you’re not even trying to educate yourself on the subject, you just hide behind your idealist, grand-standing spite. just go read Foucault and get some critical thinking done. question your biases ;)

Wow you’re such a master of sophistry and purveyor of strawman arguments! I told myself to not to venture anymore into this thread but I wanted to read other comments and was too taken aback by your ingenious reasoning: dripping with sarcasm, devoid of substance, and utterly unmoored from reality.

You reduce centuries of historical struggle to a juvenile caricature of violence as if proponents of revolutionary change are advocating bar brawls over policy disputes. Congratulations, you’ve managed to completely miss the point and simultaneously belittle the historical sacrifices of countless movements that fought for the very freedoms you enjoy today.

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Let’s start with your dismissal of violence as a foundation for human society. “Mutually beneficial coexistence” and “strong democratic rule of law,” you say? Cute. But how exactly do you think those came about? Did kings one day wake up and declare, “Let’s dissolve feudalism in favor of liberal democracy because it’s the right thing to do”? No, those changes were wrested from their cold, greedy hands by uprisings, revolutions, and organized struggles.

• The Magna Carta? Signed because the barons threatened King John with rebellion.
• The abolition of slavery? Achieved only after countless slave revolts and a bloody Civil War in the United States.
• The right to vote? Fought for by suffragettes who faced violent repression.
• Labor rights? Achieved after decades of strikes, riots, and blood spilled in clashes with private militias and police forces.

Your idyllic “coexistence” is not a natural state of humanity but a negotiated truce born from the fear of revolutionary upheaval.

Jefferson’s statement about the “tree of liberty” needing the blood of patriots and tyrants was not a call to violence for violence’s sake. It was an acknowledgment of the historical truth: oppressive systems do not voluntarily cede power. Pretending that systemic change can occur without disrupting the status quo is like believing you can dismantle a factory while it’s still running without turning off the machines.

When despots—be they monarchs or capitalists—cling to power, they do so with violence. You see it in the police repression of labor strikes, the brutal crackdowns on colonial uprisings, and the militarized responses to civil rights protests. The violence of the oppressed is not the instigator but the response to the entrenched violence of the ruling class.

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You mockingly equate violence with fixing mundane issues like car troubles and crop failures. How clever! But let’s reframe this nonsense for clarity. Violence in the context of systemic change is not some crude hammer smashing individual problems; it’s the lever that dislodges entrenched structures of oppression. To illustrate with a few examples:

• The American Revolution: Would you prefer the colonists had petitioned King George a few more times instead of taking up arms? Maybe they could have voted him out? Oh, wait—no ballots for them.
• The French Revolution: Should the starving masses of France have just “coexisted” with the aristocracy while bread prices skyrocketed and their children died? Perhaps a sternly worded letter to Louis XVI would have sufficed?
• The Civil Rights Movement: Even nonviolent actions like sit-ins and marches faced brutal violence from the state. Without the threat of unrest, would the Civil Rights Act have passed? Doubtful.

Your whimsical alternatives ignore the brutal reality of oppression: power concedes nothing without a fight.

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You extol the virtues of specialization, rule of law, and coexistence as if these are unassailable constants of human civilization. But under capitalism, these “pillars” are subverted to serve profit, not people.

• Specialization? Great, but under capitalism, it’s turned into alienation, where workers are cogs in a machine, disconnected from the fruits of their labor.
• Democratic rule of law? Lovely idea, except it’s a veneer covering the reality of class domination. Laws are written by and for the ruling class, and enforcement disproportionately targets the poor and marginalized.
• Minimization of harm? Tell that to the victims of imperialist wars, sweatshop labor, and environmental destruction—harm inflicted not by revolutionary movements but by the very system you implicitly defend.

Your appeal to these ideals is as hollow as your argument.

le violence bad, peace good moral tailspinning

You frame violence as inherently immoral, but your selective moral outrage ignores the structural violence baked into capitalism. The daily grind of exploitation, poverty, and systemic inequality kills far more people than any revolution ever could.

• 8 million people die yearly from poverty-related causes under capitalism.
• The imperialist wars waged to secure resources for the capitalist system have claimed tens of millions of lives.
• Environmental collapse, driven by the profit motive, threatens the survival of humanity itself.

Revolutionary violence, by contrast, seeks to dismantle these systems of oppression and exploitation. It is not a love of violence but the recognition of necessity.

In conclusion

Your snarky deflections and idealistic appeals to a nonexistent utopia betray your deep misunderstanding of history and the nature of power. The world you describe—a harmonious democracy where disputes are settled through mutual benefit and rule of law—has never existed without the threat or use of force to make it so.

You ridicule the idea of revolution while sitting atop the very achievements that violence has secured: your rights, your freedoms, your comforts. To dismiss the utility of revolutionary struggle is to deny history itself, a luxury only afforded to those insulated from the realities of oppression.

You might enjoy your quips, but history won’t judge you for your wit. It will judge you for your cowardice.