A Response to Denver Communists’ “Against the Left’s Rush to Arms”
by Freida Gogh
“Individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness. It reconciles them to their powerlessness and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great adventurer and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.” — Leon Trotsky
Tyler is a comrade. We have organized together, argued together, and I have a great deal of respect for the political seriousness he brings to these questions. It is precisely because of that respect that I want to engage his recent video on leftists and firearms carefully and on the record, because I think he has made a significant analytical error that, left unchallenged, forecloses a genuine site of working-class struggle.
Tyler’s argument is built on a conflation that does most of his work for him before the analysis begins. By opening with individual acts of violence, the Luigi Mangione case, Willem Van Spronsen’s attack on the ICE facility in Tacoma, and then moving without pause through armed affinity groups and militia formations to gun ownership and firearms training broadly, he treats these as variations on a single political problem. They are not. Individual acts of targeted violence, organized armed community defense, and the project of building a firearms-literate working-class left are three distinct phenomena with distinct histories, distinct organizational logics, and distinct political implications. Collapsing them allows Tyler to use the most indefensible case, the lone actor, to contaminate the others by association.
This is not a minor rhetorical slippage. It is the load-bearing move in his argument. Remove it, and most of what follows doesn’t hold.
The conflation runs in two directions. First, as noted, individual terror gets smuggled into a critique of organized armed defense. But second, and this is the more consequential error, Tyler’s entire framework treats the state as the only threat worth analyzing. The right-wing militia movement, the organized street violence of fascist formations, the targeted assassination of activists: these are functionally invisible in his account. When the only armed threat you’re theorizing is the state, then yes, the asymmetry is so total that armed resistance looks like a fantasy. But that is not the threat environment the left actually operates in. Heather Heyer was not killed by the state. The organizers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan during the civil rights movement were not killed by the state. The question of whether leftists should be armed cannot be seriously engaged without accounting for the armed right as a material force in our political life.
Tyler is not wrong to look to history here, and his reading of Fred Hampton is genuinely sharp. But the historical record he’s drawing on is incomplete in ways that matter. The Panthers are not the only, or even the most instructive, example of organized armed self-defense in the American left tradition.
Robert F. Williams was the president of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter in the late 1950s when he organized armed self-defense against Klan terror. His account of that experience, Negroes with Guns, documents something Tyler’s framework cannot explain: that organized, visible, community-based armed defense did not substitute for political organizing but enabled it. When the Klan knew that Black neighborhoods in Monroe were armed and prepared to defend themselves, the calculus of terror changed. Williams was not launching clandestine guerrilla raids against the state; he was protecting the conditions under which his community could organize, meet, and build power without being murdered for it. The NRA, it is worth noting, even supported his chapter’s right to bear arms before they understood what he intended to do with it.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice, formed in Jonesboro, Louisiana in 1964, represent the organizational maturation of this tradition. This Non-Violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed tells the history of The Deacons were explicitly working-class, rooted in the industrial workforce of the rural South, and their purpose was unambiguous: to protect civil rights organizers and Black communities from Klan violence at a moment when the state not only refused that protection but actively participated in the terror. They were not an armed vanguard pursuing revolutionary objectives. They were a disciplined community defense organization that made it possible for CORE organizers to work in areas where they would otherwise have been killed. Historians of the period are fairly consistent that Klan activity decreased measurably in areas where the Deacons operated. On a side note, I have taught from both of these books within the SRA.
Tyler’s Panthers analysis is stronger than his treatment of these earlier examples, and his point about Hampton is well taken. But it cuts differently than he intends. The state did not assassinate Fred Hampton because he was armed; it assassinated him because he was building the kind of cross-sectional working-class solidarity that makes armed defense viable and meaningful. The guns were not the threat. The organization was the threat. That distinction, which Tyler identifies correctly and then abandons, is precisely the one that should be guiding this entire debate.
What the preceding account reveals is not a debate about firearms. It is a debate about history, strategy, and the organizational logics of the left, conducted, notably, with enough seriousness to reach principled resolutions. Tyler’s video implies that armed left organizing is the province of undisciplined adventurists with no political framework beyond the fantasy of individual heroism. The Socialist Rifle Association, in which I am currently a national-level organizer, is a direct refutation of that characterization.
