19.11.2015

Second amendment Marxism or inveterate pacifism

Jack Conrad and Salman Shaheen debated the right to bear arms

Jack Conrad puts the case for the right to bear arms

I would like to begin by referring to two editions of BBC2’s Daily Politics show. The first was in March 2014 and featured Salman Shaheen being interviewed by Andrew Neil. The second was in February 2015 and featured Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, again being interviewed by Andrew Neil.

Comrade Shaheen did well. He came over as calm, reasonable and good-natured. However, it has to be said that Andrew Neil gave him an easy ride, certainly compared with the way he treated Natalie Bennett. I readily admit, I have mixed feelings about the Green Party. It is a petty bourgeois formation that damns the ecological crimes of present-day capitalism, but dreams of an ecologically sustainable future capitalism. Nonetheless, I did sympathise with Bennett on this occasion, not least because every time she opened her mouth Neil insisted on interrupting her. It was a bullying, hectoring, swaggering attempt to do a hatchet job.

One particular response to the interview that has stuck in my mind came from the Army Rumour Service. Years ago, back in the early 2000s, various unofficial websites were established to serve as a discussion forum for members of the armed forces. Now, of course, ARRSE, as it is irreverently known, is safely under the control of officially approved moderators. Anyway, amongst the politer quips was: “Bennett got her ass whooped”. Despite the officially approved moderators the comments thread is often violent and sexist. What caused particular delight was Neil’s sneering mockery of the Green Party’s proposal to replace the standing army and with some sort of territorial army - one that does not operate abroad without United Nations permission and otherwise acts as a purely defensive arm of the state. This is long-standing Green policy and has been revised or updated at Green Party conferences.

However, the reaction of the left was perhaps more interesting than that of the army’s personnel. You might have expected that the left would have rallied to Bennett’s side on this question. Or, given that this was in the midst of the so-called Green surge, at least provided an opportunity for critical commentary.

But, no, in the Morning Star there was absolute silence - even though the paper frequently covers the Green Party and gives space to leading members such as Caroline Lucas, Derek Wall, Amelia Womack and, no surprise, Natalie Bennett herself. Likewise there was absolute silence from The Socialist, Socialist Worker and Left Unity (apart from the Communist Platform). It is as if the demand for a popular militia and the abolition of the standing army is something of an embarrassment, something the left feels guilty about, even fears.

That takes me back to comrade Shaheen’s own appearance and Andrew Neil asking him about a Communist Platform motion to Left Unity’s March 29 2014 conference on the standing army and the right to bear arms. This is what the motion says:

Left Unity is against the standing army and for the armed people. This principle will never be realised voluntarily by the capitalist state. It has to be won, in the first place by the working class developing its own militia.

Such a body grows out of the class struggle itself: defending picket lines, mass demonstrations, workplace occupations, fending off fascists, etc.

As the class struggle intensifies, conditions are created for the workers to arm themselves and win over sections of the military forces of the capitalist state. Every opportunity must be used to take even tentative steps towards this goal. As circumstances allow, the working class must equip itself with all weaponry necessary to bring about revolution.

To facilitate this we demand:

1. Rank-and-file personnel in the state’s armed bodies must be protected from bullying, humiliating treatment and being used against the working class.

2. There must be full trade union and democratic rights, including the right to form bodies such as soldiers’ councils.

3. The privileges of the officer caste must be abolished. Officers must be elected. Workers in uniform must become the allies of the masses in struggle.

4. The people have the right to bear arms and defend themselves.

5. The dissolution of the standing army and the formation of a popular militia under democratic control.

Andrew Neil claimed that this reminded him of the Tea Party. You would think that as a committed Americophile the poor man would know something about the 1776 revolution, the 1788 US constitution and where the pressure for the 1791 second amendment came from. In full the second amendment reads: “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.” Needless to say, this formulation did not originate with American reactionaries, slave owners or Tory loyalists. No, it came from the American radicals, democrats and anti-slavery leftists - the popular forces who made the revolution were determined never to see a US version of George III.

And it is worth remembering where those who wrote the US constitution and the second amendment got their legal template. It was from this country, not least from the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. There is a myth that before 1066 and the Norman yoke England was a land of Anglo-Saxon liberty. Of course, this is complete baloney. But it is a myth that informs, colours and leads to democratic interpretations of the 1215 Magna Carta and then the 1689 Bill of Rights.

