I keep seeing libs post "lol, you can't possibly beat the US military! They have drones & tanks! Give up! "

Tell that to iraqi's, afghani's, vietcong, etc. The US hasn't won a war since WWII.

It's not about lone wolf or even conquest, it's about collective community defense.

Obviously we cannot beat the US military in a straight up war. Attempting to do so would be stupid. Even if we could, violence and conquest just re-creates the State, which we need to abolish. Thinking that's what Revolution is or has to be is a failure of imagination.

Emma Goldman said that the more organized the working class is, the less violence is necessary to make a revolution. She was right. A real Revolution isn't war and mayhem, it's collective action - strikes, neighborhood councils, creating worker-owned collective businesses.

This is the essence of an Anarchist dual-power strategy. We build counter-institutions that enable and extend working class power and self-management. In classic anarchosyndicalism that strategy was based on labor unions but in a modern setting it's got to be much bigger.

But in order to build those institutions, we have to be able to defend them. Anyone who knows labor history knows when unions get strong, bosses resort to murder and intimidation. I could list examples all day long. From Pinkertons to having the Natl Guard machine gun strikers.

THAT is why we have to have guns. For the same reason why civil rights organizers in the South who used nonviolence as a tactic were virtually all armed - to defend against lynchings. An unarmed left can never build power because the ruling class will crush us via terrorism.

And, if and when our counter-institutions become strong enough to move from dual power to directly challenging the state, as the CNT did in '36, we will need arms to defend ourselves and our communities. If we've done our jobs right there will be no war, no conquest.

But if you believe for a moment Bosses & State will just give up, you're delusional. They will use all the classic tactics of right wing terrorism that the US has deployed all over the world for a century+. Our militias (NOT standing armies) will obviously need to be armed.

You simply cannot make revolution without arms. At every stage of the process we must be able to defend ourselves and each other. Not as isolated lone wolves - fuck hollywood - but as communities in resistance that can mobilize to defend the world we are building.

Stirner argued that the defining characteristic of the State is its monopoly on "legitimate" violence within a given territory. At root, all State power comes back to that capacity for violence, and in authoritarian systems all state violence is deemed legitimate by default

In a revolutionary situation where the State has even more leeway to use violence against citizens than normal, this tendency is amplified even further. So a marxist State becomes an instrument of organized murder, a weapon used by a minority to force the majority to conform.

This is why Marxist revolutions always result in tyranny. As Malatesta pointed out, the ends we seek to achieve must be reflected in the means we use to achieve them.

In other words, anarchists seeking to achieve human liberation must only ever use violence as a last resort.

BUT we must have that last resort available. Self defense is legitimate. Community defense is legitimate. Defending our counter-institutions against State terrorism is legitimate.

Revolution is a process, not an event, and we must be able to defend ourselves at every step.