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A Classless World – Worldwide Communism – Will Eliminate All Weapons!

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With all the carnage in the world, many people are clamoring for gun control and nuclear disarmament. Many aspire for a world without weapons of any kind – where human life will be cherished as society’s most valuable asset. Is such a world possible?
Yes! Communism and only communism can and will build it because weapons and their use - as we know them today - are products of class society.
In pre-class communism humans had two basic needs: procuring food needed for survival, and protecting their lives from predators.
They developed many tools to satisfy these needs. These tools were seldom, if ever, used against other human beings, especially within the same social grouping.
As humans spread over the world, their hunter-gatherer societies sometimes clashed violently over territory they perceived as crucial for survival.
Thus, these tools, notably the spear and bow and arrow, had dual use. They were primarily means to procure food, and secondarily used sometimes against other human beings.
The development of agriculture and the domestication of animals changed this.  Hunter-gatherer societies evolved into sedentary societies as their food supplies became more secure and stable.
This also gave humans the ability to produce a consistent surplus. This created the material basis for the division of society into classes. Now some humans, the majority, could be enslaved and the surplus produced by their labor appropriated by a tiny minority of exploiters as their private property.
This transition, however, was not peaceful. It required violence, depriving the masses of laborers of their instruments to defend themselves and creating a permanent small armed group to enforce and perpetuate this exploitation of the toiling masses.
In the transition to agriculture and stock rearing, the hunters-gatherers lost their defensive instruments because the new mode of production did not require them. Class society coined a new word for them: weapons, whose sole purpose was to enslave and slaughter human beings in the exploiters’ wars of conquest.
The instruments that helped humans survive the vagaries of nature became weapons to impose on the majority of society the demands of a tiny minority of exploiters.
However, violence was not enough. The new rulers had to win the masses  to passively accept their exploitation and to see it as natural. This ideological control was provided by the development of a priest caste and organized religion.
This was the birth of the state. Through it the rulers exert their dictatorship - ideologically and violently – over the toiling masses. Its core is that permanent armed group that violently suppresses the masses to guarantee their exploitation and prevent them from rebelling.
In ancient slavery and feudalism, the armed groups’ officers were composed of the slave masters and the nobility. Only they had weapons and military training on a permanent basis. They would recruit peasants as temporary foot soldiers to fight and die in their wars.
This changed under capitalism. The capitalists are the smallest ruling class ever. Yet they have to rule over the largest, most organized, rebellious working masses in history.
They can’t alone– like previous ruling classes – form the bulk of the officer corps that commands the armed forces needed to control these huge working masses, or to fight their ever-wider imperialist wars. They are forced to recruit millions of workers and youth into their military - their historical gravediggers.
What prevents our class from turning these weapons on these capitalist parasites and fighting for communism?  Capitalist ideology!
We are bombarded with it from cradle to grave. The capitalists’ educational system, mass media, political parties, trade unions, community and religious organizations – all flood us with anti-communism and other poisonous capitalist ideologies.  Wage slavery, the conditions of capitalist life, reinforce those ideologies and provide their material basis.
Class society required both violence and ideology. Its destruction will also require both armed struggle and ideological struggle.  A massive international ICWP must mobilize the masses for communism, including the organization of a Red Army of millions of industrial workers and soldiers.
 When communism has triumphed worldwide and capitalist ideology has been uprooted from the masses, there will no longer be a state to impose the dictatorship of a class.  There will be no classes – no rulers with weapons to exploit and terrorize the masses of workers. There won’t be weapons of any kind.  They were developed by class society and will end with it.

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