Let us recall the reign of James II. Just before the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1689 there was the Monmouth Rebellion, which because it wanted to appeal to popular forces was fought under the green flag of the Levellers. What was its slogan? The right of the Protestant population to bear arms. James II was in the process of putting together a powerful standing army with a view to imposing an autocracy along French or Spanish lines. Integral to the 1689 William and Mary compromise with parliament was the Bill of Rights. It states that “raising or keeping a standing army” in peacetime is “against the law”, unless with the “consent of parliament”. Furthermore, there is the ringing declaration that Protestant subjects “may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions”. This passage clearly inspired the writers of the second amendment.

What about our own, working class tradition? Let me cite the parties of the Second International. The 1880 programme of the French Workers Party, jointly authored by Karl Marx along with Jules Guesde, includes this demand: “Abolition of standing armies and the general arming of the people.” Then there is the 1891 Erfurt programme of the German Social Democratic Party: “Education of all to bear arms. Militia in the place of the standing army.” If we turn to the programme of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party, what do we find? Yes, once again the right to bear arms: ie, “general arming of the people instead of maintaining a standing army”. Even the father of revisionism, Eduard Bernstein, in his 1889 Evolutionary socialism, does not flinch over the demand for a popular militia. It was the common sense of the workers’ and democratic movement in Europe and the Americas going back at the very least to the 17th century.

Let us also consider British history from below. During the Great Strike of 1984-85 the miners set up hit squads in order to resist police violence and deal with scabs. The hit squads fought on and off the picket lines and we were quite right to give them our fullest backing. In fact we urged the hit squads to rise to the organisational and political level of the workers’ defence corps which the CPGB guided in the 1926 General Strike. They were remarkably effective. Take the town of Methil in Scotland’s Fife coalfield. When the police viciously attacked picket lines, the workers responded by forming a powerful defence corps. Hundreds-strong and marching in military formation, it was led by a man on a white horse - he was apparently a member of the Social Democratic Federation. Reports say that no further violence came from the police. They were scared off. The potential to inflict violence resulted in a peaceful outcome. A vital lesson.

In the Weekly Worker’s ‘What we fight for’ column we state that the working class must be readied to make revolution “peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must”. A slogan taken from the physical-force wing of the Chartist movement. Like them we are painfully aware that violence is not a goal to be positively pursued. If we can have a peaceful revolution, so much the better. Violent revolution means that our class will suffer death, severe deprivation and maybe starvation. Their class, by contrast, can always fly away into a luxurious exile.

What requirements do we need in order to achieve a peaceful revolution? Well, not only do we need a party of many millions and the mass of the people behind us. We need to take decisive steps to ensure that the ruling class cannot resort to violence. What is the instrument of violence of the ruling class? Primarily the armed forces.

If there were a Left Unity government, would we expect the bourgeoisie, civil service, the secret state, the army high command to simply sit back while our government carries out its programme? They would sabotage and subvert, and if that fails their last resort would be a slave-owner’s revolt.

No-one should forget the CIA-organised 1973 military coup against the Allende government in Chile. Thousands were butchered, tortured or simply disappeared. The best guarantee against such a horrible outcome is gaining the backing from the mass of the population … and winning over the army rank and file.

During the Russian Revolution there were workers’ soviets, peasants’ soviets … but also soldiers’ soviets. Who defended the right to take the revolution forward? Who famously overthrew the provisional government by storming the Winter Palace? The worker-based Red Guards of the Petrograd Soviet … and the pro-Bolshevik army regiments. And it is worth noting that more people died making Sergei Einstein’s celebratory film October (1928) than in the actual 1917 revolution itself. The potential to inflict violence resulted in a largely peaceful revolution.

Let me cite another interview. In 2009 we questioned Dave Nellist of the Socialist Party in England and Wales. This was just before the European elections in which he was standing as a candidate for ‘No to EU, Yes to Democracy’. We asked him about his attitude towards the right to bear arms. Comrade Nellist said we should talk to him after the election was over - unfortunately he still will not give us his views on the subject. We brought the same question up with the general secretary of Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain. Robert Griffiths was also standing for the red-brown No2EU lash-up. The comrade worriedly denounced the question as a CPGB provocation. If you raise the right to bear arms, MI5 and the police will soon be round and all in all use it as an excuse for further acts of repression.

But neither MI5, special branch nor GCHQ need such an excuse in order to do what they do. This is one of the reasons why we oppose the stupid cult of secrecy that exists on the left. The dark forces know exactly what we are saying, doing and even dreaming (in truth they know more about the left than the left knows about itself). Does the state really need us raise such a basic Marxist demand as the right to bear arms in order to bug, monitor, infiltrate and disrupt. Wikileaks, Edward Snowden and Chelsea (Bradley) Manning have shown us otherwise.

