Mass Shootings and the Working Class
Mass Anger over Mass shootings
The capitalist state maintains its control by a monopoly of legal violence. As a class the capitalists control, manufacture and determine the distribution and sales of arms internationally and reap blood profit. First and foremost the capitalist state arms its forces and militarized police against the workers and oppressed people at home and internationally. To end the violence of mass shootings, the phenomena must be understood in full light of capitalism’s need for wars, militarization, police and racist terror. The violence capitalist rule depends upon explaining why the working class and oppressed need our own mass self defense organizations.
Spontaneous demonstrations, marches, rallies and pickets are popping up all over the country in response to the latest mass shootings. They can be transformed into politically independent actions leading to mass working class self defense; but only by exposing the fact that the state is not a neutral arbiter that can be used against the military industrial complex, but that it exclusively serves the interests of the capitalist class.
Teachers are demanding action, some are even demanding kevlar! Children are scared and parents are frustrated. More than a few observers and activists in the oppressed communities have noticed that cops have no problem shooting unarmed Black and Brown youth down; but come up against an active shooter in a Latin neighborhood and they stand down while children and teachers are shot and are bleeding to death. The Black community endures white supremacist attacks and police terror and racist bias quantified, as 13.4% of the US population is Black yet as a community it suffers 34% of the annual shootings of unarmed persons by cops. Outrage after the Uvalde school shooting, the racist mass shooting in Buffalo and the public takes notice of the twenty mass shootings in the week after Ulvalde.
During the ten year Vietnam war 52,000 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese were killed. By comparison the CDC reports 40,000 annual deaths by firearms. Mass outrage and a radicalization of the youth and working class frightened the ruling class into ending the draft and the Pentagon now limits U.S. troops’ exposure, favoring proxy wars, an enlisted military, supplemental mercenaries and air war to limit the flow of body bags from imperialist military adventures. In 2021 20 millions guns were sold in the US. US weapons manufacturers in 2020 took down $285 billion. These are 285 billion reasons why only mass action can effect the arms industry. With the current alignment of political forces, Democratic appeasers reaching fruitlessly across the aisle, change ain’t gonna come.
There is scarcely any “bipartisan” will at the national level to interfere with gun manufacturers’ profits. There is a liberal fantasy that is entertained in the Capitol that guns are the problem and that we could be like other, sane countries and disarm the civilian population. Here the Democrats manipulate the grieving and the fearful. They propel the “March For Our Lives” marches headed up by David Hogg, a Parkland High survivor who not incidentally is the son of an FBI agent. At the very moment when televised Congressional hearings will examine the rightist Jan. 6th insurrection, liberalism shows us they are far more afraid of armed workers than of the fascists! It is now commonplace for fascist militias to parade their firepower in flagrant actions against Black Lives Matter and even state officeholders! They are doing so generally without fear of arrest! But liberalism says the police are their heroes. This is a suicidal course should the workers and oppressed peoples go for reliance on the police for defence against fascists who seek a racist civil war!
Working class and oppressed people must break with the capitalist class and their politicians and put a working class stamp on history. We need a politically independent and internationalist working class party that organizes workers and oppressed peoples with class struggle methods for self defense based on a Transitional Program to address the decay that the terminal crisis of capitalism demands we bear. This requires organizations of workers and oppressed committed to irreconcilable struggle to defeat the capitalists offensive against workers and the oppressed, and democratic rights by both political parties, the POTUS and the SCOTUS.
For the working class to survive, capitalism must die!
Thinking Inside the Box
Most Americans, the left included, fall into the trap of pragmatic wheel spinning with every newsworthy mass shooting event, doubling down on calls for ‘sensible gun laws’ as a solution the politicians will never solve. That many (commentators, politicians and activists) have shown their incapacity for critical or original thought is representative of the decay of capitalist political innovation. The post-‘witch hunt’ generation has gone to intellectual rot, lazily permitting liberalism to dictate the parameters of debate, even in a red hot social crisis.
