Both sides of ‘gun debate’ target rights of workers

....Capitalist rulers fear that the deepening economic and social crises of their system will force bigger battles with working people ahead. They seize on every opportunity to cut away at political rights, seeking to make it harder for workers to fight back.

In the current debate, most representatives of the propertied rulers stress the need to strengthen the armed bodies of the capitalist state and their related institutions—the cops, courts and “registries” of dangerous people.

And many want to restrict workers’ access to guns, seeking a monopoly on arms in the hands of their cops and military forces.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution—like the rest of the Bill of Rights won in struggle by workers and farmers that serve as restrictions on and protections from the government—guarantees the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” against government infringement.

Opponents of the Second Amendment argue that “public safety” necessitates scrapping that right as a relic of the past enacted in a different period when popular militias existed and before the invention of automatic weapons.

But working people are not safer with a monopoly of firearms in the hands of cops and other armed bodies whose job is to protect property and prerogatives of the capitalist exploiters. Defending all workers’ rights against stepped-up encroachments by the bosses and their government become more, not less important today, as the employing class mounts assaults on our wages and working conditions.

The Second Amendment is among the constitutional protections that working people wielded as part of the mass proletarian fight for Black rights in the 1960s. Groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice and Robert Williams’ NAACP chapter in Monroe, N.C., maintained their right to bear arms and used them to stay the hand of racist thugs and cops, protect social protest actions and Black communities and prevent bloodshed.

At the same time, the working-class movement has nothing in common with the gun-rights politics of rightist militia outfits or with vigilante “justice” and so-called Stand Your Ground laws that promote them. But the working-class political battle against such reactionary movements and laws cannot be advanced by calls for government restrictions on any rights of working people.

Anti-social violence and senseless murder do not come from video games or legal rights to own guns. They are not a product of too many constitutional rights or too few armed cops at every corner. They are first and foremost a by-product of social relations under capitalism—buttressed by cop brutality, deaths and maimings on the job, and bloody wars of conquest abroad.

And violent crimes within the working class can be exacerbated by the myriad social pressures that mount under the grinding effects of the capitalist crisis.

At the same time, the rise of mass working-class struggles to come will replace capitalism’s dog-eat-dog values with social solidarity, just as they always have in the past. It’s this solidarity and the transformation of working people and their view of themselves that develops in the course of struggle against capitalist exploitation that is the most powerful weapon against anti-social behavior of all kinds.  

https://www.themilitant.com/2013/7701/770101.html

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….The Militant ran an article in the Jan. 14 issue titled “Both Sides of Gun Debate Target Rights of Workers,” which explained that proposals put forward by capitalist politicians and the media—from the “left” and “right”—were aimed against the working class.

Seizing on public outrage, these proposals included inroads on the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, more cops with greater powers, armed vigilantes and posses, restrictions and greater lockup of those deemed mentally ill, restrictions on movie and game content, and increased spying under the guise of predicting and preempting mass-murder outbursts.

Riding a wave of calls for tighter government restrictions on gun sales, led by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and liberal forces, Obama announced he would bypass the nuisance of congressional debate and vote-taking by issuing the first new laws by executive decree. The move is one of many that are part of a trend toward strengthening powers of the executive branch of government.

The orders are directed at expanding background checks and the data they contain for guns purchased; narrowing the pool of people eligible to own guns; strengthen cops ability to go after “gun crime”; and expanding deployment of cops in high schools. Obama presented a number of other proposals for Congress to discuss.

The announced measures come out of a presidential-appointed task force headed by Vice President Joseph Biden, which included Attorney General Eric Holder and the top officials of the departments of Homeland Security, Education, and Health and Human Services.

The task force met first with opponents of Second Amendment rights and then with proponents, including the National Rifle Association and the owners of Walmart. It also met with video game manufacturers and movie executives in order to consider new restrictions on violent media content.

“Friends of Mr. Bloomberg said he came to view guns, like tobacco and unhealthy food, as a dangerous consumer product,” the New York Times reported Dec. 21.

Obama has long bemoaned workers’ alleged “fixation” on guns, viewing it as a symptom of their lower intelligence and prejudice.

“It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment,” Obama told a San Francisco fundraiser in April 2008.

“The president should not be able to act unilaterally when it comes to our constitutional rights,” Congressman Jeff Duncan, Republican from South Carolina, said. “Executive orders were meant as a way for the president to implement legislatively passed laws, not to make law.”

Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has said Congress will put off dealing with gun control legislation for at least three months because of fiscal policy deadlines he claims will consume all the legislature’s time.