The SRA is not simply a gun club. It is a multi-tendency organization that has functioned as a genuine site of left political struggle, and the debates it has hosted are as substantive as anything produced in the reading formations and journal articles that constitute the more respectable precincts of the organized left.
Consider the organization grappling with the question of military members joining the group. A determined faction within the SRA pushed to ban active-duty military members from joining, drawing on the same third-worldist logic that animates the broader left tendency to treat soldiers as imperial agents rather than workers. This is not an obscure theoretical position — it has deep roots in the Vietnam-era left’s encounter with Emmanuel Arghiri’s unequal exchange theory, Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, and a reading of Fanon that produced what I’ve elsewhere called vanguardism without a class. The position treats soldiers’ structural location within the imperial military apparatus as definitive of their class interests, collapsing the distinction between the institution and the people compelled by economic circumstance to serve in it.
The counter-argument, which ultimately prevailed in a democratic referendum after extended debate, drew on Charles Post’s updating of Lenin’s labor aristocracy thesis. Post’s work in Against the Current demonstrates that the labor aristocracy argument, properly understood, does not support the wholesale exclusion of any sector of the working class from solidarity, and that Lenin himself, whose positions are often cited in support of third-worldist exclusions, was frequently leaning into certain tendencies harder than his actual line in order to correct over-represented errors among the masses. His opposition to economism in What Is To Be Done? is a clear example: a polemical overcorrection that gets read as a settled position. The referendum result was not a victory for political softness. It was a victory for rigorous class analysis over inherited cultural norms dressed up as theory. We’re not angry punks training to be antifa supersoldiers. We are principled revolutionaries who are training, building relationships, and developing our political positions.
We recently had a very contentious fight over governance and our bylaws that were a different kind of education. What the SRA experienced at the national level was a masterclass in how a determined faction, operating with discipline and clear objectives, can use procedural control to capture an organization whose silent center — people who joined to build working-class community around a shared practice — has no comparable organizational focus. We witnessed the building of voting blocs, the exploitation of poorly-written bylaws, the mechanisms of regulatory capture applied to a grassroots left organization. We learned, at some cost, what it takes to counter that kind of maneuvering without becoming it. That is not adventurism. That is politics. That is the kind of mass work that builds cadre.
The debates around class reductionism and identity politics were the most directly relevant to the broader left context in which Tyler and I both operate. The SRA’s membership spans tendencies that disagree sharply on these questions — anarchists, various Marxist formations, people with no prior organizational affiliation whose politics were shaped by the gun range rather than the reading group. The argument I brought to the organization, drawing on Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity, is that identity politics as practiced on the American left has become a demobilizing and divisive force not because the underlying questions of race, gender, and oppression are illegitimate, but because the substitution of identity-based frameworks for class analysis produces organizations that are very good at policing their own membership and very bad at building power. Haider’s concept of insurgent universality, the idea that particular struggles become politically generative when they reach toward a universality that includes rather than excludes, offers a way out of the binary between class reductionism and identitarian fragmentation that has paralyzed so much of the left.
This argument landed differently in the SRA than it would have in a reading group or a socialist convention. It landed in a room where the people disagreeing with me had guns, had training, and had made a material commitment to the project of working-class self-defense. That changes the stakes of the argument in ways that are clarifying rather than distorting.
None of this is incidental to the question Tyler is asking. It is the answer to it. The SRA is evidence that firearms-centered organizing does not produce the depoliticized, tactically confused, individually-oriented gun culture Tyler critiques. It produces something closer to what the left actually needs: a durable organizational infrastructure built around shared practice, capable of holding serious political disagreement, and reaching people who will never feel welcome in typical leftist spaces.
This brings me to what I think is the most significant gap in Tyler’s argument, and the one most worth addressing seriously. His critique of armed organizing assumes a specific kind of left subject: politically educated, organizationally experienced, comfortable in the deliberative culture of the socialist left. That subject exists. But they are not the whole of the working class, or even the most important part of it for the project of building a mass movement.
There is a substantial stratum of working-class people in this country for whom the gun range is a more natural organizing terrain than the reading group or the protest. They are not politically unsophisticated, they are politically differently situated. They distrust institutions, including left institutions, for reasons that are materially grounded. They have skills, networks, and community relationships that the organized left cannot access through its existing channels. And they are already organized, around gun culture, around hunting and sport shooting communities, around a set of practices and social bonds that the left has largely ceded to the right by treating firearms as inherently reactionary.
