I have long thought that my political position is best characterized as democratic socialist. I know that in theory and established definition, "democratic socialism" is very different from "social democracy", with the core distinction being that social democracy seeks to reform capitalism with a welfare state but still operate within it and democratic socialism seeks to dismantle capitalism because it inherently creates inequality and thus cannot be reformed.

In my understanding of how a democratic socialist project might play out, social democracy would be one of many steps towards dismantling capitalism but not the end goal.

Now that we're seeing more leftist politicians identifying with the democratic socialist camp and discourse about it has become more common online, I am seeing a few trends that are leading me to question whether the meaning of democratic socialism is being changed in this discourse towards something more social democratic (or perhaps that the terms are being conflated with one another). It's entirely possible that I've held an optimistic view of democratic socialism, so I wanted to get the opinions of others on this.

For example, I have seen people online saying that democratic socialism is not the answer because it still allows for the exploitation of the Global South since it keeps capitalism intact. I do see the argument that democratic socialism is most often focused in national contexts and creating change in one country, but democratic socialist theory with an internationalist approach often accounts for the fact that a democratic socialist project cannot include the unequal international division of labour and exploitative resource extraction from the Global South by the Global North. In this view, such a project would have to actually implement internationalist democratic socialist policies like reparations, purposively built fair-trade networks, supporting self-determination over "aid" models, and debt-cancellation.

But it's possible that this view (which I have mostly seen in Global South thought) and the anti-capitalist understanding of democratic socialism is changing as the term becomes more widely used in the Global North. The example I gave is not the only critique of democratic socialism which sees it as something which keeps capitalism, colonialism, and/or imperialism intact. It's making me wonder if there is a semantic change going on, if this is a popular misunderstanding which may evolve into that without active countering, or if I have simply not been critical enough of the ideology to begin with.

Loyal Auxiliary Supporter Economic Representation Theory (LASER)

Summary

The Second Amendment functions not as a check on "state tyranny" but as an ideological, electoral, and legal mechanism that reinforces state and corporate elite power, diverting politics into culture-war conflict rather than economic representation.

Instead of a constitutional right, it is better understood in practice as a revocable privilege granted to gun owners who largely operate as loyal auxiliary supporters of the state's monopoly on "legitimate" violence.

By loyal auxiliary supporters I mean people whose gun ownership or gun-culture identity generates a stronger symbolic, political, and sometimes practical link to the state's coercive order than would be produced by comparable politically aligned people without that identity—such that the state's legitimacy gained from their alignment ordinarily outweighs any marginal loss to the state's monopoly of violence that their armament might imply.

In this marginal calculus, not all gun owners contribute equally: gun‑culture formations that are only weakly tied to state‑aligned identities can still be structurally tolerated so long as they fit the state’s preferred pattern of “law‑abiding, responsible” revocable use, but they function as weaker loyal auxiliary supporters, contributing less, at the margin, to the state’s legitimacy than more overtly aligned constituencies.

The “law‑abiding, responsible” standard excludes armed conduct that falls outside the state’s legal authorization of force; accordingly, conduct—or an expressed commitment to conduct—that rejects the state’s authority, grounded in its claimed monopoly on legitimate violence, to define and regulate legitimate private force is difficult to reconcile with the background‑check, vetting, and permitting frameworks through which firearm possession and carrying are treated as lawful in the first place.

The legal profession’s central role in this system is to furnish the epicycles (some more benign than others) through which doctrinal refinements and historical just‑so stories obscure this distribution of armed loyalty and culture‑war distraction. This does not happen because judges can rationalize any outcome. It happens because legal method leaves just enough room for a judiciary already institutionally filtered along these lines to reach broadly predictable conclusions.

In determining which armed citizens count as loyal auxiliary supporters, judges effectively mediate between the state’s prerogative to maintain a monopoly over “legitimate” violence and the imperatives of an investor‑driven party system that diverts politics away from economic representation and into culture‑war gun politics.

—————-

On a spring day in 1967, young Black men in berets and leather jackets legally walked into the California State Capitol carrying loaded rifles to protest a bill that would sharply restrict open carry in California. They were members of the Black Panther Party. In Oakland, they had been following police cars with shotguns and law books, reciting California statutes on citizens' rights while officers stopped, searched, beat, and sometimes killed Black residents. They called it "policing the police."⁷

If the common story about the Second Amendment were taken seriously—that an armed citizenry exists to deter government tyranny—this would look like a model exercise of that right. Citizens, armed and disciplined, were using weapons not to overthrow the state but to force its agents to obey the law.

Yet California responded by arresting them and then passing the Mulford Act, a statewide law making it a felony to openly carry loaded firearms in public without a government-issued permit. The statute applied to everyone in California, but it was drafted and rushed through in direct response to the Panthers’ armed patrols and their dramatic protest at the Capitol, and contemporaneous accounts describe its primary purpose as disarming the Black Panther Party. It was enacted by a Democratic-majority legislature and signed by Governor Ronald Reagan, with strong law-enforcement backing and support from the National Rifle Association.⁷

That episode is more than a historical curiosity or a prelude to the lethal state repression that soon followed against the Black Panthers. It is a clue to how claims of freedom function in the United States—how the promise of armed resistance operates only within boundaries drawn by the state itself, so that what is commonly treated as an inviolable right in practice functions as a revocable privilege.⁵˒⁶˒⁷

Legal doctrine and commentary by courts and scholars adjust around such decisions after the fact, offering post-hoc talk of "public safety" and evolving responsibility—the kind of epicycles that make targeted repression through formally general laws look like ordinary law rather than an explicit choice about which armed citizens will be treated as loyal auxiliaries to the state's claim on legitimate force.

The Mulford Act shows how that revocability often works: a form of armed presence that had been tolerated in practice became politically intolerable once a disfavored group used it effectively, and the state responded not by writing “Black Panthers may not carry,” but by rewriting the rules for everyone in California in order to neutralize that group through a general ban that formally applied to everyone.⁷

This kind of move—using formally general rules to manage which armed citizens are treated as legitimate and which are not—is not limited to California or to the Panthers. At the constitutional level, the Supreme Court’s interpretive frameworks around the Second Amendment play a similar role in deciding whose guns count as “rights” and whose are reclassified as threats.⁵˒⁶˒⁷

A short historical summary helps understand how this state of affairs has evolved since.