When it comes to standing in elections, most of the existing left, including the self-declared revolutionary left, stands, in practice, to the right of Natalie Bennett and the Green Party. They are not revolutionary and not even particularly radical in terms of their manifestos, priority points and commitments. The right to bear arms is not a revolutionary demand. It is a democratic demand.

And are we really expected to put our trust in the British army? An army that in my lifetime fought vicious counterrevolutionary wars abroad, in Malaya, Kenya and the Yemen. An army that, as shown by its role on the streets of Belfast and Derry, would do the same at home.

Rosa Luxemburg famously argued that we Marxists are strong not in spite of our principles. No, we are strong because we openly espouse and build upon those solid foundations. Those who oppose abolishing the standing army and establishing a popular militia in the name of a nicer, slower, less risky road to socialism actually pursue not the same goal as us, but a different goal. Instead of fighting for a new social order they seek an illusory modification of the existing order.

Salman Shaheen puts the case against

This debate in Left Unity started with my interview on the Daily Politics, in which I made a point which Jack disagreed with. Of course, that then led him to write in the Weekly Worker that as a result of my position I was a coward. I’m here today to hopefully prove that I am not a coward and that I am very happy to debate with the CPGB on this issue. (I believe he also called me a “Bonapartist”, but we will leave that one for another day!)

It is quite clear that within Left Unity there are different kinds of socialism - the party is a broad church, with many different left traditions involved. I think it is fair to say that my socialism is of a more pacifistic variety than the CPGB’s - this whole debate cuts to the very heart of what socialism means to me.

I think there is a degree to which we are - not talking over each other, but dealing with different time periods. I am talking about the present and he is talking about the future situation in a revolutionary environment or in a post-revolutionary situation. I want to talk about the present because it is something I am deeply concerned about.

Jack has very eloquently harked back to history, citing numerous examples of the movements and parties of the past that have called for the arming of the people. But I think this is a socialism of a bygone age - one that began with the best intentions of overthrowing tyranny and liberating the workers and peasants, but ended in the long march to the gulag and Asia’s own King Joffrey. To me socialism is about saving lives and making people’s lives better. In no way does the proliferation of guns help save lives: it destroys them. It is hardly ironic then that Jack’s position is not one that is shared by much of the left, but by the hard right. Both Andrew Neil and Jack himself would recognise that the demand for the right to bear arms is one very strongly identified with the Tea Party.

As such I think the US is the best place to start in explaining why I am opposed on a moral level to the proliferation of guns in society.

June 2015 once again bore witness to two of the ugliest elements of American history coming together in the most deadly way possible: racism and gun violence. Time and again we hear the gun lobby claiming that guns do not kill people: people kill people. But people with guns can kill a lot more people. Gun control would not have stopped Dylann Storm Roof becoming indoctrinated by hate; it would not have stopped him being a racist and white supremacist. It would not have stopped him being a terrorist (the fact he was not a Muslim does not mean that he was not a terrorist and I think it is important to recognise that). However, gun control would have prevented the lives of those nine people killed in Charleston being lost.

As Jack has argued, America was founded on the right to bear arms, but it was also founded on racism. As one tyranny was replaced by another, that was emblazoned in burning crosses and the barbarity of slavery. The proliferation of guns has not brought liberation to black people in America (any more than it has white people): it has brought death.

It has brought death to children too. In 2007 we saw the worst school shooting in US history, when a 23-year-old man killed 32 students at Virginia Tech. Deadly as this event was, it was hardly uncommon. Dozens of school shootings take place every year in America - last year alone there were 41. Who can forget the 1999 Columbine massacre, when 12 students and their teacher were gunned down? Or the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, which saw 20 children and six staff shot dead by a lone gunmen? When we talk of workers’ rights and the rights of children, let us not forget that there is also the right to be safe and secure in their workplaces and places of learning.

We can discuss revolutionary situations in the abstract if we like. We could conjure up the ghost of Trotsky, murdered by the ultimate product of the violent revolution his guns started, but we cannot be blind to the consequences of guns in society - mass murder. Like the CPGB I am against nuclear proliferation. I want to see a world free of their destructive potential. But I want to go further. I want to end the proliferation of all weapons, shut down the deadly arms trade, end profiteering from death and build a safer world for children in Britain and around the world. There are over 300 million non-military firearms in the US and it is no coincidence that the country has the highest murder rate in the developed world. There were 14,827 reported murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases in the US in 2012. In 2013 firearms were responsible for 4,258 injuries 11,208 homicides. Obama himself has recognised that America has a problem - it is unique in the developed world in this respect - and that the problem stems from the proliferation of guns.

