By workers he clearly means labor unions. Individual people who are not engaged in the revolutionary struggle or the defense of communism should not have access to guns (or any weapon for that matter). Western leftists, particularly American ones, have liberal brain worms because they intertwined this with the second ammendment. Not everyone who is a worker should be entrusted with a fucking gun, the organizations that represent workers however should. Its the same argument with cars, are cars bad? Not inherently, but we as a society should be phasing them out. Western leftists listen to China challenge (HARD)
All of this assumes there's a legitimate effort being made towards a revolution, we shouldn't be acquiring guns because of a what if, they should purely be for an offensive and preemptive strike, ie we need to do the opposite of what Stalin did and invade Germany before they even invade Poland. Self defense is not the point of gun ownership for communists, war is. And if we aren't willing to use them in that context then they are useless to us.
:fedposting:
I'm kinda drunk but I think I'm kind of in agreement? This was written predicting a revolutionary uprising of the German petty bourgeoisie who would arm then betray the proletariat (thus the proletariat would have to be willing to fight to the petty bourgeoisie with the arms supplied to them). Definitely a far flung reality from our current situation where neither class is particularly revolutionary.
I honestly think the electoral program and the insistence on workers' councils is the most interesting part of this address rather than paragraph about arming the proles. Pairs nicely with Left Wing Communism and really reinforces Lenin as an orthodox Marxist rather than some sort of derivation.
My initial comment wasn't specifically directed at you. I bring up the Address whenever I can.
Can we all at least agree that guns for self defense purposes when there are no clear ideological threats (ie feds and blackshirts aren't hunting us) is bad.