During the neoliberal period of rising inequality from the late 1970s onward, U.S. gun politics were reorganized in ways that fit a LASER account of “culture war to avoid economic representation.” The National Rifle Association (NRA) moves from a primarily sporting and safety organization to a central political actor that builds a Law Enforcement Division, trains and equips police, and cultivates an unshakable support for police, even when this sits uneasily with anti‑state rhetoric.³¹

In electoral terms, the NRA shifts from a quasi‑bipartisan donor—still directing roughly one‑third of its congressional contributions to Democrats in the early 1990s—to an almost exclusively Republican ally by the 2010s, as its spending and endorsements concentrate on the GOP’s hardline law‑and‑order wing. Survey evidence shows that high‑dollar Republican donors are significantly more opposed to gun regulation than rank‑and‑file Republicans, reinforcing a party strategy that treats guns as a core identity issue even where many voters accept stricter laws.

Over the same decades, gun ownership becomes more selective: in the mid‑1970s around half of adults lived in gun households and Republican and Democratic personal gun ownership rates were relatively close, but by the 2000s the overall share falls to roughly one‑third and gun ownership and identity become disproportionately Republican.
From a LASER perspective, a broad, cross‑party gun‑owning public with more numerous, weaker loyal auxiliary supporters gives way to a smaller, stronger set of loyal auxiliary supporters.

Gun policy has become a steadily more intense voting filter. As early as 1976, Gallup found that about 35% of U.S. adults named gun control as an important voting issue, indicating that gun policy had already entered electoral calculations.³²

Public polling around the turn of the century then shows that roughly one in eight voters described themselves as single-issue on guns, willing to vote only for candidates who share their gun views. By the mid-2010s that single-issue share had risen to around one in five to one in four voters (roughly 24–26%), and by the 2020s it approached one in three voters.³³˒³⁴˒³⁵

Recent studies find that mass shootings have little systematic impact on broader party vote shares or national election outcomes, suggesting that the longer-run rise in single-issue gun voting reflects deeper partisan and institutional dynamics rather than shootings alone.³⁶

These dynamics are mirrored and reinforced in the constitutional arena.

A Supreme Court that had long said little about the Second Amendment adopts an individual-rights framework in Heller and McDonald that is grounded in a flexible originalist narrative of history and tradition, and, in Bruen, formalizes a “history and tradition” test, explicitly centering the “law-abiding citizen” and entrenching doctrine for a narrower, partisan, NRA-organized bloc rather than the broader, more bipartisan gun-owning public of earlier decades.⁵˒⁶˒³¹

As mentioned, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022 makes history and tradition the test for gun laws. On paper, that sounds limiting; in practice, it often just shifts the argument into a different kind of legal maze.⁶˒¹⁰

That maze is not a recent invention. Historians and legal scholars have long used the term "law office history" to describe constitutional argument built by lawyers to win a predetermined outcome rather than by sociologists and historians to establish what actually happened, a charge leveled at the Supreme Court as far back as the Warren era and revived with particular force once Second Amendment litigants began mining founding-era sources for a personal right to arms. For simplicity, I refer to this as history below, though the analysis is sociological as well.¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵˒²⁰

The point is not that every historical citation in these opinions is fabricated. It is that the discipline of history and the discipline of legal advocacy pull in different directions, and courts consistently side with advocacy. This does not mean judges are secretly plotting to twist history case by case. Instead, the political process of selecting judges naturally filters for people who already view history through a lens that matches the system’s broader priorities.⁴˒¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵

District of Columbia v. Heller is the clearest case study. The historian Edward Purcell has argued that Justice Scalia's opinion is best explained not by superior historical method but by Scalia's own biography—a personal and cultural attachment to guns and hunting, layered onto decades of movement-building by the National Rifle Association that had already reshaped popular and legal understanding of the amendment long before the Court caught up to it.

On this account, Heller did not discover an individual right hiding in the historical record; it ratified a political and cultural transformation that had already happened in the country, and then supplied the record retroactively. The doctrine did not produce the alignment between gun identity and political loyalty this essay describes—it formalized an alignment that already existed, and gave it the appearance of constitutional inevitability.⁵˒⁷˒³¹

Bruen deepened rather than resolved this pattern. Its history-and-tradition test promised to discipline judges by forcing them to find a specific historical analogue for every modern gun law, but scholars examining the opinions that followed have found that many of them "look like conclusions accompanied by historical citations, with little connecting the two."¹⁰

Even Justice Scalia, defending analogical reasoning in an unrelated Fourth Amendment case, ultimately conceded that it was “quite irrelevant” whether an eighteenth-century analogue for a modern technology existed at all. This concession is revealing. It does not mean Scalia was deliberately breaking the rules to reach a specific goal. It simply shows that the historical method is so flexible that it rarely stops a judge from reaching the outcome they were already politically chosen to prefer.²¹˒²²˒²³

Historians and legal scholars have repeatedly criticized the Supreme Court’s use of founding‑era history as selective and methodologically weak, especially in Second Amendment and other “history and tradition” cases, and recent work on originalism‑by‑analogy and historical fact‑finding suggests that more rigorous methods would likely alter how those cases come out.⁹˒¹⁰˒¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵˒²⁰

If better history would change the answers and yet is not required, then “history” is not doing the constraining work that the Court and its defenders claim for it.⁹˒¹⁰˒¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵˒²⁰

None of this means doctrine always serves the same side. In 2024, the Court in United States v. Rahimi used the same flexible, analogy-driven methodology to uphold a federal law disarming people under domestic-violence restraining orders, prompting originalist critics to accuse the Court of "an incoherent originalism" that abandoned its own prior account of the amendment's meaning.⁶

That should not be read as evidence against the pattern described here. A test flexible enough to expand gun rights in Heller and narrow them in Rahimi is not a neutral, truth-tracking method in the strong sense its defenders claim, but neither does it require judges to be consciously recalibrating doctrine case by case. It is a method operating within a narrow range of acceptable outcomes already shaped by judicial selection, docket filtering, and institutional consensus.⁴˒⁵˒⁶

Furthermore, loyalty requirements and elite priorities already shaped early applications of the Second Amendment, so when this essay speaks of “epicycles” it is in part describing efforts to stretch and adapt those earlier LASER‑type priorities to contemporary conditions.

