Interesting that the store owner had a gun in Venezuela Being a Marxist paradise and such
It is also worthy of note that Lenin wanted the proletariat to be an “armed people.”Looks like Maduro is still holding on to this little bit of Leninism. For now.
This prospect did not frighten Lenin at all. He had unmitigated confidence that the members of the proletariat would never abuse their power as the capitalists had done.
Furthermore, Lenin assumed that the proletariat had the instinctive capacity to recognize justice on sight. Not only would they use their weapons to put down any non-social acts in the community by spontaneous “mass action,” but Lenin believed they would genuinely and heroically suppress any selfish, nonsocial tendencies in themselves. They would have acquired the “habit” of living in a communal social order and would have grown “accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social existence without force and without subjection.”
Lenin then says that with the machinery of government gone and with the Communist pattern of a classless, stateless society established throughout the world, finally “it becomes possible to speak of freedom!” …
— The Naked Communist, Chapter 3