I’m not celebrating that a bad person died, but that the bad people are afraid. It’s fucked up to think any justice was delivered from the death of one guy. The justice comes from how this motivates people to work towards systemic change; a world where these rich sickos are held back rather than encouraged. These rich people are not like us, and their panic is driving that truth home. Make them panic more. Let them widen the divide between us and them. Force them to show their true colors.
Simping for him is the right thing for us to do. It furthers his act of terror against the rich without spilling any blood. It doesn’t matter that it’s an empty threat for most of us; the more we celebrate him, the more people will take out their anger on the best targets imaginable.
If we don’t do it, that lonely white man will just shoot innocent people for infamy like they’ve been doing. They will join the cops or vigilante fascists in lynching trans people of color like me to scratch their itch for blood. This agitation propaganda is helpful in combating the agit-prop from the right. They’ve been doing stochastic terrorism against children for years, so fuck them and their mother if they complain about civility.
We’re in a state of nature now, with no political or economic sovereignty to speak of. We don’t have any human rights thanks to these rich idiots not appreciating the sweet deal they had, so I only feel empowered when I call their murderer hot.
I can’t believe that after thousands of years humanity still struggles with “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
When under attack, defend yourselves. When a potential possible attack some time in the future seems likely, or when a benefit provided by society via democratic system is taken away, if you attack preemptively then you’re probably just a POS.
We might be happy this time, but the next person might kill somebody we like. They might feel emboldened to target trans folk and democratic socialists. If violence escalates to riots then one side might start gunning the other down in the street. The only people who want the poor and ignorant to kill each other are enemies of our society as a whole.
You do not get to decide who lives or dies. No one does.
If an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, one person denying over 80% of insurance claims is a whole lot of eyes, which is a crazy ratio. I don’t think your analogy works.
Nation wide, 305 million Americans have health insurance. Over 80% were being denied because of a faulty system these companies refused to fix. That is 244,000,000 people. Two hundred and forty four million people being rejected.
United has 51 million people it “”““covers””“”, being generous and saying it was only 80% who were getting denied from this system means that’s still 40 million 800 thousand people.
All your what ifs already happened because of 2016 btw.
If I had my way him and his ilk would be facing life in prison.
BTW, United had a denial rate of 32%, double the national average. Idk where tf you got 80%.
The man didn’t gun people down in the street, he refused to pay for their treatment and his victims didn’t know how to fight it. Less than a fifth of a single percent of denied claims are appealed by the people whose claims are denied, they literally don’t even realize a system exists to fight against the injustice.
But now we’re moving on to violence in the streets? Well for your sake, I hope your side wins despite the massive sacrifices.
His systemic violence is far more dangerous than street justice. Stop being a libcuck. If someone wants to hurt you, or your community, or your entire planet, there is nothing unjust about stopping him in anyway necessary and this was certainly necessary.
“His systemic violence” is going to keep happening because nobody is doing a fucking thing about it, the killing in the street included. The only real solution is to change laws and pass sweeping reforms of the system, which demonstrably people are reluctant to do.
capitalism can not be reformed. the core value system of it and it’s prevalent iteration of neoliberalism is based solely on exploitation, individualism, differential advantage and monetary profit and is antithetical to life and thriving of life. you can’t fix this system with minor tweaks and reforms
the structural violence the plutocrats participate in and reinforce through myriad means like advertising and economic coercion is exponentially more devastating and deadly than someone venting like with this ceo shooting
edit2: the “real solution” is mutual aid, community building and dual power movements with an emphasis on anarchist ideas. to partially quote Buckminster fuller To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. but unfortunately sometimes the only language these monsters understand is violence, which is ironically what their colonial projects always claim about the oppressed
There is no reality in which tearing down the US system of government via violence and forceful action results in a better system than what currently exists. There is no precedent for such a situation. There is no way foreign adversaries wouldn’t leap at the chance to take control during the conflict. There is no way native adversaries wouldn’t leap at the chance to take control during the conflict.
If that’s your plan, a civil war that creates anarchy, then you might as well just hand the keys to the kingdom over to the richest americans because they absolutely would come out on top in that hypothetical.
What you’re really asking for is just for Americans to kill each other off only to make things worse, to make the entire world worse.
We are in anarchy at best under fascism. The rule of law is gonna breathe its last breath in January, so we better set up ways to exist without the protection of the state.
The strategy isn’t to kill every rich person, but see that they undermine their popular support. Let the Democrats have no popular support. Let the rich desperately kiss the ring of the crazy old tyrant.