The pragmatic ‘sensible’ argument of the civil-libertarian liberal left challenges the court’s interpretation of the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution and Madison’s qualifying militia cause.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Reformers argue this “amendment has been outpaced by technology”, written when flintlock muskets not semi-automatic assault rifles were the height of technology; and that these rights were secured for a well regulated Militia, when citizens maintained arms at home and answered muster. The argument goes, these rights were secured for self defense and hunting and these rights can and should be retained but that assault rifles are not necessary for self defense or hunting. Today, they argue, the ‘well regulated militia’ is the national guard and constabulary police; the colonial settler war against the indigenous for land has been won and wild animals pose little threat except of course far in the outback.
The reformers (in general, liberals, Democrats, and the ever expanding righteously indignant class of vulnerable peoples) embrace “sensible gun” reform laws like background checks for domestic violent perps and mental instability and raise the age eligibility to purchase assault rifles. No mention of fascist groups and their arsenals. For protection the masses are told to rely on the police. After police lack of performance in Uvalde, public sentiment is reflected in a meme chiding the patriotic sloganeering and flag waving “these colors don’t run” (into the building while kids are getting shot). But bourgeois politicians did the opposite of what the masses called for in the wake of the George Floyd murder by the police. They neither disbanded nor defunded the police. They INCREASED police budgets and installed former police as mayors!
The gun advocates strictly interpret gun rights as fundamental, even invoking deities for rhetorical flourish about “god given rights.” The second half of the amendment speaks of the right to bear arms as if, at the time of the writing, they were already secured as a fundamental right. The right to bear arms could have fit under the 9th Amendment–unenumerated rights clause:
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Thus the gun advocates main argument is the right to self defense which predates the Constitution, and because governments both define and restrict individual rights–by force of arms, it was by ‘great foresight’ and based on the revolution against English rule, that Madison and the founders saw fit to enumerate this fundamental right (consider John Locke’s theory of “the natural order of things”). The argument builds, this right was secured not only for citizens conducting land theft from indigenous people, for defense against wild beasts roaming a wild land, for hunting, to muster a militia against foreign and domestic threat; but also to ensure the people have the ability to protect themselves from the tyranny of government. And this is where Jefferson’s admonition that:
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Logic follows that as arms technology ‘advanced’ and governments secured advanced arms the right of the people to defend themselves from tyranny requires access to the most advanced equipment as well.
Despite this being a formula for civil war it has been a boon for the arms manufacturers, who have sold 20 million AR-15 style rifles to the public (a population of 330 million) which owns some 393 million guns all told.
The NRA allegedly violated campaign finance laws funneling $35 million to funding Trump’s GOP campaigns. Trump’s performance at the NRA convention as a shill for the arms industry balances that debt. In addition to ‘thoughts and prayers’ Trump offers hardened classroom doors and armed cops in every school. Reinforcing the anti-big government line that, your government, the capitalist state cannot prevent the causes of mass shootings, so, the greater good, that the price of ‘liberty’ (god given rights) is accepting that mass shooter events will persist, so long as there are insufficient numbers of “good guys with guns.” It makes little difference to these Trumpers that the discharge statistics show that there are more shootings in schools where armed personnel are present!
The NRA is funded by the beneficiaries of gun sales to promote interpretations of gun rights that keep the wheels of that industry churning. Their expansive interpretation of those ‘rights’ hits their mark especially when promoted on FOX news alongside the white-fear-inducing ‘Great Replacement Theory’. Tucker Carlson, born with a silver foot in his mouth, makes bank servicing the ruling class, stoking race hatred, misogyny, anti-union sentiment, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim bigotry, and conspiracy theories. Under cover of “Great Replacement” promoted by Tucker Carlson alongside Hungarian president Viktor Orbans CPAC and Fox unleash the fascist dogs on the working class and oppressed people who suffer the resultant racist, misogynist, homophobic. anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim terrorism.
The suits covering for the insurrectionist rightists declare the right to bear assault weapons is Americanism defined, conceding that mass shootings-as a form of collateral damage–are a price we must be willing to pay for liberty and that more cops in schools and/or directly arming teachers are the only options. This cynical pitch to militarize schools is no solution. Neither is it based on root cause analysis. Nor does it answer for the fascist terror attacks at Tops Grocery in Buffalo where armed security, a retired police officer, Aaron Salter Jr. died heroically among the victims. Or for the racist slaughter at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina, the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the Gilroy Garlic Festival or the decades long war on women including sexual assaults and the shootings and bombings at women’s health clinics.
