The scene is impossible to forget. A fleet of ICE vehicles corners the maroon Honda. Masked federal agents approach, guns drawn. One reaches into the window, barking orders. The driver maneuvers cautiously, trying to withdraw.

Bullets pierce her forearm, chest, and temple.

The vehicle slams into a lamppost and parked car. “Fucking bitch,” a Fed says, as the killers prepare to flee. Becca Good sits crying in the Minnesota snow, covered in her beloved’s blood: “You guys just killed my wife!”

“Surging demand for firearms training”

Kristi Noem called Renee Good a “domestic terrorist.” Trump said she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over” an ICE agent, who merely responded in self-defense.

The streets of Minneapolis–St. Paul delivered their own verdict: murder most foul. Neighborhood meetings and rapid-response Signal chats swelled to capacity—and beyond. Mass demonstrations filled the streets. An explosion of anger and energy culminated in the general strike of January 23.

The next day, ICE agents pinned Alex Pretti to the pavement and shot him in the back, at point-blank range, no fewer than 10 times. Vigils sprang up all over the city. In some neighborhoods, protesters erected barricades and clashed with ICE, as clouds of tear gas hung in the air. Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s former running mate, deployed the National Guard.

Days after Pretti’s murder, CNN reported, “Niche, left-leaning gun advocacy groups … can hardly keep up with the surging demand for firearms training.” Across Minnesota, applications for permits to carry a firearm surged by nearly 75% in January. Faced with extrajudicial violence, many are asking, “Should we arm ourselves to fight ICE and other repressive forces of the state?”

It’s easy to understand why so many radicalized workers and young people are attracted to armed struggle. They want to fight back in a direct and immediate way. Above all, they want to settle accounts with ICE. Historically, armed struggle appears to be the means by which things are settled once and for all.

This idea is particularly attractive to Americans. After all, wasn’t independence from Britain won through determined armed struggle in the Revolutionary War of 1775–83? Wasn’t the Southern system of chattel slavery buried forever by Union victory in the Civil War of 1861–65?

It is undeniable that warfare has played an outsized role in world history, and America’s two great revolutions are no exception. But in reality, armed struggle, as such, has never been the determining factor. The course of human history is ultimately driven by the development of the forces of production and the struggle of classes. Only under certain definite conditions do these factors express themselves in the form of armed struggle against the existing state.

The state

The modern state is a behemoth. It confronts us as a dizzying array of acronymed departments headquartered in grey-brown concrete buildings and marble-white neoclassical palaces. It rides in blacked-out FBI SUVs and charming white postal trucks. Our first task is to cut through the mystique surrounding the state and explain what is really essential. As Lenin said, “Not examples, not divergences, but the Thing-in-Itself.”

In The State and Revolution, Lenin, following Engels, explained the real essence of the state:

Engels elucidates the concept of the “power” which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command …

 

Like all great revolutionary thinkers, Engels tries to draw the attention of the class-conscious workers to what prevailing philistinism regards as least worthy of attention, as the most habitual thing, hallowed by prejudices that are not only deep-rooted but, one might say, petrified. A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power. But how can it be otherwise?

What’s so special about these “special bodies of armed men”? They are special in the sense that they represent a stratum of society set apart from the masses of oppressed and exploited people. Their role is to mediate the relationship between those masses and the ruling class, in favor of the latter. In short, they police and hold down the exploited majority on behalf of a tiny minority, maintaining the status quo relationship of each class to the means of production.

These bodies stand in direct contrast to the “self-acting armed organization of the population” that coordinated self-defense and maintained order in earlier tribal societies.

For the first few hundred millennia of human existence, the state was completely unknown. Our earliest ancestors lived by hunting and gathering. No individual owned the food they acquired collectively. It was shared and consumed communally. That’s why we refer to this form of society as “primitive communism.” Nobody was richer than anybody else. The only real division of labor was that between men and women, rooted in the biological fact that women alone carry and bear children.

When a tribe faced an external threat, like an attack from a rival tribe, everyone capable of wielding a weapon took up arms in self-defense. There were no ranks, no uniforms, no distinctions between civilians and soldiers. This form of armed action was possible because society wasn’t divided into hostile classes. Everyone in the population had the same basic interests.

The development of agriculture and animal husbandry, starting roughly 10,000 years ago, changed all that. An hour spent tending crops or herds was more productive on average than one spent gathering or hunting. For the first time, human populations were capable of producing more of the necessities of life than they strictly needed.

