and Latin America. Seven new U.S. military bases have been constructed in Colombia as the advance contin­ gents for future wars aimed at re-established U.S. he­ 4 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2013 gemony in the region. The U.S.-operated African Com­ mand (AFRICOM) last month approved sending 3500 U.S. troops, assisted by Predator drones, to 35 African nations. These are but the advance guard of the tens and hundreds of thousands to come in the course of U.S. efforts at re-colonization of that continent.

The U.S. spends $1 trillion annually on its war ma­ chine, exceeding the combined total expended by the rest of the world. In truth, another decade and longer of wars and occupations is in preparation. The U.S. has every intention of remaining the “cop of the world.”

“An economic recovery has begun,” asserted the president, although a week later, the fourth-quarter figures affirmed a GDP decline, along with a continued fall in manufacturing investments. To the extent that there is an economic recovery it is limed to the ruling rich and their stock market manipulators, who engage in vast speculative machinations with capital that can­ not be put to profitable use in the real economy. There has been no recovery for working people, unless the vast increase of minimum wage below subsistence and largely part-time work in the food and other ser­ vice industries is considered a “recovery.”

“For we, the people,” says Obama, “understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” This super-rich “shrinking few” multi-billionaire and per­ haps soon to be trillionaire ruling class in the U.S. and worldwide—based on the exploitation of the earth’s billions of workers—has no alternative but to inflict ever-increasing measures to keep their system go­ ing. But Obama’s recent and temporary “fiscal cliff” solution to the manufactured deficit crisis granted additional billions to the ruling rich while extracting billions from workers by ending the Bush-era payroll tax cuts. The average working American will now pay $1000 more in taxes in the coming year.

Obama’s deal with his Republican associates includ­ ed some $80 billion more to the “few” he appears to chastise, with the graphic example of the fine-print wording that gave the Amgen pharmaceutical corpo­ ration $500 million by delaying for two years a gov­ ernment-mandated reduction in the cost of Amgen pills used in the kidney dialysis process. The $500 billion, of course, will be paid to Amgen by Medicare funds, further increasing the deficit.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations”—a pitifully grandi­ ose remark, if ever there was one. Obama campaigned for the presidency under the banner of being a bigger friend of the oil industry than Romney or Bush. During his final presidential debate, he publicly championed Big Oil as few candidates before him had ever done.

The president’s first term, Obama bragged, saw in­ creased domestic fossil fuel production, not counting the billions of barrels spilled into the Gulf Coast dur­ ing the British Petroleum super-spill. His adminis­ tration has promoted the water-table poisoning and environmentally catastrophic fracking and tar sands processes. The stated policy of Obama and virtually all candidates and parties of the ruling rich is to dramati­ cally increase fossil fuel production and use by 25 to 40 percent over the next 10 years, a deadly scenario for the continuance of life on earth.

“We, the people,” Obama insisted, “declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”

However, no such truths have been put into prac­ tice by Obama or his predecessors. The state of Black America—last hired, first fired—has dramatically worsened under his administration, with every con­ ceivable reactionary law put into place to increase the incarceration rate and numbers of the oppressed in prison (e.g., “three strikes,” “stop and frisk,” etc.) The income gap between Black/Latino and white is ever widening, while all workers are living or barely living through hard times imposed by the inherent inequali­ ties that come with capitalist racist exploitation and oppression. Schools are increasingly re-segregated and failing, teachers are fired, affirmative action gut­ ted, and social programs eliminated. Dr. King would be horrified!

Obama’s tip of the hat to LGBT America has been to­ ken at best. “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well,” he stated. Yet his “equality” exists in word only, while thousands of laws remain on the books that dis­ criminate against LGBT people in myriad ways.

The nation’s 12 million “illegal” immigrants were also given an inaugural nod: “Our journey is not com­ plete until we find a better way to welcome the striv­ ing, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity—until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than ex­ pelled from our country.” Under Obama, 400,000 im­ migrants were deported in each of the past two years. His new proposals for “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” amount to nothing less than continued op­ pression and use of immigrants as low-wage “guest” workers employed in the least desirable jobs—essen­ tially denied the right to organize collectively.

For those necessary low-wage workers, Obama of­ fers little or nothing. His “path to citizenship” includes requirements that are near impossible to meet, in­ cluding payment of back taxes, mandatory facility in English, interminable waiting periods of perhaps 10 years, rejection of amnesty for all, forced military ser­ vice (Dream Act), not to mention the massive militari­ zation of the border.

For those potential immigrants with great skills— “engineers,” said Obama—capitalism makes its excep­ tions, maintaining its “brain drain” policies to encour­ age a privileged few to desert their own countries in search of a way out of a poverty that is greatly exacer­ bated, if not caused, by imperialist pressure and con­ trol over underdeveloped nations.

“With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of his­ tory and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.” With these concluding words, Presi­ dent Obama, the chief executive officer of the U.S. rul­ ing class, concluded his oration, fully satisfying the liberal elite, who need to refurbish their tarnished party’s image every four years. At the same time, the speech infuriated the Republican diehards, who serve capitalism best by pushing the country’s overall agen­ da to the right—with Obama’s compliance.

Despite Obama’s rhetoric on this special occasion, there will be no real freedom in the U.S. or anywhere on earth until this corrupt assemblage of America’s super-rich and their twin parties of hate and plun­ der—including its titular leaders like Obama—are removed by a mass mobilization and replaced by a government of working people. n