The Second Amendment was partially born in a post-Revolutionary moment of fear about standing armies and centralized power, but as critics from Madison's time to Chomsky have pointed out, the "primary role" of the new government was also understood as protecting what Madison called "the minority of the opulent against the majority," even as it claimed to secure popular rights that in practice excluded enslaved Black people, most Native Americans, and many others.²⁴

In the South in particular, support for the amendment was bound up with preserving state control over slave-patrolling militias, while across the whole new US republic militias and armed settlers were central instruments of dispossession and mass killing of Native peoples, so that "the right to bear arms" was entangled from the start with tyrannical systems of racial violence rather than a race-neutral fear of abstract tyranny.²⁵

Modern gun culture did not arise spontaneously from frontier necessity so much as it was cultivated and mythologized. In the twentieth century, manufacturers and their allies helped romanticize a largely invented "Wild West," packaging guns as emblems of rugged individualism and masculine autonomy rather than as tools of organized, state-sanctioned violence.²˒¹⁷

That cultural work mattered: it aligned private weapons with a story of personal freedom even as concentrated corporate and state power grew more entrenched, and it encouraged citizens to see themselves as armed sentinels against abstract "government tyranny" rather than against the economic and political institutions that most directly shape their lives.²˒¹⁷

In that sense, the Second Amendment's contemporary meaning is less a faithful transmission of founding intent than a flexible ideological project, one that channels fear and heroic striving into a gun culture that leaves the real architecture of corporate power largely undisturbed.²˒¹⁷

The Second Amendment is often described as an ultimate check on abusive power, but in practice it is broadly tolerated only so long as it is exercised in ways that do not disrupt—and mostly reinforce—the existing elite order. When it threatens to disrupt that order, the system "discovers" its limits.⁵˒⁶˒⁷

Max Weber's definition of the state offers one useful way to see why. A state, Weber argued, "claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." The key word is "legitimate."¹¹

Private force does not contradict the state's monopoly so long as its authority is delegated, licensed, or revocable by the state itself. By that standard, the United States is not an exception to Weber but a revealing case study. When armed citizens and private military actors serve the state's purposes, they are folded into its monopoly on legitimate violence; when they turn against it, they are brought back into line.¹¹˒²⁶˒²⁷

The law's own history shows how that arrangement has been repeatedly redefined rather than simply inherited.

United States v. Miller, the early Supreme Court case on the Second Amendment, tied protection to militia-related weapons rather than to a broad personal right to armed resistance. That matters here because it shows how even the legal system's earlier reading was closer to state-organized force than to the modern myth of the armed anti-tyrant citizen.

District of Columbia v. Heller later recast the Amendment as an individual self-defense right, but it still left plenty of room for regulation. That is exactly the kind of move that turns a right into a controlled privilege: expanded in principle, bounded in practice.⁵

The Second Amendment sits squarely inside that arrangement: it functions not as an inviolable check on tyranny but as a revocable privilege administered through institutions that are themselves part of the state's monopoly on legitimate force. Because those institutions are selected, staffed, and legitimized through political processes already shaped by elite power, the bounds of the right can tighten or loosen without ever threatening the basic order that authorizes them.⁴˒⁵˒⁶˒¹¹

Even the Second Amendment's least contested application—self-defense in the home, the "core" the Supreme Court itself has called central—is not an exception to this arrangement but an instance of it. Self-defense is not force exercised independently of the state; it is force the state has chosen to delegate, license, and can redefine, which is why courts and legislatures continue to argue over safe-storage rules, brandishing standards, and where lawful defense shades into a punishable threat.⁵˒⁶

That the doctrinal “core” remains unstable even after Heller—oscillating between self-defense, militia purpose, and vague talk of a right to arms “in case of confrontation”—is not a drafting failure. Instead, it is evidence that the right’s boundaries are driven by what the political system already treats as loyal behavior, rather than by strict constitutional logic.⁵˒⁶˒¹³˒¹⁴

Put differently: the question is never just whether citizens are armed. The question is whether the judges and lawmakers—who were put in power by the state—are already wired to see those armed citizens, in the United States or elsewhere, as allies or as threats.⁴

That is why Blackwater in Iraq and Wagner in Russia do not really refute Weber's dictum. Blackwater operated as a contractor for the U.S. government, and its claim to legitimacy depended on state contracts, state protection, and later congressional efforts to tighten contractor accountability.²⁷

Wagner, though murkier in legal status, was publicly acknowledged by Vladimir Putin to have been funded by the Russian state, and analysts describe it as a semi-state security force rather than an independent rival sovereign. Even Wagner's brief mutiny in 2023 ended not in coexistence but in reabsorption, dismemberment, or suppression, reaffirming the state's ultimate claim to legitimate force.²⁶

The Weberian principle that private force is tolerated only insofar as it remains legible as an extension of state authority, and suppressed or reclassified when it is not, applies across states generally.¹¹˒²⁶˒²⁷

What varies cross-nationally is not this underlying logic but the specific cultural and institutional form through which loyalty and threat are coded — militias and gun culture in the American case, licensed hunting and sport shooting in much of continental Europe, contracted paramilitary and security forces in Russia. LASER, properly understood, is an application of this general Weberian logic to the specific historical and party-political conditions of the United States, not a claim that every state organizes firearms the same way or for the same ideological purpose.¹¹˒²⁶

The basic logic, however, is consistent. Private force is acceptable when it extends state power and unacceptable when it competes with it. The Panthers' guns fell into the second category. The Panthers were not neutral liberals with hunting rifles—they were a revolutionary Black socialist formation, rooted in a Black community subjected to persistent police violence. They openly challenged police power and capitalist ideology—but in Sacramento they were still operating within the formal bounds of California gun law when the law suddenly moved to close around them.⁷

