By A. Shaw
Around 1848, two of the world’s greatest revolutionaries — Marx and Engels — wrote in the Communist Manifesto
“In all these battles, it [the bourgeoisie] sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie,”  the Manifesto says.
Let’s be specific about these “elements of political and general education.”
Let’s be specific about these “weapons.”?
(1) What are these elements and weapons?
(2) Where are they?
(3) Do they work?
As for the question (3): Do they work?
Well, the Tea Party and its predecessors over the last two decades armed several hundred thousand reactionaries, lunatics, and crackpots with these weapons. Today, this political force or mass movement or electoral apparatus is a powerful force in the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the working class and against the rest of the masses.
So, it seems these elements and weapons work.
As for the question (2), Where are they?
Everywhere in the USA — bookstores, Ebay, libraries, etc. An excellent source are bookstores operated by GOP county organizations. The county organizations of the DP are usually worthless. These elements and weapons are often found in campaign manuals or books on how to win elections.. Obviously, the readers or students of campaign manuals should as soon as possible supplement their reading and studies with experience in actual campaigns.
The Bernie Sanders’ campaign, still in its early stages, is a splendid resource to supplement one’s self-training.
Lenin, the great Russian revolutionary, says “It takes years to train oneself to be a professional revolutionary.”
To be sure, the Koch brothers, the degenerate U.S. billionaires, say “It takes years to train oneself to be a professional reactionary.”
One highly recommended text is Ronald Faucheux’s Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management.
So, it seems the elements and weapons are everywhere, largely abandoned and ignored, especially by liberals and leftists who prefer to dine on and to digest the foul-looking and foul-smelling bullshit of their failed leaders and idols.
As for the question (1): What are these elements and weapons?
The elements and weapons that farsighted Marx and Engeld saw in the middle of the 19th century are merely fields of electoral specialization in which a liberal or leftist can train oneself to be professional or a professional amateur or professional nincompoop.
Among others, these fields of electoral specialization include planning and budgeting, fundraising, targeting, voter contact, free media, paid media, candidate activity and development, opposition research, volunteers, GOTV, anti-voter fraud, etc.
The Tea Party has trained hundreds of thousands of its supporters to be real good or even professional in these fields or in the use of these weapons. These highly trained and experienced reactionaries easily prevail over liberal and especially leftist nincompoops.
Generally, well trained reactionaries are “professionals” based on their level of political skill, not their dependence on their political skills as the only or a major source of income. But increasingly,  these “professionals” trained by Tea Bags are getting multi-million dollar fees for a few months work.
Cuban revolutionaries are training and providing opportunities for self-training for Latin American and Caribbean revolutionaries. The implied precondition of being a revolutionary is a serious obstacle to the participation of US liberals and leftists in these Cuban political programs.
So, it seems that weapons are merely  electoral skills.
Obviously, if a state is not a democracy, the immediate task of the working class is not winning non-existent elections. The immediate task is then the introduction of democracy or, better still, to win the battle for democracy as Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto. By winning the battle for democracy, Marx and Engels did not mean, like many US liberals and leftists, winning the battle for the bourgeois democracy, Marx and Engels meant the battle for a proletarian democracy, a state in which workers chiefly and democratically exercise state power and in which the workers  chiefly and democratically exercise power for the working class.
WEAPONS THE WORKING CLASS CAN USE TO HELP BERNIE?
The weapons that seem most available to the liberal and revolutionary sectors of the working class are volunteers and free media.
The two can creatively be forged into one. Creativity and audacity are exactly what the forging demands.
Traditionally, this is how volunteers were addressed by the campaign.
Hey volunteer,
Do you know how to knock on doors?
Do you know how to use a telephone?
Do  you know how to lick a stamp?
Do you know where to buy a bucket of KFC chicken?
Volunteers today should learn to respond something like this.
Hey asshole,
I’m here to learn what you do if you do anything in this campaign.
I’ll do my share of the doors, telephones, stamps and chicken,
but I’m here to get some fucking weapons, not to fuck around with assholes.
Bernie himself says this campaign is not about Bernie Sanders.
If it’s not about Bernie, then for sure, it’s not about your ass.
Remember this, I’m not going to take any shit from you.
In other words, the weapons are not JUST for the leaders and big wheels of the campaign.
Mass movement becomes politically independent only when the mass, among others, possesses  weapons because the armed mass, which knows what the leaders know, does not depend on leaders who may be controlled by the political police, chiefly the FBI and G-2 units of the military.
A mass with weapons identifies, exposes, and isolates corrupt leaders whose treachery can cause a mass movement without weapons to collapse.
A mass with weapons is too solid to collapse.
With over 200,000 volunteers signed-in, the campaign may want to establish or at least assist in the establishment of a network of two hundred or three hundred volunteer-operated websites called something like LIBERALS AND SOCIALISTS FOR BERNIE (ST. LOUIS) and LIBERALS AND SOCIALISTS FOR BERNIE (NYC) and LIBERALS AND SOCIALISTS FOR BERNIE (Chicago), so on and so forth.
The national network of “volunteer-operated” and volunteer-financed websites lifts the participating volunteers above doors, telephones, stamps, and chicken.
 
But the proposed operation modifies the concept of free media.
Before Obama 2008, free media meant coverage in the mainstream of the bourgeois media for which the campaign wasn’t charged.
Obama 2008 added something new to the concept of free media. 2008 introduced a campaign owned and operated media providing self coverage of the campaign to the masses.
When Obama won in 2008, the sellout president-elect promptly dismantled his electoral apparatus. Obama, of course, knew he would sell out during his first term. So, the electoral apparatus may have been used against him in his 2012 re-election. So, he dismantled the thing as quickly and as completely as possible.
Obama is a sellout and an Uncle Tom, but he’s not a fool.
2008 required a lot of creativity and audacity in regard to free media, but now 2008 is just history.
2016 demands fresh creativity and audacity.
Now, in 2015, what we find is evolving concepts of volunteer and free media forging into one.
Obviously, there are potential complications.
CONCLUSION
With weapons.