“the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”
Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850)
Bonus links: “The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights (Reprise)” (“The political principle at stake is simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force, and, obversely, to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the people.”), April Theses (“Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy . . . to be replaced by the arming of the whole people.”), Chairman Mao Quote (“political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”), Painting & Guns Quote (“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”), “Draft Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (“XXII. But any act against liberty, against the security or against the property of a man, exercised by anyone, even in the name of the law, except in the cases determined by it, and the forms which they prescribe, is arbitrary and void; the very respect of the law forbids us to submit to it, and if we wish to execute it by violence; it is permissible to repel it by force.”) and “Violence” and Links to books about black armed resistance in freedom movements and “Things That Can and Cannot Be Said” (“And I thought, fuck this. My question is, if, let’s say, there are people who live in villages deep in the forest, four days walk from anywhere, and a thousand soldiers arrive and burn their villages and kill and rape people to scare them off their land because mining companies want it—what brand of non-violence would the stalwarts of the establishment recommend? Non-violence is radical political theatre. *** And who can pull in an audience? You need some capital, some stars, right? Gandhi was a superstar. The people in the forest don’t have that capital, that drawing power. So they have no audience. Non-violence should be a tactic—not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence…. With me, it’s been an evolution of seeing through these things.”) and Barrett Brown on kids’ march for gun rights (“If all these hundreds of thousands of kids had brought guns with them they could have seized control of the capitol and enacted whatever anti-gun legislation they wanted. Catch-22!”) and Battlefield America: The War On The American People. And for anarchist perspectives, see “School Shootings: Who to Listen to Instead of Mainstream Shrinks” and “How Nonviolence Protects the State”