As I said previously, socialism for me is about making lives better and it is about saving them. It is about making sure people do not starve in a world of plenty. It is about making sure people do not die of preventable and curable diseases because big pharma controls patents and puts healthcare beyond the reach of the poor. If you can save 11,000 lives every year in just one country by banning guns, I think that would be a victory for humanity.

After the Dunblane massacre here in the UK, which left 16 pupils aged five and six dead, along with their teacher, Britain had the good sense to ban handguns and there have been no school shootings in Britain since. In 2013 there were 551 murders in the UK and, compared to an armed US, even with the population size difference, I think it is quite clear that the UK is a much safer place to live. In Australia, following the killing of 35 people in Tasmania, the government banned semi-automatic and automatic rifles and shotguns. In the decade following the ban the firearm homicide rate fell by 59% and the firearm suicide rate (and suicide is another important factor here) fell by 65%, without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides.

All countries are different - they all have their own social balances - but the UK and Australia can be seen as socially and culturally similar to the US, and so there is clear evidence that an armed society is a more dangerous society, in which more people die. Measures against the proliferation of firearms save lives.

There are, of course, historical reasons why countries have encouraged armed populations at one time or another. In America, as Jack pointed out, the fear was a tyrannical king, George III. In Britain it was the fear of another tyrant with a three after his name, Napoleon III, and the threat of invasion. Now modern Britain and the US face no such threats: there are no such justifications for weapons being on the streets. Let us remember that with the Magna Carta the obligation to arm people was an obligation to arm people with swords, not semi-automatic weapons.

However, the libertarian right today claim that they must be allowed to bear arms in order to protect against the power of the state and to overthrow it if necessary. Quite what they expect to do against a nuclear-armed state with tanks and fighter jets I am not too sure.

Writing in the Weekly Worker a few months ago, Jack turned this on its head. He said:

… if only the masses stay within the safe confines of the law, do not irresponsibly take to the streets, do not stage disruptive strikes, do not fight for a radically different society, the forces of the state would not be obliged to beat them. This, says Trotsky, is the “philosophy of Tolstoy and Gandhi, but never that of Marx and Lenin” (‘Arms and our moderate speaker’, May 22 2014).

Of course the masses should take to the streets, of course they should stage strikes and of course they should fight for a radically different society. But we are not in the Warsaw Ghetto. We are not facing down occupation or dictatorship. Modern Britain is not crying out for armed struggle. All that would do is invite a far deadlier, far more dangerous society. Arm the people, and you come ever closer to being the 51st state of America, with more Jean Charles de Menezes and more Michael Browns.

Even if we were in a revolutionary situation, even if we were, as in Russia, a small communist vanguard who were able to seize power with guns, what kind of society would that lead to? If the majority of people are behind a revolution, as clearly the CPGB wants them to be, as in Serbia, then the revolution does not need to be a violent one. If the minority use the threat of murder to win power and impose it upon a majority who are not with them in the first place, then the seeds are sown for failure, just as almost every so-called communist revolution that has ever taken place has failed to one degree or another.

I would point out that I fundamentally agree with the right of people who are being violently oppressed to violently resist. That is a legitimate right, but it is important to also realise that there are consequences to that. Syria is a powerful and tragic example. Syria began, along with the other Arab spring revolutions, as a peaceful movement. Weapons were introduced into the equation when the state cracked down and armed groups began opposing it. All hell broke loose and now we have a situation in which there are multiple factions, including the barbarism of Islamic State. We are now in a situation where a quarter of a million people have been killed and four million people are refugees. So, while recognising this right, I do not think we can ever be blasé about it and never say this is just a question for the future: it is happening here and now.

Of course, in dealing with the future, I do not think I would be (despite Jack’s vote of confidence!) the best defence minister in a Left Unity government. I do not know what would be the best way of reorganising the armed forces in a socialist society. The army may well need to be reformed, and a territorial army, such as the Green Party advocates, may well be the best way forward. Certainly we do not want this big interventionist force fighting imperialist wars. I come from a very pacifist tradition - my grandmother was a Quaker - and in that spirit my ideal would be a world where there are no armies.

My socialism is a democratic one, it is a humane one and it is a peaceful one. None of those things can be found down the barrel of a gun.