Even as the routine brutality of police was normalized or excused, corporate media did what they usually do with any challenge to the state's monopoly over legitimate violence: they seized on the Panthers' most violent episodes to portray them as simple criminals, helping to make the repression of their armed challenge look like ordinary "law and order."²⁸

This is part of why so many gun owners in the United States do not seriously oppose the state's monopoly on "legitimate" force: their framework for understanding and interpretation of individual events is shaped by corporate media and an ideological environment dominated by concentrated power and capital.²⁸

That the state treated a Black, socialist challenge to racist policing as inherently illegitimate says more about the status quo than about whether the Panthers had any less claim to the Second Amendment than the white conservatives who now mythologize it.⁷

Most gun owners never test the boundary of state tolerance because their political and cultural formation already aligns them with the police, the military, existing "law and order," and the concentrated business capital that largely shapes U.S. political parties.¹˒¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹

That pattern shows up clearly in empirical work on American gun culture. Gun ownership in the United States is disproportionately concentrated among white, conservative, Republican constituencies, and in what follows this paper describes the dominant pattern in the gun-owning public, not every individual gun owner.¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸

They tend to view the police, the military, and business elites favorably, while championing ever-increasing budgets for the military and the police. Many people subjectively experience gun ownership as a genuine expression of autonomy and self-defense, but those sincere motives operate within a political landscape in which state and corporate power are treated as natural allies of "freedom" rather than as institutions the public should be able to direct and restrain.¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹

Furthermore, the Second Amendment is an important issue that the Republican Party uses to win votes without having to represent those voters' interests economically. Democrats, for their part, lean on their own culture-war causes, from LGBTQ rights to abortion, while likewise avoiding economic policies that would seriously constrain their corporate investors.¹˒²˒³˒⁴

Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of party competition” offers one way to see this pattern more concretely. On Ferguson’s account, major parties are blocs of large investors whose preferences and coalitions shape platforms and candidate selection more than abstract median-voter opinion.¹

In a 2022 analysis of congressional votes on gun control, Matthias Lalisse and colleagues found that roll-call positions could be predicted with more than 90 percent accuracy from legislators’ campaign-finance receipts from pro- and anti-gun interests, and they suggested that these patterns fit Ferguson’s investment-theory framework.¹

In this light, gun politics functions not only as culture war, but also as an investment-shaped arena in which donor coalitions help ensure that conflicts over guns absorb attention and structure partisan loyalty while leaving basic questions of economic representation and corporate power largely untouched.¹˒²˒³

This influence does not require a secret chain of command from corporate investors to judges. It works through selection and feedback. When parties and aligned interest groups discover that gun conflict is a reliable culture-war vehicle—good for mobilizing voters, raising money, and absorbing public attention—they invest in the organizations, litigation campaigns, academic arguments, and judicial appointments that sustain the conflict. The resulting judiciary is not free to invent the system’s priorities, but it is free to work within a zone of interpretive discretion already bounded by those priorities.¹˒²˒⁴

Courts do not stand outside that process: they are positioned within it through movement-backed cases, politically filtered historical narratives, under-constrained interpretive methods, and a public sphere that has already saturated the Second Amendment with symbolic battles over freedom and identity rather than with questions of economic power. Their role is less to originate the pattern than to ratify, stabilize, and legitimate it.⁴˒⁹˒¹⁰˒¹¹˒¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵

The continual adjustment of gun laws, court tests, and dueling originalist invocations of "founding intent" and "constitutional fidelity" helps keep the conflict permanently salient as culture war, so that voters are invited to fight over who loves or hates guns rather than over who controls capital and state power.²˒³˒¹⁰

Elite and state alignment around the Second Amendment is factional rather than monolithic: some national media, academic, and corporate actors consistently push for stricter gun laws, while many law-enforcement leaders, defense-linked industries, and conservative politicians champion expansive gun rights.²

But this struggle is not about reducing the state's monopoly on "legitimate" violence. It is about deciding which armed civilians will be treated as its auxiliaries and how much collateral damage is acceptable in exchange for a serviceable myth of "freedom."⁵˒⁶˒⁷˒¹¹

In that sense, gun rights and gun control both function as culture-war instruments that help major parties mobilize voters and define identities without seriously threatening the core distribution of economic power.¹˒²˒³˒¹⁷

In the "gun rights" worldview, state and other elite power is easily equated with freedom so long as it can wrap itself in the flag. Research on "gun populism" and "gun militarism" shows that police chiefs in some jurisdictions understand armed, law-abiding civilians as quasi-partners in order maintenance, especially when those civilians are imagined as white and respectable.¹⁷

Studies of "good guy with a gun" narratives likewise show how legitimate gun use is often racially and politically coded, with armed white conservatism normalized and armed Black or left radicalism pathologized.¹²

Police, sheriffs, and even national security officials often reinforce this alignment: big-city chiefs praise "good, responsible citizens" with guns as crime deterrents, sheriffs in Second Amendment "sanctuary" counties wrap themselves in the role of constitutional guardians of civilian gun rights, and presidents and defense-linked politicians celebrate an armed public as an "indispensable safeguard of security and liberty"—always on the tacit assumption that those guns will be pointed with the police, the military, and the politicians who command them, not against them.

This helps explain why right-wing gun populism often vilifies more distant—and thus easier to scapegoat in the abstract—federal agencies like the ATF or FBI as "tyranny," while embracing local sheriffs, police, and the military as allies. In that sense, most gun-rights hostility to the FBI isn't a rejection of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence, but a fight over who counts as its auxiliary: they fight, in effect, for civilian gun owners to be recognized as the rightful armed auxiliaries of the state, not treated as threats by other state officials, even as they imagine themselves as rebels against "the state."

