Marx on Guns

 

So, I'm not a fanatic follower of Karl Marx, and I'd go so far as to say I find the actions of many Marxists to be embarrassing and rather annoying and counterproductive. One example of this is the use of Marx as a flesh and blood bible. Much of socialist discourse is really just a petty game of idol worship and quotation fighting, and like most Christians many Marxists are fond of just taking random snippets of gospel and using them because they look like they're agreeing with a preconceived idea if you just give them a quick glance and don't bother reading the rest of the text or the historical context.

A big example of this is 2nd Amendment Marx, you've probably seen the famous quote or a paraphrasing of it "Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." Had Karl Marx been an American politician alive today or some point in the 20th Century, I would also assume he's weighing in on America's gun control debate. But he wasn't. What he was actually doing was commenting on the political situation in Europe in the middle of the 19th Century.

That quotation comes from text written in 1850 Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League. The text is an attempt by Marx and Engels to promote a new strategy in the aftermath of the 1848 wave of Revolutions. To be specific, this is the rest of the paragraph that the above sentence comes from

 

 2. To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, 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. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.

He's talking about a future military force acting in a hypothetical revolutionary situation. In the text this scenario is called inevitable, but it didn't happen, so it wasn't. I'm not really surprised the 1850 Address isn't well known, and its legacy is this one sentence, it's referring to a period that was unique or at least hasn't been repeated, and a lot of its immediate predictions didn't pan out, and ultimately Marx and Engels would soon move away from the strategy it promotes.

During the early 19th century, there was a continental wide explosion in the popularity of militias of one type or another. Some like the Yeomanry of England were established by men of property and their sons to be a supporting force for the professional army, as was the case in the Peterloo massacre. Others were more plural bodies of the citizenry and were supposed to assist the nation in times of strive, and there were also more radical and less official bodies made up of working men. 

Compare: Above the Yeomanry at Peterloo, and below the more popular and insurrectionary militia at Prague, 1848.

This movement was in response to general conditions and developments, rather than the strategy of any would be leaders of the workers. The nobles and industrialists and landowners grew worried that the professional forces of law and order were incapable of offering sufficient protection from rebellious peasants and workers, so funded and established their own bodies of armed men. The growing national movements of professional politicians and thinkers felt that the professional armies which were still in the hands of a powerful King or noble class were not truly representatives of the nation, and so agitated for the creation of citizens and national militias to form a truly patriotic force. Meanwhile, more radical elements amongst the workers and student fraternities also promoted the establishment of armed bodies, both to play a role in some expected insurrection and to act as a counterweight to the violence of the authorities. There was also a Liberal utopian case for the militia system at the time, it was argued that militias were sufficient to protect life, liberty and property at home, and man the city walls and "natural" borders in time of crisis, but weren't suited for offensive action, so by adopting the militia and replacing or at least heavily reducing professional armies, the militia could be the seed for greater international peace. 

A key issue among the pre-1848 German liberal opposition to the existing order was the reduction if not the abolition of princely standing armies and their replacement by militias based on universal male military service (also see entry under Military Reform). Their models were the 1793 French levee en masse, an idealized memory of the halcyon days of the Prussian Landwehr during the 1813 war of liberation or the local municipal civil guards of self-governing towns. What these shared was a stress on a non-professional armed force of citizens serving only in times of emergency. Liberals generally associated standing armies with wars of aggression and believed that militias could only be used for defense. A Europe of militias would be at peace.

Popular Militias

For years, this grew into a very heterodox movement of militias in many European nations, until in 1848 when the situation exploded into mass revolts in France, the German states, the Italian states, and the Habsburg Empire including in Prague, Hungary and Vienna. The 1848 Revolutions were a chaotic mix of participants and ideologies, liberalism, republicanism, democracy, nationalism, and to an extent early socialism played its part in motivating and shaping the struggles.

 

It's difficult to untangle, but in general terms, and I must stress general, the militias that were composed mainly of the affluent and the gentry sided with the reactionary governments, while those with a more popular and working class composition tended to side with the more radical forces. 

For example, the French National Guard in Paris:

 In February 1848, the Paris National Guard's some 50,000 members were divided into twelve legions, one for each of the city's arrondissements. The legions, in turn, were broken down into battalions, recruited at the level of the quartiers of each arrondissment. The legions were commanded by colonels or lieutenant-colonels, the battalions by majors, captains, and sometimes lieutenants. Of the city's twelve National Guard legions, only one, the first, from the notoriously haute bourgeois Champs Elysée-Place Vendôme district, would prove loyal to the monarchy at the onset of the February revolution. The mass defection of the guard has been seen by many historians as the crucial event in the collapse of the Orleanist regime. Georges Duveau contended that "the insurrection [of the February 1848] could have been brought under control if the National Guard had remained loyal to the system." He added that the morale of the regular army plummeted when the troops "realized that [they] were liable to be struck in the back by the National Guard."