The liberals and pacifists wring their hands pointing at the gun lobby yet knowing that despite mass discontent with the availability of weapons on the market that they will never stem the flow and they will never collect the arms already owned by the public in the hundreds of millions. They compartmentalize the question of gun violence by fascists they call “domestic extremists”, hoping to smear the left with the blood of the oppressed while confusing middle class muddlehead voters. Yet politicians of both parties “cakewalk billions annually” to the military industry and travel the world selling arms to oppressor regimes and reactionary insurgencies to maintain the permanent counter-revolution against the working people internationally. The militarization on the homefront is nothing if not a reflection of imperialism’s offshore sales quotas.
So the politicians content themselves with ‘thoughts and prayers’, prayers that the newscycle gives them a break so they can Move On (slither away from blame) after failing to protect the most vulnerable.
Workers and Oppressed have to Think Outside the Box
Workers, youth and oppressed people can only end the mass shooting and protect our communities with class struggle methods. We need our own class analysis and theory, that pierces sectoralist, identity polarization, to expose the contradictions of the bosses’ class ideology. Our class analysis must expose the underlying social relations which commodify our labor power creating alienation and intra-class divisions that block the working class from acting as and becoming a ‘class-for-itself.’
Capitalism enforces its rule by state violence, threat of class and caste violence and laws to back these up. The bosses need their state armed, at the ready, with a fascist reserve and a seething racist underbelly regularly served up red meat (figuratively, literally and legalistically); narrative, spectacle and petty privileges are required to perpetuate intra-working class division and win layers of the workers, precariously dispossessed and middle class to the service of the parasitic capitalist minority.
The social relations during the period of race based chattel slavery inculcated generations with racist, nativist, and chauvinist world views and ideology. That ideological poison spread and integrated structurally throughout the U.S. social and economic superstructures. Whlie slavery is the material basis for racism, segregatation, in housing, education, credit and employment ensured a racist wedge separating Black and white labor from building class unity.
The overseer class wielding the whip must hate the whipped. The slave owning class must dehumanize their chattel. The white indentured servant and small farmer knew oppression and exploitation but could take solace in that, no matter how bad it was, they were not Black slaves and could thank their whiteness for that ‘privilege.’ Today that ‘privilege’ serves the bosses still separating the white and black workers. The vast majority of white workers hear ‘white privilege’, look at their lives in debt to the banks, living paycheck to paycheck and ask, “what privilege?” The targeting of “Critical Race Theory” by FOX central, CPAC and the Breitbart brigades is a ploy to stoke white racism, to ensure that youth, white workers and their progeny in particular never learn the origins of structural racism, and how they are more easily exploited when they do not build united Black/white/multi-racial workers action against the bosses.
In conjunction with, and as if to retail the narrative of a steady march toward an enlightened progressive future, the ruling class works overtime to maintain a facade of democratic legitimacy. Regardless, that the Constitution was written as a compromise between plantation owning slave owners and other white men of property, that even today the Senate, the Presidency and the Supreme Court are not chosen democratically and if that were not bad enough the Congressional districts are regularly gerrymandered. The ruling class’ narrative that the U.S. government, as promulgated, is the pinnacle of human accomplishment remains official history. Of course, at the time of the Constitutional Convention women, slaves, First Peoples and white males without property had no say in establishing it. To make gains the excluded classes have had to engage in class struggle against the capitalist class, its state and its laws. Worker’s today don’t demand another bourgeois constitutional convention; in fact we oppose it! When the next constitution is written it must be written by elected delegates of the working class and oppressed!