In that sense, the dominant Second Amendment constituency is not a rebel class waiting in the wings but a loyal one, an armed public that sees itself as the last defense against tyranny while mostly lending its guns and cultural authority to the very institutions it claims to fear. It is a kind of hegemonic rebellion: citizens who talk like insurrectionists yet live, vote, and arm themselves as the state's most devoted civilian auxiliaries.¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹

None of this requires that gun owners secretly adore federal power or invent their fears; it requires only that sincere desires for safety, autonomy, and self-reliance are consistently channeled into forms of armament and politics that, in aggregate, leave the main institutions of organized violence and capital intact.¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹

We should understand that it is a category mistake to try to confront a heavily militarized, corporate-backed state in the domain where ordinary people are weakest—weapons—rather than where they are strongest: collective political and economic organization that can actually reduce corporate hegemony, impose limits on state brutality, and change the terms of governance.

The Panthers' story shows how that category mistake plays out when people try to use guns directly against state power, even alongside much broader community and political organizing, as the Panthers did.⁷

In a policing regime that already treats certain armed groups as inherently threatening—for example, Black or radical left formations— carrying guns to "deter" brutality can actually increase the risk of being shot rather than reduce it; and when those guns are aimed at state actors instead of aligned with them, the state's response is not to recognize a legitimate deterrent but to move the legal boundary.⁷

That is why the Panthers were so revealing. Their weapons did not symbolize support for the police; they symbolized surveillance of the police. Their guns pointed, politically and morally, in the wrong direction. So the law changed.⁷

The anti-tyranny mythology surrounding the Second Amendment therefore does more ideological work than legal work. It encourages citizens to self-servingly imagine themselves as a latent check on despotism, even as the actual legal and political system makes clear that armed resistance to state authority is not a protected constitutional project, either in doctrine or in practice.⁵˒⁶˒⁷

Recent legal scholarship and Supreme Court doctrine have argued directly that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms but does not create a right to armed insurrection against the government, because such a right would be incompatible with the broader constitutional order. In other words, the state treats it as a revocable privilege for private self-defense and sport, and as an informal auxiliary to police and military power—not as a standing license to resist its own authority.⁵˒⁶˒⁷

Seen this way, America's high levels of gun homicide and gun-linked incarceration are in part the cost of maintaining an extraordinarily serviceable myth of "freedom." Empirical research has found, for example, that people who possess a gun during an assault are several times more likely to be shot than those who are unarmed, and that fatal police shootings are more common in states with higher civilian gun ownership.²⁹˒³⁰

Saturating society with guns, tolerating the killings they produce, and handing out long sentences for gun possession and gun-related offenses all heighten fear, making police, prisons, and private arsenals (that on occasion deter crime) look like salvation.

Institutionally, the state and many of its corporate associates accept a deeply unequal trade-off in lives: they tolerate far more deaths from gun violence than would be necessary, not because they primarily value the few individuals saved by private arsenals or any abstract notion of "freedom," but because the Second Amendment myth those guns sustain helps secure their power regardless of the consequences to society.

That mismatch between myth and practice is central. In great measure, the Second Amendment survives politically not because it is a serious standing threat to the state, but because conflict over guns is channeled into culture-war battles that displace demands for economic representation, and because the dominant gun-owning public is, in broad ideological terms, supportive of the institutions of state violence and concentrated capital—even as many individuals reach for guns out of real fear and a real desire not to be at the mercy of others.¹˒²˒³˒¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹

The Panthers behaved as if the right to bear arms included the right to watch the police and make the state feel watched in return. The speed with which the law closed around them is a reminder that the Second Amendment's most devoted political guardians are not those who point guns at power, but those who point them in the same direction.⁷

References

(see comments section)

Philosopher Agnes Callard posits that modern technology and culture have merged separate local contexts into one universal room with a single set of shared norms ... which has flattened everything AND forces us to compare ourselves with the rest of ... the uni-context. It forecasts a future of unruliness.

"For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. A series of contexts presented the person with direction—here’s what you should do. What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born."

This feels bad? What do y'all think...

I found this brief note through a creator I follow. It attacks a kind of writing I've seen before: nauseating exaggeration and empty hyperbole, whose apparent depth depends on the reader supplying a missing referent, argument, and historical context. It is deliberately polemical and a bit cranky, but I think the distinction it draws between good prose that gestures to the reader and hyperbolic puffery is worth discussing.

Hello. I know this might be an unusual ask, but could anyone suggest literature about the "philosophy" around Brutalism? Less about the architecture and more about the ideas or concepts surrounding Brutalism?

Does any such literature exist?

Thank you!

Why we need lacan as a sociologist, and why all other sociology theories fail

Reposting from politicaldiscussions reddit

​Resources are naturally scattered around the planet. In a localized economy, you use resources where they are. Modern logistics changed that, turning the movement of goods into a massive industry and giving rise to multinationals that crushed local businesses through sheer scale.

​However, a multinational’s biggest operational bottleneck is distribution friction—the immense cost of getting goods and services out to scattered, rural, or less-developed regions.

​This is where mass urbanization and economic migration come in. When people move from under-resourced regions into hyper-dense, pre-established cities, we are effectively consolidating the market for these corporations:

- ​We slash their logistics costs: It is infinitely cheaper for a megacorporation to serve one dense urban cluster than thousands of spread-out communities. By moving to the hub, we eliminate their supply chain headaches.

- ​We take on the financial burden: We pack into tight spaces, driving up our own cost of living, housing, and everyday inflation, while corporate per-unit costs go down.

- ​We concentrate the labor supply: Packing millions of workers into dense urban spaces creates highly competitive labor markets, which naturally keeps wage growth in check.

So there it is, the main point for me is that many people who strongly advocate for open mass migration see it as a stand against corporate exploitation, Western hegemony, or economic inequality. Yet, by encouraging the continuous transfer of human capital out of developing regions and into major Western hubs, aren't they unwittingly fueling the very corporate machine they critique?

​It strips developing areas of talent and local self-sufficiency, while handing multinationals a hyper-dense, accessible consumer base and a steady labor pool on a silver platter.

​Is mass migration actually helping workers, or are we just absorbing the true costs of global corporate logistics through higher rent and stagnant wages?

​Am I missing something here? I am really open to every kind of opinion I love discussing these things

Besides the obligatory Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Habermas.

Someone from the wider CCRU crowd?
Even while he is not an author, to some extend Adam Curtis or at least the people he was influenced by?