This surplus had a radical effect on the structure of society. On the one hand, it allowed for significant population growth, deepening the existing division of labor between men and women, as women spent more time carrying, bearing, and caring for children. On the other hand, it introduced an all-new division between mental and manual labor.

A small minority of the population was liberated from physical toil in the fields. Backed by bodies of armed men loyal to themselves, these religious figures and administrators formed the basis of the earliest ruling classes, who took control of the social surplus and lived off the labor of the majority. They saw the self-acting armed masses as a serious threat to their accumulating wealth and power:

Were it not for this split, the “self-acting armed organization of the population” would differ from the primitive organization of a stick-wielding herd of monkeys, or of primitive men, or of men united in clans, by its complexity, its high technical level, and so on. But such an organization would still be possible.

 

It is impossible because civilized society is split into antagonistic, and, moreover, irreconcilably antagonistic classes, whose “self-acting” arming would lead to an armed struggle between them.

In other words, the emergent ruling class had to defend its exclusive control over the socially produced surplus, and to do this, it had to dispense with the “armed people.” Since the laboring majority had no interest in maintaining the ruling class’s economic domination, they engaged in a now open, now hidden struggle against it. Over time, however, through the use of physical force and economic coercion, a ruling class separated out from the broader population. This was made possible by the formation of a special caste of armed men tasked with maintaining and defending the ruling class’s domination. Though this process unfolded in different ways at different times, this, in essence, is how the state was born.

Revolution

But the story of the self-acting armed organization of the masses doesn’t end there. At a certain stage in the class struggle, this hallmark of early society reappears on a higher level to challenge the special bodies of armed men.

According to Lenin, every proletarian revolution, “raises before us in practice, palpably and, what is more, on a scale of mass action … the question of the relationship between ‘special’ bodies of armed men and the ‘self-acting armed organization of the population.’”

This is the key to how communists approach the question of armed struggle. Arms are only one side of the equation. What’s more, arms are the less important factor. In a revolutionary confrontation, the organization of the masses is decisive.

The real material basis of the potential power of the working class isn’t a matter of rifles and artillery pieces. It’s our central role in the process of production and exchange. As Ted Grant—the greatest Marxist theorist of the postwar period—put it, “Not a railway carriage wheel turns, not a ship moves, not a light bulb burns, not a paper appears, without the labor of the working class.”

What prevents workers from using our strategic position to bring the country’s economy to a halt, sweep away the decadent Epstein class, and begin the socialist reconstruction of society?

It isn’t a lack of arms. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 44% of Americans live in a household with at least one firearm. A 2022 study in the American Journal of Public Health showed that approximately 16 million American civilians regularly carry a loaded handgun. Needless to say, the vast majority of these individuals are workers.

The real barrier to revolution is working-class consciousness and organization. In order for our class to leverage our economic position to its full effect, the most advanced elements must understand the historic role of the class as a whole. They must be organized into a revolutionary party. But even this, in itself, is insufficient. The masses of the class must also be highly organized into incipient organs of class rule, like soviets or workers’ councils.

Once these factors converge and the majority has expressed its will, workers will find a way to defend themselves from armed reaction and the class enemy’s state. The historical experience of proletarian revolutions shows that the armed organization of the masses is, in fact, largely self-acting.

In History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky described the process by which the Petrograd Soviet armed itself:

Having undertaken to arm the workers, the Soviet had to find its way to the weapons. This did not happen all at once. Here too each practical step forward was suggested by the masses. It was only necessary to listen attentively to their suggestions.

He goes on to relate the story of the Soviet’s “first experiment” in acquiring arms:

When a delegation from the workers came to me and said they needed weapons, I answered: “But the arsenals, you see, are not in our hands.” They answered: “We have been to the Sestroretsk Arms Factory.” “Well, and what about it?” “They said that if the Soviet ordered they would deliver.” I gave an order for five thousand rifles, and they got them the same day.

When the class struggle reaches fever pitch, the working class will find any number of ways to arm itself. Naturally, workers could contribute arms they already own. Workers in the arms industry—who normally produce weapons for the capitalist state or for capitalists to sell on the commercial market—could deliver instead to workers’ councils, as in the example related by Trotsky.

Of course, the existence of such councils is a necessary precondition for this. That’s no small matter. Workers require complex and flexible organs of democratic rule. John Reed—a journalist who witnessed the October Revolution and went on to become an early leader of American communism—said of the soviets, “No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented. And this was necessary, for in time of revolution the popular will changes with great rapidity.”