To wit, the vast entitled professional managerial, academic and petty bourgeois layers as well as the labor aristocracy and union bureaucracy share the narrative and are satiated sufficiently that they can bask obediently with a smug self assured conviction that: in ‘our democratic republic’ the process is secure and despite some problems ‘equal justice under the law’ is attainable, that workers and oppressed over whom they have influence (in schools, work, church, NGOs, CBOs and even the trade unions), have no need to overthrow capitalism. Sure. Regents demand school curriculum and organization that teach this fiction no matter how it alienates the youth. The distorted picture promises the youth neither hope of fulfillment nor even employment, and it is into this reality that Capital dumps their “great replacement” scapegoat theory. We all see the results.
The capitalists are trapped by their system’s structural contradictions. First of which being the contradiction between social production of goods and services and individual appropriation of profits. In other words the majority of workers produce commodities and the profit derived flows to a small minority–the shareholders of capital. The second contradiction is that as capital expands (by accumulation and concentration of profits) it becomes harder for the capitalist to invest profitably in production causing the rate of profit to fall. This in turn requires vigilant austerities and wage restrictions are imposed on workers and small producers (farmers, small proprietors). The third contradiction is that the squeezed workers and small producers come to see the economics behind the first two contradictions and realize the method by which they are exploited and oppressed and unite to fight for their own class interests.
Faced with this potential reality the capitalist class plays to both their reserve army of armed fascist enforcers and their civil libertarian ideologues of bourgeois democracy. Armed on one side with the ‘friendlies’ at CNN/MSN/NYT and on the other the cudgel of FOX/Breitbart and Epoch Times the capitalist class locks the door against independent working class solutions to any of the myriad crises, wars and catastrophes capitalism in terminal decline creates.
Revolutionary Marxists observe the ruling class has no intention to protect the working class and oppressed. Despite active shooter response protocols and training the legal directive to the police is that they are not obliged to protect you and that basically you are on your own. Today a constabulary police system exists which originated in the slave patrols, which were mustered after the ‘crime’ of self emancipation. In the oppressed communities today the police patrol and operate as an occupying army; young Black men are generalized as suspects and shootings of unarmed Black and Brown bodies are routine and rampant. Reality TV police chase shows in particular promote race hatred by overemphasizing and generaling criminal behaviors of individuals to a class of persons; that class of persons being young Black men who are demonized, adding grist to the racist white supremacist mill.
The gun reformers’ solution is to elect Democrats so “common sense gun laws” can be passed, while the other side asserts their rights by stockpiling equipment and buying politicians. Only a worker’s government can unblock this logjam because it is only the working class in power which can end economic exploitation and class and special oppression, alienation and the root causes of racism, misogyny and all forms of chauvinism.
So we have a “domestic tranquility” problem, in that we have no security even though a hallowed purpose of the government is to guarantee it. The Democrat gun control plan brands the working class as unreliable seekers after firepower no person should want, taking no account of the experience of either Cuba or Switzerland where the populace is armed and these types of mass shootings have never occurred! We have big budget militarized police forces with loads of guns and these outfits are routinely under suspicion of racist practices and sometimes also investigated by the DoJ for exactly that. It is past time to ask “Do We Need Them?” They kill 1100+ Black and Brown people annually. That was the logic driving the demands on the streets to “Defund the Police.” INSTEAD, Biden dumped cash on these police departments and post 1/6/21 (insurrection day) the Democrats have made the Capitol police the heroic defenders of democracy. Who are they jerking?! What murder sprees have they prevented?
Just about now in the argument, the reformists cry, “..well that’s all well and good–come the revolution you socialists have a solution for everything.” And they have a point there, because many a confused socialist content themselves with a minimum program-of reforms (which are rarely won and retained) or a maximum program that “..come the revolution–we all get lollipops and skateboards are free”.
Revolutionary Marxism, on the other hand develops a Transitional Program for working class independence which does not rely on begging the bosses politicians for either more cops in the schools or advocate supporting capitalist Democrats in hope they show a little love to the people. Our transitional program is not based on solving problems in the interest of stability of the capitalist state and the status quo of private profit ueber alles but in smashing their state power and raising our class to power as a class acting-for-itself. The productive class insists on species survival!
