Begin forwarded message:
> From: Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Where is the left argument for gun rights?
> Date: 9 May, 2013 3:05:21 PM EDT
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Bcc: Walker Jones <walker1jones at gmail.com>
>
>
> On 2013-05-09, at 9:19 AM, Maladvocate wrote:
>
>> On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Marx lived during a period of popular democratic armed uprisings against
>>> reactionary autocracies, so his opposition to disarming the insurgent
>>> masses was quite understandable then.
>>>
>>> However, the historical context has radically changed...
>>
>>
>>
>> That same "things are different now" argument can be used to make damaging
>> inroads against all the other civil rights, which is why that argument
>> should never be accepted as valid.
>
> Not so. My argument that circumstances have changed - that the demand for arms is now coming from the right rather than from the constituencies we support, who now favour gun control - doesn't mean that I'm obliged, by extension, to support restrictions on our rights to assemble, to speak and publish freely, to organize trade unions and political parties, and to exercise other democratic rights. I don't have the slightest problem reconciling my unconditional support for these hard-won rights with my endorsement of efforts by liberal and radical Americans to place curbs on access to weapons by right-wing militias, criminal gangs, and confused individuals who represent a threat to their public safety and, in the case of the militias, potentially to their civil rights.
>
> And "things are different now", unless you believe that the level of working class consciousness and combativity is the same as it was during the rise of the labour and socialist movement from roughly the middle of the 18th to the middle of the 19th century. The decline of this movement has severely limited the possibilities for the left, as difficult as this may be to accept for voluntarists who extrapolate from the continued existence of capitalism that "things are no different", and attribute the failure to overthrow the system mainly to the ideological confusion of generations of socialists and the outright treachery of their leaders.