Reed described the atmosphere of a soviet meeting on the eve of the October insurrection:

I went … to one of the great popular meetings which occurred all over the city, more numerous night after night. The bare, gloomy amphitheater, lit by five tiny lights hanging from a thin wire, was packed from the ring up the steep sweep of grimy benches to the very roof—soldiers, sailors, workmen, women, all listening as if their lives depended upon it.

It will be far easier for unarmed workers’ councils to arm themselves than for American workers to move from our present state of relative disorganization to building vibrant workers’ councils.

Will the military side with or repress the revolutionary masses?

Perhaps the most significant means by which a proletarian revolution arms itself is by splitting the special bodies of armed men along class lines. In Trotsky’s words, “It is often impossible to make the army march against the people. It begins by disintegrating and ends with the passage of a large section of the soldiers over to the people’s side.”

There are around 1.3 million active-duty members of the US military. This sounds like a formidable force, but it is far from homogeneous. At the top, there are about 900 general or flag officers. They constitute the military clique of the capitalist state. At the bottom, there are over a million enlisted men and women, drawn mainly from the ranks of the working class. These workers in uniform needed a job and found one that happens to involve bearing arms on behalf of the class enemy. In between the military clique and the enlisted ranks stand the junior and field officers, numbering around 230,000.

History shows time and again that under the pressure of a powerful working-class movement, the military will split. A majority of the military clique will stick with the ruling class. The enlisted will be forced to choose whether to fire on their class brothers and sisters or to come over to the side of the revolution. The junior and field officers will split, too. The lower ranks are most likely to side with the workers, while the upper ranks are more likely to side with the ruling class.

When a majority of these armed bodies come over to the side of the workers, they will bring their arms with them. At the same time, they will deprive the class enemy of the forces it needs to resist the revolutionary wave.

For just this reason, the October 1917 insurrection was a nearly bloodless affair. The Bolsheviks had succeeded in winning over not only the majority of the soviets but also the ranks of the Russian army. Under these circumstances, the tiny minority that remained loyal to the old regime didn’t dare to put up a fight. Above all, this goes to show that revolution is ultimately a political task, not a military-technical one.

Working-class consciousness

Trotsky summed up the relationship between the development of class consciousness and the question of armed struggle in “Whither France?”:

The proletariat produces arms, transports them, erects the buildings in which they are kept, defends these buildings against itself, serves in the army and creates all its equipment. It is neither locks nor walls which separate the proletariat from arms, but the habit of submission, the hypnosis of class domination and nationalist poison.

How can this habit of submission be broken? Only through the experience of class struggle. During a strike, and even more so during a general strike, workers develop a palpable sense of their collective power to shut down production and exchange.

A hard picket line—one where strikers physically prevent scabs, vehicles, and supplies from entering their workplace—can become the embryo of a workers’ militia. The history of American labor furnishes countless examples of strikers taking up arms to defend their picket lines from the bosses’ thugs and the forces of the state.

During the 1902 strike in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields, for example, the coal barons pulled out all the stops to break the pickets. Workers faced down Pinkerton strike breakers and the vicious Coal and Iron Police, a private outfit funded and armed directly by the bosses.

When these forces failed to break the strike, Governor William Stone sent the entire Pennsylvania National Guard—not only infantrymen with rifles, but also cavalry troopers armed with pistols, carbines, and sabers.

To stop supplies from getting in and coal from getting out, strikers dynamited railway bridges over the Lackawanna and Susquehanna Rivers. They also carefully applied dynamite to the houses of scabs, managing to destroy the buildings without killing women or children.

Such cases offer a powerful demonstration of how the development of class consciousness in the heat of class struggle goes hand in hand with the arming of the working class.

Individual terrorism

In contrast, assassinations, bombings, and other forms of armed adventurism by individuals and small groups tend to have a reactionary effect. Individual terrorism cuts across the development of the class consciousness necessary for mass, armed self-defense. Isolated acts of violence may attract the attention, and sometimes even sympathy, of millions. But they leave the masses feeling like spectators, rather than participants, in history.

In a way, individual terror is a mirror image of the class enemy’s elitist conception of politics. A worker passively watching a terror attack on a television or phone screen is invited to think: “Politics is the rarefied world of a small elite. Some may be acting on my behalf, others against me. But ordinary people like me cannot—and should not—get involved.”

Marxists have a long history of opposition to individual terrorism. Bolshevism emerged in opposition to Narodnism (Populism), a tendency that dominated the Russian revolutionary movement from the 1860s to 1890s.

