roachboy

well, i position myself pretty much on the left (surprise) and my position about guns actually varies quite alot depending on who i am talking to and what the situation is. i'm not particularly opposed to guns per se, i just don't like them being carried around alot in, say, a city. i don't assume that everyone who buys, uses, enjoys having guns is a nutcase, nor do i assume that the only reason anyone would buy or use a gun is violence. but for some reason, it's alot easier to have a conversation about this when you're not writing stuff on a messageboard and have the nuances of your position come through. i think messageboards may push people toward speaking in generalities because there's a pressure to keep things short. and because these are typically argument-based encounters.

if you know anything about the history of the political left, there is certainly no history of being violence-adverse or being shy about guns. almost from the start of the modern left, there has been a school of thought about revolutionary tactics that sees it on the model of a civil war. within that, some folk saw violence and organizing for it as a necessary response to what they assumed would be a violent state response to the surfacing of a revolutionary threat to it. others saw violence as a necessary weapon, something to be proactive about, to organize around. whichever way you see it, within the left there's long been a tendency toward military-style organization. the history of that organization hasn't worked out so well at times--you know, when these organizations actually took power and deployed themselves not only around what they said they were after, but also in ways shaped by their own organizational periods in the underground. think lenin.

there's also been a more diffuse anarchist tradition, which was overlayed with another tradition that reacted against leninism and it's unfortunate (um....yeah) effects on the soviet union. this tradition typically thought alot about general strikes, so about a non-violent way to accomplish revolutionary goals predicated on a mass withdrawal of consent from the existing order. personally, i like the idea of this, even though in the present world i can't quite figure out how exactly folk would go about withdrawing consent and have it register, given that the existing media apparatus tends to focus only on those sections which have not withdrawn consent and positions everything else outside it. whence "terrorism" and other fictions. image effects.

the point of all this is that it simply is not true that there's any coherent opposition between the political left and guns--or violence as a political weapon. what there are mostly are projections--if folk themselves oppose violence and construct a sense of the tradition they align with, they tend to make it over into the image of their preferences.

personally i have a hard time doing that because i've spent way way way too much time working on the history of the left and thinking about it's collapse.

i tend to oppose guns when i oppose the politics that people trot out that inform their use, really.
this because i see guns as neutral, as objects, and focus instead on how people seem to think about political objectives that they imagine would inform how they define which types of violence would be acceptable to them.


so in a conversation about the appearance that the ultra-right might be organizing some kind of putsch, i will definitely argue against the politics--which i oppose entirely---and by extension against the idea that this kind of politics should inform how "legitimate" violence is defined.
and i find it a bit alarming that there are still ongoing consequences which benefit the ultra-right which follow from the nra getting in bed with them at the organizational level (as an organization, then, which isn't the same as the membership)


this because not only do i oppose these politics on principle and logically--but also because i know that if such a "revolution" were to happen, people like me would end up in nice rural camps somewhere in all likelihood, learning the errors of our ways by digging canals or moving rocks back and forth.

just thought this an interesting place to say this.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite