pkill
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.
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.
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.
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.
USSR was a degenerate workers state, though the degeneration didn't fully take hold until 1930s. The concept of socialism in one country was a revisionist drivel against which Lenin fought his entire life. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 established soviets (worker and peasant councils) with direct democracy without privilege all over the country. it's a shame that the political upheaval in the USSR didn't go further and the calls to not only criticize Stalin but also Khrushchev didn't materialize, as well as his plan to return at least some democracy to the party for which he got ousted.
ok dear agent, you cannot admit losing the discussion so you'll just resort to namecalling, so vice versa 💅
the fuck are you talking about
I finally feel like agreeing with you here. Yes we need to build such a system. But it won't be built by complacency and idle talk while the billionaires rob us in broad daylight. It requires struggle. The law is only an ideal but it's interpretation and execution depends on the material reality whether you like it or not and that was recognized even by people you wouldn't call materialists and who made great contributions to the modern philosophy of the law, such as Hegel.
Hegel also had this concept of Sittlichkeit, which is closely linked to the teleological interpretation of the law, namely that what matters is the intent and purpose of the laws and that the purpose of the law should be the greatest common good.
But that is just a beautiful vision that is not realisitically attainable in a system controlled by a tiny minority which can afford better lawyers, bribe the lawmakers and even the justice system at times, essentially to rig the system to fit their needs.
We do need a system that does not perpetuate violence against anyone. But that system is irreconcilable with class society where the antagonisms between the exploiters and the exploited will sooner or later lead to one eruption or another. Social peace is over. The question is how we secure a system truly fit for the needs of many against the attacks by the deposed few furious at the lost comforts attained at the expense of their fellow human beings with as little bloodshed as possible and establish a society where the antagonisms and stratification of yore are no longer relevant.
But before the working class firmly secures it's power, it will have every right to defend itself, even if it involves such counterattacks for the suffering caused by the other party. Sitting idly and flinching at the very thought of violence will end to the same tragedies as those that happened in Chile in 1973 and in countless other places.
I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom's way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!
But dreams are nothing without a clear and uncompromising strategy for making them a reality.
yes because those parasitic companies need to be expropriated without compensation and healthcare put under democratic control of the real stakeholders: frontilne medical workers and patients
everyone I don't agree with is a tankie: an emotional child's guide to political discussions online
Once again, your idea that violence leads to a “system where the strong kill the weak” is ironic because it perfectly describes capitalism. Under capitalism, the strong (the wealthy) already exploit and oppress the weak (workers and marginalized groups). Capitalism is a system of structural violence: people die of preventable diseases, starvation, imperialist wars and workplace accidents because profit is prioritized over human life. The strong kill the weak daily, but they often do it quietly, through markets and laws, not just the rifles and bayonets. And bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends.
I'll reiterate with hope that you cease your baseless fearmongering: revolutionary forms of social organization, when properly rooted in democratic proletarian control, aim to abolish the conditions under which “the strong” exploit “the weak.” The dictatorship of the proletariat, as articulated by Marx and Engels, is not a tyranny of individuals but a transitional state where the working class wields power collectively to dismantle class hierarchies.
It is capitalism, not socialism, where the strong exploit the weak. In the present system, billionaires exploit the workers, devastate the planet, and use their power to crush resistance. What you fear is the inversion of this state of affairs: a society where the oppressed assert their collective strength to abolish oppression altogether.
Your apparent appeals to moralistic platitudes ignore the material realities of class society. Under capitalism, it is the ruling class that pits the poor against one another through systemic inequality, wage suppression, and imperialist wars. Revolutionary movements aim to unite the working class against their true enemies: the capitalist class.
To denounce revolutionary struggle while ignoring the daily violence of capitalism—poverty, police brutality, environmental destruction—is to tacitly side with the oppressors. Revolutionary action is not about chaos or "killing each other" but about dismantling the systems that perpetuate such violence.
Yes because if you don't pay the taxes, armed men will come and put you in a prison where you'll work for fucking dogshit, taxation is not chipping in some spare cash for a fundraiser like in some ancap wet dreams.
Oh and they'll make damn sure you do not cheat on your taxes either, because the tax authorities in most countries have the prerogatives comparable to those of intel agencies, which means encroaching upon your privacy.
But they have one advantage: They are way easier to counterfeit. Meaning that with a few months of programming at most, if you ever find yourself on a run, you'll be able to ID yourself on trains or buses or check in to hotels with fake personal info.