Unilateral executive action has been a feature of Democratic and Republican presidents alike over many decades, especially in areas of spying and “national security.” Obama has been taking it a few steps further, from secret executive approval of warrantless Internet spying to presidential orders for assassination of those the government labels “terrorists.”

Like the new laws being floated for gun restrictions, these decrees are peddled to working people as necessary concessions for the sake of our “security.”

Obama is considering taking similar executive action around the issue of the so-called debt ceiling.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg and his cops in New York announced Dec. 20 they are taking steps to use “precrime” spying to find and neutralize “lone gunmen” who can become mass killers.

They intend to copy National Security Agency measures, authorized by executive orders from both George W. Bush and Obama, to spy on people’s Internet and phone communications.

“The goal would be to identify the shooter in cyberspace, engage him there and intervene, possibly using an undercover to get close, and take him into custody or otherwise disrupt his plans,” New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said in a statement reported in the New York Times.  

https://www.themilitant.com/2013/7703/770303.html

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....Hundreds of thousands took to the streets coast to coast March 24 in what they called a March for Our Lives. The well-financed marches were promoted by Democratic Party politicians and liberal celebrities, with an unprecedented volume of unpaid publicity by media bosses. Some see this as the issue to use to defeat Republican candidates in the upcoming elections and get at President Donald Trump. Others see the working class as dangerous “deplorables” who must be disarmed and restrained.

It comes at a time when workers increasingly see the need to rebuild the labor movement and fight the tyranny of capitalist class rule.

March organizers demanded a ban on semi-automatic weapons, raising the age limit for buying guns, stricter background checks for gun purchases and other restrictions and regulations on gun ownership.

Former Justice Stevens says the Second Amendment is a long outdated relic that should be repealed. This, he says, would “eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States.”

The protests were answered by some rightist forces. These deadly opponents of the working class also anticipate growing class combat and are interested in protecting their guns accordingly.

The debate takes place as working people are engaged in strikes and labor protests in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky and elsewhere, drawing attention and solidarity from workers everywhere, and beginning to point a way forward for the labor movement.

In this context, our political rights are crucial.

Restrict rights, more armed cops
On the eve of the march, school district officials in Broward County, Florida, announced that starting in April Parkland students will be allowed to use only see-through backpacks and must wear identification badges at all times. And they are planning to install metal detectors. Florida Gov. Rick Scott is sending eight armed state cops to guard the school. And from now on the district will station at least one armed cop at every school there.

Similar measures are being taken around the country. So the call for restrictions and regulations on the right to bear arms are coupled with moves to increase the presence of armed cops, in the schools and on the streets.

“That’s an invasion of privacy,” New York high school student Felix Rodriguez told the Militant at the march here when he heard about the clear backpacks.

Importance of Second Amendment
Like Stevens, some march participants carried signs saying, “Repeal the Second Amendment.” The amendment says, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

It was enacted because of popular pressure as part of the fight for the Bill of Rights — a series of defense measures against the interference of the government with the rights and struggles of workers and farmers by the newly created U.S. government. Taken together with bars against government attacks on free speech, free exercise of religion, the right to protest, against unreasonable search and seizure, against being forced to testify against yourself, for the right to a speedy trial and not to be deprived of life, liberty and property without due process of law, these protections are crucially important to the working class today and its ability to fight.

No working-class voice
Absent from the debate in bourgeois politics over “gun control” is a working-class point of view.

With the exception of the Socialist Workers Party virtually every organization in the U.S. that calls itself socialist — including the Communist Party, Workers World Party, International Socialist Organization, Socialist Alternative and others — has caved into the pressure from the liberal left and embraced the protests as a road forward.

Mass shootings like in Parkland, gang violence and crime are not new. They’re not products of the existence of guns. They are products of the dog-eat-dog morality and violence of the workings of capitalism, exacerbated today by the crisis of capitalism and its effects on working people — from drug addiction to crime. Capitalism’s anti-working-class culture of “look out for number one” and “step on anyone who gets in your way” breeds anti-social violence.

The biggest threat to working people today is the violence of the propertied rulers — deaths and maiming on the job, premature deaths from their refusal of medical care, cop brutality, the U.S. rulers’ bloody wars to defend their imperialist interests abroad.

“Graft and crime and extortions and rackets are the symptomatic products of a diseased social system and its false values,” James P. Cannon, one of the founders of the Socialist Workers Party and its first national secretary, wrote in 1951. “These dark and evil symptoms can’t be eliminated, or even seriously curbed, until they are tackled at the source. A party that says this … is not excusing crime and criminals or evading the issue; it is, rather, dealing with the issue realistically and fundamentally.”