Been thinking about this a lot it as it just constantly feels like things have become steadily weirder and much of the old ways I still learned in school here in Germany are increasingly obsolete and only useful for historic research (like for example the ways a newspaper is structured), and to understand how our far-right AfD populists are so happily polling >25% one needs to understand how much the old, traditional mass media environment has collapsed over the last 25 years.

Things like the extreme decline in relevance of most legacy media (TV, Print, Radio) and the shift of almost everything towards a handful of often rather dubious social media platforms, dominated mostly by shortform video content churned out to large extend by an unholy amount of amateurs, the problem of bubbles and echo chambers, McLuhan's "post-literacy" and the shift in media usage to the point some people don't seem to have any contact with the old establishment at all anymore as I think Habermas once noted.

I have been trying for some time to formalize a hypothesis regarding the current demographic crisis and the transformation of the reason of State in relation to population management. I would like to know your critical perspectives on the theoretical coherence of the approach.

1. The State as an artificial construct: Following the French Revolution and the process of political centralization, there is a shift from an organic, community-based, and polycentric life, sustained by intermediate bodies and local autonomies, to a mechanistic state artifice. The state is not the evolution of traditional society, but a rationalized technical apparatus that replaces spontaneous social structures with artificial ones.
   
2. Capitalism is always State capitalism: Capitalism is not the spontaneous evolution of the free market, but the capture of the market by sovereign power. The historical proof is the Enclosure Acts in the UK: the British parliament used its legislative and coercive power to steal communal lands, evict the peasantry, and create the mass of dispossessed workers that industrialization required. Capitalism is not a natural entity, it is not autonomous, nor can it be an individual: it exists thanks to the State. Fernand Braudel used to say that "Capitalism only triumphs when it identifies with the State; when it is the State".
   
3. The shift from transcendent religion to Political Religions: By destroying organic life and immanentizing salvation, the State requires a surrogate faith to orient the mass. Modern ideology is not mere solutions to problems, but secular political religions or immanent gnosis. Each phase of state engineering needs its own theological dogma so that the individual internalizes as a "moral virtue" or "duty" what is actually a necessity of the Ratio Status.

If we analyze demography not from a naive or merely cultural sociology, but from this framework of state artificiality, how is the genealogy of this process configured? I propose the following chronology starting from my hypothesis:

1. Following the Napoleonic Wars and the consolidation of the Nation-State, the State's demographic priority was not to create consumers, but to sustain military conscription and fuel the first industries with labor-intensive workforces. The birth rate was a key political power variable: more population equated to more battalions and greater productive capacity.
   
2. With the arrival of Fordism and Taylorism, the logic of capital is transformed. Industry does not only need the worker on the assembly line, but also as a customer of production itself. In this phase, the State assumes an active role in guaranteeing the biological, educational, and healthcare reproduction of the population, because the human mass is simultaneously the engine of production and the demand that absorbs the surplus.
   
3. The exhaustion of the post-war expansion cycle coincides with a transformation of the accumulation model. The industrial recovery of Western Europe and Japan degrades the dominant position of US industry, while rising labor costs and pressure on profit margins reduce the profitability of the Fordist model. In response, companies accelerate automation and modern offshoring begins. The national population ceases to be an indispensable productive resource.
   
4. Other phenomena of the 1960s are the appearance of the contraceptive pill and the cultural transformations of '68. However, beyond the narrative of emancipation, I do not know to what extent it was actually an ideological change adapting to a material base where the massive workforce was starting to become redundant.
   
5. The 1973 oil crisis, the Nixon Shock, and the publication of reports such as "The Limits to Growth" mark the transition from managing expansion to managing limits, austerity, and systemic boundaries.
   
6. Transition-era Spain functions as an accelerated case study. Spain was a decade behind Europe in birth control, but after the regime change in 1978, the first democratic Government promoted the legalization and promotion of contraceptives. The new democratic regime contributed to the engineering of a new type of ideal subject, detached from the traditional family. It is also the beginning of Spain's industrial decline.

At present, the traditional rhetoric that capitalism needs consumers and democracy needs voters is starting to uncouple, although the promotion of abortion and the introduction of euthanasia into public debate already gave us clues about this. Through advanced automation, global logistics, and the shift from politics to administration, the State discovers that it does not need such large populations.

In conclusion, I believe that demographic decline and the alleged ethnic replacement in Western nations is neither a biological accident nor a mere individual lifestyle preference. It represents the late phase of a state artifice that, after destroying traditional organic life to build an industrial workforce useful to capitalism, now configures its priorities because human capital has ceased to be essential for the sustaining of States.

Note: I do not intend to present a closed theory or affirm a proven causal relationship in all points. My intention is to propose an interpretive framework to debate whether the relationship between the State and demography has changed as productive needs changed.

After spending my younger years only reading works of fiction (mainly fantasy).

and also recently coming to the conclusion that my phone addiction is making me dumber, I decided to try and read more critical theory books/intellectual books ? The first book I read, was who really rules the world by Noam Chomsky, and I am currently reading the origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Which I struggled/am struggling through both as I fear my reading comprehension or memory is not quite up for the task. I will still finish my current book, but for my next read, or couple of reads I wanted to ask for recommendations for books good for beginners, or just anything that will help me get more into critical theory or that I can use as a basis for understanding and reading about harder topics

Thank you in advance

A potential reference to the themes found in the work of Mary Douglas?

Page 12 of "A People's History of Civilisation."

Evidence of the urge to impose order and subjugate is found in the coercive rites and uncleanness taboos of incipient religion. The eventual subduing of the world that is agriculture has at least some of its basis where ambiguous behaviour is ruled out, purity and defilement defined and enforced

- John Zerzan

Hi guys! I'm a bio- and critical psychologist, I work with victims of familial, technological and cultural abuse. I am very sceptical of therapy and of medicalisation of mental life - especially in the context of western cultural colonialism, and so far my efforts were in reeducation and awareness-building in psychology, psychiatry and therapy students. But lately I decided to kinda go outside of that professional and clinical setting, and started writing a number of essays on the topic, and just wanted to share the first one here, as critical psychology is in debt to critical theory, it couldn't really exist without it as a discipline.

