Nevada Militia and Left-wing Radicals

The news stories coming out about the Nevada cattle rancher who had armed post-hoc right-wing militia form to defend his property against Government seizure has me troubled. I am not weighing in on whether the Nevada rancher was right in his claims, or whether the Government was right in its claims. I also do not particularly care whether the post-hoc militia were defending justice or unjustly destabilizing the rule of law. What bothers me is the way it was handled in relation to how the Government has historically handed other dissident activities.

A picture of armed, government militia confronting a workers strike from the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike.

It is my belief that the capitulation on the part of the Government had mostly to do with the fact that post-hoc militia were right-wing and defending the institution of private property. In Marxian political theory, the State is the monopoly on the use of legitimate violence for the maintenance of private property. The police and the military serve the primary purpose of protecting private property. In On the Jewish Question, Marx writes:

"Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property... The concept of security does not raise civil society above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism. None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community."

The τέλος of the police is the shared aim of what the post-hoc right-wing militia were fighting for in Nevada. Obviously, the interests of each individual capitalist and the libertarian ideology of capitalism do not always coincide with the interests of the State and its vision of capitalism. Yet, it is undeniable—from the Marxist perspective—that there is a certain affinity between the two camps.

My concern is what would happen if a leftist-socialist community decided to take a similar action. What if an organized collectivity of agricultural workers decided that they were going to disobey the Government and refuse to turn over the products of their labor to the absentee capitalist owner? What if they armed themselves into a militia in exactly same manner?

It is doubtful, in my humble opinion, that the Government would roll over and play dead. It is doubtful the Government would accept the new ownership of the workers collective. I imagine that the situation could dissolve into bloody skirmishes and that many arrests would definitely follow. I cannot envision the Government capitulating, permitting this socialist dissidence.