As the class struggle heats up, the rulers will be more and more interested in curtailing our rights and at the same time assuring that their cops and rightist goons are armed to the teeth. The stakes for the working class — and most everyone else — are huge.

We can push back anti-social violence of every description in only one way — with working people in their millions standing up and fighting for better working conditions, against police brutality, for women’s rights, against imperialism’s wars around the world. A byproduct of young people and others having something to fight for, of seeing solidarity in action, will be a decline in crime and in senseless acts of violence.

This can only be made permanent through a social revolution, where the working class takes political and economic power out of the hands of the capitalist class once and for all, transforming ourselves in the process, and joins the worldwide fight for socialism.

https://themilitant.com/2018/04/09/second-amendment-important-for-rights-of-the-working-class/

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....Political preparation for what is coming has a decisive bearing on how working people should respond to the stepped-up calls by liberals today for restrictions on our rights, including the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

A steady stream of articles lauding the “children’s crusade for gun control” has filled the pages of the liberal media and the papers of the left since March 24, when hundreds of thousands joined demonstrations across the country. They were demanding a new range of tests and restrictions on gun ownership, following the brutal killing of students at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

Many of these commentators praise the young age of those at the actions. “Students Lead Nationwide Crusade for Gun Control,” wrote the online People’s World, which reflects the views of the Communist Party. That young people would want to take to the streets in the midst of teachers’ protests across the country and protests against the cop killings of Stephon Clark and Saheed Vassell should be of no surprise.

But whether an action advances working-class interests has nothing to do with the age of the participants. That depends on whether it strengthens the unity and self-confidence of working people and points a road forward for independent political action. Protests demanding more restrictions and regulations on our hard-won rights head in the opposite direction.

Liberals have made such calls for years and it is the political outlook of these capitalist politicians that shaped the March 24 protests.

They increasingly see workers as “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton said in the 2016 campaign. She doubled-down on this last month in India, where she said President Donald Trump won support from workers in smaller towns in the middle of the country who were “looking backwards.” She claimed working women turned against her under pressure from their husbands and bosses.

In 2008 former President Barack Obama connected gun ownership with his broader scorn for working people. He described workers who had lost their jobs in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, saying, “It’s not surprising … they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.”

After the killings in Florida, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens called for repeal of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, saying it’s outdated.

He took aim at a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia that confirmed that the Second Amendment says people have the right to bear arms to defend themselves. At the same time, he also said states have the power to establish some restrictions on weapons in places like schools.

What’s important for workers today is not that individuals can get guns to fight the cops and company agents. That would be an adventure and lead to nothing but defeats for the working class.

Lessons from past working-class battles
In the 1930s the explosive growth of the labor movement led to sizable and sharp clashes with the employers and their government — in Germany, elsewhere in Europe and in the U.S. Fearing their rule was threatened, the capitalist rulers turned to rightist thugs and fascist gangs to try to attack working-class struggles and bust up the unions. This isn’t happening today.

“The sharpening of the proletariat’s struggle means the sharpening of the methods of counterattack on the part of capital,” Leon Trotsky, a leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, wrote in 1938. “The bourgeoisie is nowhere satisfied with the official police and army.” As the capitalist rulers turned to armed thugs to attack the workers, Trotsky said, “only armed workers’ detachments, who feel the support of tens of millions of toilers behind them, can successfully prevail against the fascist bands.”

The course outlined by Trotsky is contained in the “Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution,” which was adopted by the Socialist Workers Party.

The leadership of the Teamsters union in Minneapolis responded decisively in 1938 to an organizing drive in the city by the fascist outfit called the Silver Shirts. The goons’ leader, Roy Zachary, called for an armed raid on the union’s headquarters. The union organized a workers defense guard.

“Members of the guard were not armed by the union, since in the given circumstances that would have made them vulnerable to police frame-ups,” explained Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the union and the Socialist Workers Party, in his book Teamster Politics. “But many of them had guns of their own at home, which were used to hunt game; and those could quickly have been picked up if needed to fight off an armed attack by Silver Shirt thugs.”

The emergency mobilization of several hundred determined and disciplined members of the guard convinced the Silver Shirts to back off and leave town.

The workers defense guard grew out of intensified union and social struggles. Union leaders sought to draw into its ranks the widest layer of workers. It relied on battle-tested, disciplined cadre and leaders capable of avoiding provocation.

Today the rulers prepare for bigger struggles to come by seeking to restrict our rights to organize and defend ourselves, including limiting workers access to guns. That’s why workers today need to oppose government measures that restrict workers’ rights, like their right to bear arms.

https://themilitant.com/2018/05/05/coming-class-battles-pose-need-to-defend-political-rights-today/