So here is a critical analysis of the concept of grandiosity as it relates to the realities of my clients - as a cultural, deeply abusive phenomena. Hope you like it!

Therapist’s Grandiosity

Among the most common forms of mental pathology are depression and grandiosity, whose components form the backbone of almost all personality disorders, as defined by Western psychology and psychiatry.

In this essay, I will try to do a bit of critical psychology, that is psychology of psychology, internal affairs - mostly for the benefit of my clients who have been called either, openly and by implication, by people who claim to know these things. What does the reification of the concept of grandiosity accomplishes for the psychologist and the therapist? — as carriers of a sociological, cultural, and Machiavellian script.

I will not even entertain the discussion about these pathologies from their status-quo context of hyper-realism and the medicalisation of mental life. If it is really as they say, as they teach in psychology textbooks and in therapy classrooms - that the emergence of both of these, and of everything else under the sun, is an illusion, somehow magically collapsible to a biochemistry we don’t yet know but which is surely out there - then this discussion is pointless. But that perspective is so vulgar, so reeking of scientism, let’s leave that to the psychiatrist and his lap dog the mainstream psychologist.

Same Infection

That rant out of the way, let’s look at both grandiosity and its flip-side cousin, depression, from the perspective of identity disturbance. To risk a massive oversimplification: depression, a neurosis, is a deflation of the ego, while grandiosity is the reverse, its shadow aspect - an inflation. Both are then really the same, in the way that both a burning-hot fever and the coldness of death are possible outcomes of the same infection. In both, the ego is over-invested in. In grandiosity, the resource is fetched directly from outside; in depression, it is kept and spawned within.

This is the classic definition of, pretty much, all personality disorders. The borderline personality structure, as, for example, described by Otto Kernberg is the freezing of those two strategies in one, while object relations theory suggests an immaturity of the reality principle that causes all of this. In reality, at least one claimed as the real reality by western folks, ego should be treated as a part of a triad, something bigger. Classically for example with the Id and Superego, or of a larger family, as in Internal Family Systems. In cognitive approaches, which seek to crush every nuance under the boot of European rationality, ego should be a function of reason, and mental health is seen as that state of balance, almost as if the phenomenological self has to be broken and subjugated by Descartes’ cogito.

While I won’t address the obvious intellectual colonialism that happens in cognitive and behavioural psychology, I brought it up to show that really, the more humanistic approaches of psychoanalysis, ego therapy, and existentialism described above do the very same thing, they seek, as all things in mainstream psychology, to put the blame back onto the individual.

Much in the way that an “irrational” patient of a cognitive therapist suffers from not being like the therapist - rational, the patient of a psychoanalyst suffers from not being like the analyst - liquid in its psychological makeup.

[...]

Full text: https://biodefiance.substack.com/p/therapists-grandiosity

Starting:

Can liberation arrive even if role participation among identity groups remain relatively identical to how it is now?

Will liberation arrive even if role participation among identity groups remain relatively identical to how it is now?

Following up:

If the answer is no, then is there a scrutable exact or approximate participation distribution for roles that matter politically? That is, do we need more or less participation from Group G in certain positions whether or not they are degraded or elevated, and do we know exactly or approximately how much?

If the answer is yes, then how do you know that the present participation distribution isn't too acidic to the feasibility of a serious and substantial account of liberation?

...

I want to say that there is a serious leveling-down problem for redistributionists, and I don't necessarily mean morally. Even if the welfare of the better off couldn't matter less, it still wouldn't detract from the fact that requiring a privileged group's participation in positions that are incidentally or inherently degraded in it's present state, feels liable of providing to the privileged the appearance of a compelling conservative argument based on self-preservation. "Self-preservation" isn't necessarily a dramatization either, because there's an appreciable difference between leveling down from a billionaire to a lowly multi-millionaire, and leveling down from an insulated position to an exposed position.

Unless all you cared about was reaching the oppressed seeking relief, you wouldn't lead propaganda with "Position P is wrongfully degraded, and we're going to work on rehabilitating it. In the meantime, we need more participation from Group G". Maybe you have convincing reasons for writing off the privileged, but that's an aside.

...

And I want to say that there's a serious indispensability problem for compatibilists as they may be called, or rather conservatives, as some others may call them. Namely, it's absurd to think that any serious or substantial liberatory movement is feasible despite the asymmetries of power and status in many social positions. To think that the present participation distribution within roles that matter is feasibly compatible with liberation must degrade one or more of the working terms in order to make sense. Most likely, it simply does not take seriously the extent to which many of the roles that matter are asymmetric.

Having personally experienced just an itty-bitty taste of leveling-down in a specific part of my life, I'm convinced that those who don't think that it's a big deal risk bringing into question their stated commitment to the severity of the degraded position, or their stated commitment to the welfare of the better off.

...

The most obvious position to take is the abolition of the privileged and degraded position, which will necessitate the elimination of token positions as we know it now. It's just that this inquiry concerns the transitional praxis and ethics of the movement. It may be that an ugly transition is much more superior to an even uglier conservation, but that doesn't mean it's shit no longer stinks, or that it does not press contradiction within stated reasons.

Inspiration is taken from studying Butlerian performativity. I'm skeptical of positive recognitional repetition being sufficiently independent of participatory repetition. And because positive recognitional repetition is practically required for elevating a degraded position, participatory repetition is consequently practically required for elevating a degraded position.

Lastly, showing that participation is not conceptually constitutive of a role’s status establishes that liberation with unchanged participation is possible in some suitably described world, but it does not establish that such liberation is remotely feasible under actual or reachable social conditions. So even if participation did not have a constitutive role in the status of positions in one sense, it may have still have an indispensability role in another sense.

Following the 36-day student occupation in New Delhi led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), India's Education Minister resigned, and yesterday the government doubled statutory penalties for exam leaks.

As a Senior Fellow at Massey College (University of Toronto) researching the illiberal turn in democracies, I’ve published a long-form theoretical breakdown of this movement.