The French National Guard - Bruce Vandervort

Though there were exceptions, in Hungary the Habsburg Emperor faced a revolt led by Hungarian nobles and was able to win support from the serfs by promising to abolish serfdom, while the nobles didn't offer them much of anything. While the insurrectionary wave was a sustained challenge to the established authorities and did force a number of political concessions like the abolition of serfdom in the Habsburg Empire, the wave was defeated with the powers of Europe remaining intact if shaken and bruised. As a result the widespread popularity for the people armed, and militias greatly declined amongst the liberals and the conservatives, and there were moves to control and disarm the surviving radical armed bodies, though a minority of them remained in existence for a while yet.

The address of 1850 was a response to this aftermath, this is why it talks about a "proletarian guard" and opposition to the revival of the "citizens" militia movement. There were still some armed workers groups, many workers had been armed and experience combat and the storing and use of weapons, and the idea that workers could form armed guards and fighting forces was a recent memory. He wasn't talking about an unrestricted market in guns for the consumer, which exists in the USA of today. Most of those arms held by people in the famous paintings of barricade fighting were bought clandestinely or seized from the state armouries for what its worth. 

But does it really matter? Well it's dishonest and adds to the general confusion which is a problem, but there is a much more serious problem with taking Marx out of context to weigh in on the American gun culture debate. That is, the American worker is already disarmed. The workers were armed in the 1800s through several forces hundreds or even thousands strong, and were actively training themselves in combat techniques. The American working class is not armed because a plumber can afford to have a small collection of generic (or "civilian" as Americans call them) rifles, nor because a UPS delivery driver can save up to buy a small revolver. Even if a greater proportion of the more dangerous weapons were bought by Americans on lower incomes this wouldn't change anything. 

I used to own a gun and know several people who work for a living and still have some, no one would be taken seriously claiming the working class of the UK is armed and should resist attempts to disarm them. 

The American class is not armed and in danger of being disarmed, that's not what the gun control debate is about. What America does have is a relatively unrestricted market for firearms, with one political group wishing to push for  more restrictions on commercial transactions while the other side is pushing for even fewer. What militia movement North America does have is a scattering of ill-disciplined far right fanatics anticipating and longing for a sort of apocalyptic race war. If anything, they're more reactionary than the most reactionary elements in Europe in the 1850s.

The two just aren't comparable, if anything I believe the laissez-faire gun market that exists in the modern United States is evidence of the lack of such a presence. There was a period of time when the class struggle in the US was extremely violent with essentially smaller re-enactments of the Civil war breaking out, in the mining towns of the South west and the Appalachians, but after the battle of Blair Mountain and the end of the 1920s armed working men getting into stand-offs with the company security, and the police, and the national guard gradually faded. When the spectre of radical armed insurgency reared its head, as shown by the Black Panther Party, the response was Reagan's gun control measures for the state of California. The New Left of the 60s and 70s did see isolated pockets of armed resistance, but these were quickly and brutally isolated and neutralised by the 1980s. 

So I don't think it's particularly wise to put the cart before the horse and try to will a revolutionary army into existence. The only way I see that leading is in a new form of Foquismo which only really works in conflict as depicted by video games. If American revolutionists really wish to live up to this scarecrow of Marx, then they'll have to put a lot more work in, I'm aware there are now several active gun clubs, it's not on the same scale as the militia columns, but hopefully if nothing else they're raising the standards of gun safety and discipline. Possibly they could be the foundations for a more substantial force, assuming that is even something desirable or viable, but we'll have to wait and see.

1937: Juan García Oliver Speech About Durruti and the time of Pistoleros and action groups

 

 

I found this speech given at some point in 1937 by Juan Garcia Oliver while looking for public domain footage of the Spanish Civil War and the years that preceded it. Oliver had joined the CNT Anarcho-syndicalist union in 1919 and in the early 1920s took an active part in the illegal action groups. The groups carried out reprisals for the murder of Anarchists and union members and with the group Los Solidarios Oliver took part in some high profile assassinations. In the 1930s Oliver took part in several abortive insurrections in Catalunya and was in prison until an amnesty in 1936. 

During the civil war he oscillated wildly between posts and ideological positions, initially supporting the full implementation of Libertarian Communism and joining a column at the front in Aragon, before being called back to be a CNT representative and later joining the Caballero republican government. During the Mayday's clashes between the Republic and the more revolutionary elements, he urged a ceasefire and unity with the government. In his tenure as Minister of Justice, he was associated with abolishing court fees and destroying court records, but also had a role in the establishment of work camps and prisons.

 

 

Link  

 

Text of the speech.

 
Our anarchist group was founded in the year 1923.