With Russia’s nobility in decay, its bourgeoisie crude and underdeveloped, and its proletariat still embryonic and unorganized, the Narodniks looked to “the people” as the revolutionary class. Petty-bourgeois intellectuals donned peasant garb and went into the villages to rouse the people to revolutionary action. The greeting they received ranged from suspicion to hostility.

In response, two trends developed within Narodnism. The moderate wing sought to win over the peasants through “small deeds” like feeding the poor and teaching the illiterate to read. The radical wing, organized in Narodnaya Volya, preferred the tactic of individual terror.

In 1881, members of Narodnaya Volya assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Lenin’s older brother, Aleksandr Ulyanov, was executed for plotting to assassinate his successor, Alexander III, in 1887.

Lenin opposed the tactics of Narodnaya Volya, not as a matter of moral principle, but because it cut the most energetic fighters against tsarism off from the working masses. The task was not to strike symbolic blows against a few hated individuals. It was to build a party capable of leading a revolutionary movement broad and powerful enough to topple the entire rotten regime. As Lenin argued in “Where to Begin?”:

We, therefore, declare emphatically that under the present conditions such a means of struggle [individual terrorism] is inopportune and unsuitable; that it diverts the most active fighters from their real task, the task which is most important from the standpoint of the interests of the movement as a whole; and that it disorganizes the forces, not of the government, but of the revolution. We need but recall the recent events. With our own eyes we saw that the mass of workers and “common people” of the towns pressed forward in struggle, while the revolutionaries lacked a staff of leaders and organizers. Under such conditions, is there not the danger that, as the most energetic revolutionaries go over to terror, the fighting contingents, in whom alone it is possible to place serious reliance, will be weakened?

Guerrilla warfare

Lenin applied the same criteria to his evaluation of guerrilla warfare as a revolutionary tactic. After the December uprising of 1905, the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary parties formed “fighting organizations” to coordinate guerrilla operations. But Lenin was never in any doubt that “the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle … this method must be subordinated to other methods.”

In an underdeveloped and overwhelmingly peasant country, Lenin understood that guerrilla warfare could supplement the mass movement of the proletariat, but it could never replace it. Moreover, the Bolshevik fighting organizations didn’t go into the countryside to foment guerrilla warfare like latter-day Narodniks. Their assignment was to help organize and train the masses who were already engaged in sporadic and uncoordinated guerrilla struggle—and to bring that struggle under the central control of the workers’ party.

As Trotsky explained in Stalin: “The original purpose of the fighting organizations was to assume leadership of the rebellious masses, teaching them how to use arms and how to deliver the most telling blows at the enemy. The main, if not the only, theoretician in that field of endeavor was Lenin.”

But as the revolutionary tide ebbed and a period of reaction set in, the fighting organizations were increasingly isolated from the masses. In these circumstances, even the most disciplined armed detachments became little more than common bandits. In Trotsky’s words, at the height of the revolution, “Guerrilla activities augmented and stimulated the mass movement; in the period of reaction they attempted to replace it, but, as a matter of fact, merely embarrassed the Party and speeded its disintegration.”

Even in more recent cases like Yugoslavia, China, and Cuba, where guerrilla warfare led to the overthrow of capitalism and the formation of deformed workers’ states, the disconnection of guerrilla forces from the working class left its mark.

To cite just one example, in Cuba, a general strike in support of the guerrilla army led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara dealt the final blow to the US-backed Batista dictatorship. But the workers hadn’t developed organs of class rule during the two-year guerrilla war that preceded the successful general strike. For most of that time, the guerrillas operated with the passive support, but not the active involvement, of the working class.

Without workers’ councils, power passed to the only ready alternative to the old state, the bodies of armed men of Fidel’s guerrilla army. The revolution—which Marxists have always wholeheartedly defended against American imperialism’s ruthless attacks—succeeded in liberating Cuba from capitalism, landlordism, and imperialism. But instead of a workers’ democracy, it created a deformed, bureaucratic state, mirroring the top-down command structure of the army.

The role of communists

Communists are not pacifists. We understand the necessity of armed self-defense. As Marx said, “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” But the midwife is only called upon at a definite stage in the process, and ultimately, the importance of the midwife is secondary to that of the mother and child. We must be careful not to cause a miscarriage.

The role of communists is not to take up arms behind the backs or over the heads of the mass of the working class. It is not even to take up arms on its behalf. For Marxists, the question of arming the communist party separate from the arming of the working masses as a whole is unthinkable.

Our role is to build the revolutionary party—the network of cadres who have mastered the fundamentals of Marxist theory and the art of organization. Only such a party will be capable of providing a political lead when the working-class masses are ready to confront the class enemy with arms in hands.