Workers and the oppressed are learning daily that we need to protect ourselves, our children and our communities, not only from racist and strike breaking police, not only from the fascist KKK, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, racist hater Boogaloo Boys, but also the frustrated and alienated with easy access to weapons. Do we need more cops sent by the very capitalist class that perpetuates alienation and racism? Do we need laws that restrict workers access to the very arms they will need to water the tree of liberty?
The ruling class has no answer to these attacks, caught in a pickle, they want the workers and oppressed Black and Brown communities to be unarmed, and at the same time keep their fascist flank guard armed and at the ready. Set the Labor Black and Brown Community Defense Guards UP! Rightism wants to put more guns INSIDE THE SCHOOLS! The statistics prove more guns inside schools mean more shooting! The DEMOCRATS’ gun control hobby horse betrays their fear of the working class; in fact they know NO ONE will disarm fascists, least of all the police. “Common Sense Gun Laws” mean stepped up attacks on Black and Brown communities, like “the War on Drugs” redux. Pacifism acquiescing in these policies is class collaboration with a bourgeoisie that believes it can control and use the rise of fascism. DON”T GO FOR IT!
The leaders of the workers and oppressed for too long have depended on a cozy relationship with the capitalist politicians of the Democratic and sometimes Republican parties. This class collaboration leaves the workers disarmed politically and accepting of the limits on social change imposed by capitalism’s many contradictions. Our class needs to break with the Democrats to form our own fighting workers party committed to our own working class self defense.
Teachers do not want to be militarized. Ted Cruz wants this and Trump sold the idea at the NRA convention. The working class must not call on its oppressor to protect us. We must not endorse calls for more cops in schools, for cops in every vulnerable supermarket, discotheque, and church! No, we know the police are there only to protect the banks and serve the ruling class. We must organize disciplined Labor Black and Brown self defense guards- based in the labor councils and the community centers of the oppressed, trained by veterans so that schools, picket lines, supermarkets, places of entertainment and religious gatherings and all the social activities of our class are defended from sociopaths and class enemy violence. Shooters never will get in the buildings! The workers movement in declaring its independence from the capitalist class must identify its need to protect the working class by building a mass party that unites the union movement and movements of all the oppressed and it will be our task to form our own self-defense for all vulnerable sites. The Revolutionary party offers a pole of hope and liberation against the despair and hopelessness of capitalism in decay and the fascists goon terror.
The workers movement needs its own Transitional Program against gun violence and mass shootings:
- For Working Class Action! Organizations of the workers and oppressed to muster, train and outfit our own self defense by means of mass assemblies, strike actions and disciplined strike committees.
- For Labor Black Brown Self Defense! Down with the constabulary police forces-for a workers movement that disarms the police and mobilizes well disciplined rank and file Labor Black and Brown self defense guards.
- Make the Arms industry protect the public! With almost 400 million arms sold, the arms industry is cash flush and must protect all potential victims and distribute body armor and kevlar to all people residing in the U.S.
- Make the Arms industry compensate the victims! The arms companies that provided the guns and ammo must pay for the damage done to civilians victims of their wares both at home and abroad!
- Make the Arms industry Pay! Arms companies that refuse to comply to be expropriated and run under working class control.
- With race hate, conspiracy theory, nationaistic, pro-imperialist messaging dominating mainstream and social media, the workers and movement and organizations of the oppressed demand equal access.
- Media and social media which refuse to comply must be expropriated and run under workers control!
- Against the Military Industrial Complex! Not one penny for military expenditure.
- Fund Social Services! Trillions must be allocated for universal free education from day care to graduate school, remedial support, expanded school psychology programs, early intervention, mental health as part of a massive public works program.
- End the causes of alienation: exploitation, financial insecurity , fear, race, caste and class hate.
- Fund Public Works and Jobs for all at living wages twenty five hours work for forty hours prevailing wage! For work brigades to build social cohesion while restoring the planet conducting restoration and clean energy projects
- Nationalize without compensation and run under workers control all companies that refuse to comply; for a central plan democratically decided by the working class.
- Build a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government to carry out this program!
- Build a revolutionary workers’ International based on the method of the 1938 Transitional Program to unite the workers of the world against the capitalist parasites who profit from our labor and our bloodshed! For world socialist revolution!