In circumstances that were very bad for our movement, very sad for the whole working class,
The pistoleros of the "Sindicato Libre*", sponsored by the bourgeoisie, were almost owners of the city.
The police hordes contributed to the destruction of our organizations and our men.
Salvador Seguí, the titan of anarcho-syndicalism, had fallen.
Old militants, the first men of our so splendid movement today, had fallen.
When we thought that the moment of being completely defeated was probably coming,
We united, in that moment,  we who I have no shame in saying, we who I have pride in confessing:
The kings of the working-class, pistol of Barcelona!
We lived and acted disunited.

But we made a selection!
The best terrorists of the working class
The ones who could best return punch by punch and deliver the final victory to the proletariat
We split from the other comrades, we united, and we formed an anarchist group.
A group of action, to fight!
Against the pistoleros, against the bourgeoisie, and against the government!
We achieved our goal: we won!
Our punches were harder, more towards the head, than theirs.
And the group was formed, and it was an oath of those who joined it, that, from that moment on, our group "Los Solidarios" we'd continue the struggle, until the total triumph of the working class, until the triumph of the social revolution and that only death could separate us.
The first to fall was comrade Eusebio, in Asturias.
Comrade Torin also fell, in Barcelona.
The comrades Suberviela and Torres Escartín suffered in prison.
And when we, after the Republic was established, came out of the prisons, and united once again in Spain, we continued the group, and then, we renamed to, "Nosotros".

We (Nosotros), who have no name!
We, who have no pride!
We, who are a mass!
We, who will go one by one!
We (Nosotros)!
We have a debt.
Durruti paid it.
For the revolution and in honor to his commitment.
We who are, like Durruti, to show Europe we stopped at the last compromise.
Time has been proving it:
It is not a test of a day nor a year.
It is a test of (???).
It was paid.
It was accomplished.
Durruti did his duty,
and we, who are still here, will also do it.
Death is nothing!
Our individual lives are NOTHING!
That's why we are "Nosotros".
And while one of us is left, "Nosotros" lives on.
That's all.

* A labour union set up by the industrialists of Barcelona in an attempt to break the much more militant CNT Union. Its leadership was complicit in the Pistoleros campaigns, informing on CNT members.

UPDATE:

Found a youtube channel affiliated with the CGT union in Valencia which has the full recording of the film online. 

It also has more information,

Documental realizado por la CNT en homenaje a Durruti en el primer aniversario de su muerte y dedicado a su viuda Emiliana Morín y a su hija Colette Durruti.  Comienza con unas imágenes del cementerio de Montjuich tras lo que se pasa a un acto de homenaje anarquista en el cine Tívoli de Barcelona. Vemos la intervención de cuatro dirigentes anarquistas, entre ellos a Juan García Oliver, que hace un discurso sobre la importancia de Durruti y la CNT en la lucha revolucionaria.  De nuevo en el cementerio, un antiguo miembro de la Columna Durruti, transformada en la 26 División, se dirige a la multitud prometiendo seguir la lucha por las ideas del líder caído. García Oliver da un inflamado discurso en el que recuerda a Durruti y al grupo de acción anarquista "Los Solidarios", la muerte de Salvador Seguí al que aplicaron la "Ley de fugas", y la lucha que mantuvieron contra los pistoleros del Sindicato Libre. Este discurso está intercalado con imágenes de ficción entre las que destaca una recreación de la aplicación de la "Ley de fugas".

Translation

 

 Documentary made by the CNT in homage to Durruti on the first anniversary of his death and dedicated to his widow Emiliana Morín and his daughter Colette Durruti.  It begins with some images of the Montjuich cemetery after which an anarchist tribute act is held at the Tívoli cinema in Barcelona. We see the intervention of four anarchist leaders, among them Juan García Oliver, who makes a speech about the importance of Durruti and the CNT in the revolutionary struggle.  Back in the cemetery, a former member of the Durruti Column, transformed into the 26th Division, addresses the crowd promising to continue the fight for the fallen leader's ideas. García Oliver gives an inflamed speech in which he remembers Durruti and the anarchist action group "Los Solidarios", the death of Salvador Seguí to whom the "Law of Fugitives*" was applied, and the fight they waged against the gunmen of the Free Trade Union. This speech is interspersed with fictional images, among which a recreation of the application of the "Law of Fugitives" stands out.

* The Ley de fugas or Law of fugitives was a law that authorised the shooting of prisoners attempting to escape. It was widely used by the police to execute prisoners out of hand.