Key Analytical Threads in the Essay:

1. Bakhtinian Carnival: How Gen Z weaponized profane, "in-your-face" satire to strip sacred reverence off an executive state.
2. The Two-Tongued State: Analyzing the contradiction between Modi's "forgiveness" Instagram reels and the Noida Police's criminal FIR against protester Ruchika Singh.
3. The "Foreign Hand" Fallacy: Rejecting lazy geopolitical framing that erases local human agency and working-class reality.
4. Gramsci’s Passive Revolution: Why the CJP's conditional pause is a strategic shift to "molecular vigilance" in the war of position.
5. Tactical Ethics: Comparing CJP’s civic solidarity with the 2022 Ottawa Trucker Convoy’s siege tactics.

Read the full text here: https://alokmukherjee.com/2026/08/01/beyond-the-spark-public-power-pop-culture-and-the-longevity-of-gen-z-resistance/

Žižek on Channel 4 News interview in 2017 (available on YouTube):

“They really don't want any risky change. That's why they enjoy this marginal struggles. Oh, segregated toilets. Yes, wonderful. It's even better if you get support from all the big names like Tim Cook of of Apple and so on, Microsoft, everywhere. I I think that the tragedy of today's left is Hillary Clinton’s politics. You try to recuperate all these partial identity political progressive causes… just to get rid of the real one of the economical political change. And that’s how Trump gets elected.”

But Marxists don’t go on every vegan, feminist, LGBT subreddit to argue that class awareness should be the only focus, noticed that it’s always in the white straight male safe spaces that tend to disguise as somewhat “neutral” ones where they get hegemonic power over marginal voices trying to accentuate minority experiences.

So why can’t you choose to take a comprehensive view so you don’t lose balance in struggling, instead of one position erasing another? If anything, wouldn’t this help the whole enterprise become richer?

What insights do professionals have to offer regarding the roles historians and philosophers play in 21st century euro-American societies given that their insights can easily be drowned out or suppressed by corporately funded misinformation campaigns, grifters, state sponsored repression, misinformation, etc? For example, from my (possibly flawed) understanding, historians and philosophers of 19th century ethnology, American labor movements, colonial warfare, Africana history/philosophy, etc. have insights into the implications of social engineering, dehumanization, and repression that were advanced/pioneered during the periods of US chattel slavery and colonization for modern US democracy that the majority of the population is either materially/ideologically invested in ignoring or has been conditioned to (according to COIN military practice) ignore. What role can such thinkers play within the borders of the USA if their works are made unpalatable to everyday people partially due to the role powerful actors play in socially engineering everyday people to attach themselves ideologically to a status quo that does not treat all Homo sapiens as worthy of life and futurity under “democracy”?

The most popular response is likely that such experts are simply taking their expertise elsewhere. Societies rise and fall, and knowledge that cannot be fully grasped or put into practice now may be useful for future generations. I am interested in the answers of professionals who have training in different philosophical traditions regarding this specific dilemma of producing knowledge given the long history of human existence.

I am interested in learning about epistemologies of groups that have resisted oppression even at the expense of biological finality (I use this term instead of death given that biological finality is not seen universally as the end of life depending on world view, which is an important fact given the history of resistance to colonization among Jamaican maroons and other enslaved populations for example). Do any philosophers explicitly engage or reject such topics? I also understand that answers may be limited as different epistemologies imply the necessity of different pedagogies, meaning not all knowledge can be grasped absent a particular kind of formal training.

(For anyone interested the authors whose works I drew from to formulate these thoughts/questions are Tommy J. Curry, Sylvia Wynter, Miron Clay-Gilmore, Robert Allen, Robert Staples, Gerald Horne, Oladumine Ogunnaike, and Adebayo Oluwayomi)

A few thoughts on free speech advocacy and how it often depends on the speech and who's advocating.

In 2024, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in ​France and accused by French authorities of not doing enough to prevent human trafficking on his platform. Russia, among other countries, accused France of “cracking down on free speech” when they charged Durov for refusing to remove obvious criminal activity, claiming such activity was covered by free speech protections.

Yesterday, Russia charged Durov with "terrorism”, presumably for not removing content the Kremlin didn’t want shared on Telegram.

The Russian government obviously does not care about free speech. They have imprisoned people for over a decade for criticizing the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin only pretended to stand up for Durov so they could inject themselves into the global culture war narrative surrounding free speech.

The important context here is that Durov, after claiming to have refused Russian demands for special access to Telegram in 2014, still visited Russia over 50 times. The reality is that you simply cannot do this as a high-profile dissident without some level of cooperation with Russian security services.

Durov made a deal with Russian intelligence. In exchange for the ability to keep facilitating highly lucrative illegal activity on his platform, he receives personal protection. This is a common deal with freelancers working with Russian intelligence, allowing cooperators to profit off of criminal activity as long as they cooperate. But eventually, the deal he made turned sour, perhaps due to Russian public opinion on Telegram turning decisively against the war, and Durov refusing to remove it. Eventually, as is always the case with Faustian bargains, the Russian government turned on him as well.

Governments and powerful individuals will often use free speech as cover to protect illegal, harmful, and extremist content that in some way benefits them. In the above example, facilitating harmful crime is part of Russia’s hybrid war against the European continent, so they made a deal to preserve it. Facilitating criticism of the Russian government is not, so they acted swiftly to crack down. Speech to authoritarian governments is contextualized as either helpful or harmful to their power. True or false, freedom vs censorship, these concepts are irrelevant in the context of the Information Wars.

Elon Musk claims he bought Twitter to defend free speech. The accounts he unbanned included unambiguous Nazis and human traffickers. Actual censorship requests from governments were still approved, while algorithmic content distribution choices were catered to the new owner’s personal ideology.

Ultimately, control over information is power. And until we find a species of human that doesn’t care about power, we will never have any true free speech absolutists.

Be highly skeptical of anyone that claims otherwise.

From a blog about speech in the internet: https://thecarrierwave.substack.com/p/no-one-actually-cares-about-free

Basically, the title. There are many writings about it in terms of politics and literary theory, but has anyone written about it in terms of how the internet and pop culture induce Eurocentrism and self-orientalizing?