Firearms training as a base-building site reaches this stratum. It offers a point of entry that does not require prior political formation, does not demand fluency in left theoretical vocabulary, and does not sort people by their comfort with the deliberative culture of socialist organizations. What it does require is showing up, developing skill, and building trust with the people next to you, which is, not coincidentally, the same foundation on which every durable political organization has ever been built.
The political education follows from the practice rather than preceding it. This is not a concession to anti-intellectualism. It is a recognition that most people’s political consciousness develops through material engagement with the world, through the experience of collective action, through the relationships formed in the process of doing something together, not through exposure to correct theory delivered in advance of any organizing relationship. The union hall model worked not because workers arrived already convinced of the need for collective bargaining, but because the experience of organizing together produced that conviction. A firearms training community that develops political consciousness through practice is doing the same thing on different terrain.
Is this just a lifestyle politics trap then? Is this an example of well-armed, politically educated people who are not building toward anything specific and have simply found a more interesting hobby? In short, no, because it brings us to the question of preparedness.
The argument is not that firearms training is a substitute for mass movement building. It is that mass movements, at certain stages of political development and under certain conditions of repression, require people who can operate as disciplined units rather than as individuals who happen to be armed. The difference between an armed population and an organized armed force is not primarily a question of weapons, it is arguably more a question of trust, coordination, shared doctrine, and practiced unit cohesion. These things cannot be improvised in a moment of crisis. They are built over time, through repeated shared practice, through the experience of working through disagreement and emerging with functioning relationships on the other side.
The American left, if it ever reaches the point where armed defense of communities or organized resistance to state or fascist violence becomes a practical necessity rather than a theoretical question, will not be starting from zero in the organizations that have been doing this work. That is not a fantasy of revolution. It is an application of basic organizational logic to a question Tyler’s framework refuses to take seriously on its own terms.
The Deacons for Defense did not emerge from nowhere. Robert F. Williams did not pick up a gun and immediately become an effective organizer of armed community defense. These formations were built over time, through practice, through the development of relationships and trust and shared political understanding. The question is not whether we will need that infrastructure. The question is whether we are building it now, before we need it, or whether we will find ourselves improvising under conditions that do not permit improvisation.
Which brings us back to where we started.
Trotsky’s condemnation of individual terror is correct, and Tyler is right to invoke it. The lone actor who substitutes their own moral clarity for the organized power of the working class is not a revolutionary. They are, in Trotsky’s precise formulation, a symptom of the mass movement’s weakness rather than an expression of its strength. Luigi Mangione is not Fred Hampton. Willem Van Spronsen is not the Deacons for Defense. The conflation of these figures, which Tyler’s argument requires, is not a political analysis. It is a categorical error dressed as one.
But Trotsky’s critique cuts in only one direction. It is a critique of substitutionism, of the individual or small group that acts in place of the mass. It is not a critique of the mass developing the capacity to act. It is not a critique of organizations that build the human infrastructure of collective defense through shared practice. It is not a critique of working-class people developing the skills, relationships, and unit cohesion that make organized resistance possible. It is, if anything, an argument for exactly that kind of patient, disciplined, mass-oriented organizing, which is precisely what the SRA and organizations like it are doing.
The hammer Trotsky describes is a mass movement. The question of whether that movement needs to be armed, under what conditions, and how it develops the organizational capacity to act in a disciplined and effective way when those conditions arrive, these are tactical and strategic questions that serious revolutionaries have always engaged seriously. The American specificity of mass gun ownership, a heavily armed right-wing movement, a state that is simultaneously the most powerful apparatus of organized violence in human history and, at the local and street level, increasingly unable to protect working-class communities from right-wing terror — this context does not make the question go away. It makes it more urgent.
Tyler ends his lecture with a call to recognize the anger that drives people toward arms and harness it toward building working-class movements. I agree with him completely. Where we disagree is on whether firearms-centered organizing is a distraction from that project or one of its most promising available forms. The evidence of history, the evidence of the organizations that have done this work, and the evidence of what is actually happening inside the SRA suggest the latter.
We are not adventurists. We are not fantasists. We are not terrorists. We are not substituting the gun for the mass movement. We are building the mass movement, in the terrain available to us, with the people who show up. When the moment comes that requires more than that, we will not be starting from zero.
Come shoot with us and decide for yourself.