A modest defence of the Langoliers

 

 

Recently I've dived back into Stephen King, both his stories and the many adaptions for film and tv. I've just finished the novella the Langoliers, which has been on my to read list for a good while. As a young kid I remember watching the Langoliers TV miniseries on the Sci-Fi channel. It's quite a long run time for two parts, 90 minutes with advert breaks. It has a bit of a reputation, it's mainly remembered for early 1990s CG special effects, and memes about its dialogue. Not many King fans care for it, and I'd be lying if I claimed it made my top 10, but I do think it has its charms. Having read the novella and re-watched the mini-series which is just on youtube, I find the derision is a bit overcooked. 

It's not without its flaws, the dialogue is indeed very strange, but most of that is from the novella, I was surprised while reading, but the TV show is very close and faithful to the original story, it's easily one of the most faithful to source material adaptions in the Stephen King filmography. Often it's word for word, and that includes Mr Toomey's* infamous "Scaring the little girl? LAY-D"! Tantrum and Nick's bizarre American stereotype of an Englishman. Now, that doesn't entirely absolve Directer and teleplay writer Tom Holland here, you are allowed to make changes, and should do to account for format and other differences. Punching up or reworking the dialogue was an option and while it does have its charms, re-working was probably the way to go. One example of the faithful dialogue that should've been changed or just cut entirely was Dinah the blind girl's line about cereal and milk, "it sounds... a little like rice crispies after you pour in the milk". This is a slight change from the novella, there Dinah still says that, but all the other characters once they hear the sound make different comparisons, radio static, crunching etc, it supposed to reflect each character's experiences and inability to describe accurately an alien sound, which adds to the creepiness and gives a little more depth to each character. The show just cut all but Dinah's which limits the character development and comes across rather silly.

I say it should've been changed or just dropped entirely because it deflates one of the Langoliers key strengths, its sound design. The great strength of the show is that throughout part I and much of Part II, clunky lines aside, it does a lot to convey a sense of wrongness and building tension and dread. The sound design is key to that, muffling echoes when the characters arrive at Bangor airport, and most importantly, the noise of the Langoliers. There's a very low, almost unnoticeable at first background noise, that slowly, very slowly builds in volume and intensity as the threat approaches until as they draw near its impossible to ignore. And it is a strange sound that's hard to identify precisely. This is what hooked me to beg my parents and let me stay up late on two school nights in a row to watch the show. My parents have no interest or love for science fiction, view it with contempt, so to agree to let me stay up and watch it on the family telly that had cable took some doing. I was quite intrigued and wanted to know what had in fact happened, I doubt I'd ever seen a horror story like it, where the threat and hostility came from just how wrong and off the world was.

Unfortunately, its greatest strength is also the show's greatest weakness, it builds and builds and builds upon itself. The mystery of what happened keeps deepening, the Langoliers march from the distance continues, Craig Toomey's trauma and high-stress existence drive him further and further down a violent breakdown, endangering himself and the other passengers. And then finally, in the final third of the second episode, it all comes to a climax that fizzles out. The Langoliers show up and they are terrible indeed, just not in the way they were supposed to be. Even for the 1990s the CG effects are shockingly poor, I had seen Reboot and Insektors and enjoyed both immensely, their early episodes are in another league compared to this. I have seen concept art of what the Langoliers would look like as practical effect models, they look a bit better, but ultimately I think the design is a major limitation, the teeth simply must have looked better if they had gone that route instead, but as cheap and artificial as the CG one's look, they follow King's descriptions in the novella exactly. It's a testament to King's skill that he wrote a story whose pay off is floating meat balls with teeth to eat the world once time passes, and it was published as a serious work of horror laced fiction that takes a philosophical look at our relationship with time as a concept and force, it wasn't until a studio put it on the screen that people finally realized just how naff that is. Again, though, they must've known how silly and stupid that design would look like out of the minds of readers and in reality. I don't know why changes weren't considered. Then again, they might not have been able to come up with a satisfying alternative with the time and resources they had available.

So in summary, while I think the Langoliers time in the sun has passed, I do think it has its merits, and I am a little sad that most people just see the gay stereotype from the Beverly Hills Cop movies** running around an abandoned airport and passed gifs of his lines on social media. His character is one of the better ones in the show, and there is a lot of depth and emotional baggage and turmoil. I would like to recommend anyone curious to track down the novella, it's the first entry in the collection Four Past Midnight, and perhaps give the show a go, just try to go into it with an open mind, you don't watch all of it though, if you don't like Part I, you can stop, it's the strongest part and the best bits of Part II are what's good about Part I.

*I suppose since everyone else who talks about the show does, but Craig Toomey was played by Bronson Pinchot, star of Perfect Strangers. However, I'm not American, and that show wasn't big over here, I'm not even sure if it was ever broadcast, so I didn't recognize him, and I'm only aware of that fact because everyone else who talks about this show bringing it up, often at length.

** Yes, we did get those, including Beverly Hills Cop III, I suspect Bronson Pinchot doesn't have a very good agent, or has an amazing one with a massive grudge against him.