We aren’t gonna need to kill Trump, just wait for him to die. He’s done a fantastic job of ensuring that no one else stands out around him because he doesn’t care about legacy. Even if he tries now, there’s nobody who can take his place. The MAGA movement will fracture without him. It’s what he’s made sure of. We need to give the rich nothing to grab onto except him.
No more spineless Democrats. If they don’t help us, let them flounder. I have no faith in the Gavin Newsoms of the world. We aren’t gonna get far catering to him. We need build up independently, using an anarchist strategy of mutual aid outside of the corrupt system. We won’t even need it for gaining political power, but to survive.
I’m not gonna do anything to hurt the rich personally, but I’m not about to stop anybody from doing that. Opposing violence hasn’t gotten progressives much electoral political power recently. They still get branded as violent rioters as the police state expands. Their efforts then get watered down and turned into controlled opposition, despite them being the only people working to save liberal democracy.
The biggest thing we need is to build up our support systems for everyone, NGO style. Provide people healthcare, food, and other necessities. Electoral politics should be ignored until we get closer to the midterms. By then we’ll know better what can and can’t be done.
I’m think the reactions to the killing of the CEO highlights how people feel they have no control in changing the healthcare system. The recent events is seen as some form of justice, and a feeling that someone is standing up for the little man.
While I think most people don’t usually like to celebrate murder, it does put the things in to perspective, and highlights the unjust system, because you can compare the act of the murder and the acts of insurance companies. You need to understand the context of these reactions and not just say people are “bad” for thinking it’s somewhat fair.
Politicians should take these reactions as a sign that things need to change. Hopefully this will be a catalyst, so something good comes out of it. Otherwise I think resentment will keep brewing and might cause more violence.
Edit: just wanted to add that the recent events has given people hope that things can change, which I think is the only positive side of this.
Well I hate to break it to you, but people were very much aware of the injustices and failures of the healthcare system. So you basically agree that nothing will change because of this, but more violence could come instead.
Yes, people were aware but feel they have no way to change it. Be it lying politicians, or the general problems of a two-party system.
The killing of the CEO made people feel it is possible to fight back at the system. Futile or not, at least “something”
This is what happens if citizens feel disenfranchised, which is the key here. This will scare some powerful people which it should. This is what you get in an unjust system.
I agree that that things will most likely not change, at least if we don’t take the opportunity to discuss why this happened and why people “cheer” on the killer.
The only real solution is to change laws and pass sweeping reforms of the system,
Right. So what’s your plan for doing this then?
…
Oh, right, you can’t do it because $200 Billion are leveraged against you being able to do this.
Violence is the authority from which all other authority is derived. We respect laws and governments because we have ceded them the right of violence to maintain and enforce those laws. Governments and corporations do not respect us because governments (and by America’s extension, corporations) hold the monopoly on violence.
Therefore, the credible threat of violence is required for a fair and equal negotiation. We don’t need to go in and gun down every C-level executive in the country, the same way the cops don’t need to arrest every single person in the country to impress upon the rest of us what they are capable of. The opponent merely needs to think that you might do it in order to fear and respect the prospect appropriately.
This assassination hasn’t solved any problems directly, not in the least, but what it has done is hand us a bargaining chip that is now ours to squander. We have proven that we, citizens as a block, are capable and perhaps willing to exercise the authority of violence, and the corpostate no longer holds the monopoly. This has the corpostate immediately scared, and puts us in a position to negotiate to prevent more of these, or even for someone else to wield us in their own negotiations (think some politician in a back rooms talk with insurance reps, “look do you want the citizens to keep taking pot shots at you forever or do you want to actually do something about it?”)
We, the people, don’t want violence. It isn’t ours to wield. We gave it up intentionally when we wrote the laws of our lands. But it is the last tool left to us when all others are taken away. The lesson that should be learned here and the real solution we should be looking for is to return to us the other tools we had for negotiation, so that violence isn’t the only remaining way for us to voice ourselves. When corporations were busy union busting and warping tax code and shrinkflating and lobbying down the minimum wage, they forgot that the reason all those things existed was to keep the people happy so they don’t rise up. We already had a corpo hellstate in America once before, and by the end of it, companies gladly instated all these worker benefits after mass general strikes and the third or so time all their corporate offices were firebombed. Skip a few generations and they’ve either forgotten why those policies existed, or they’ve ignored it completely in some show of demented grandeur.
But if I’m being honest I fully expect this opportunity to be thoroughly wasted and for us as a whole to generally learn nothing. It is possible that I will be pleasantly surprised. But I’m not really holding my breath for anything these days.
Nothing has changed, tho. United Healthcare still insures millions, will still deny claims with an automated approach. Millions still don’t know how to request information about denied claims, such as who denied them and where they are licensed to practice, or how to appeal.
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
If it was an eye for an eye we’d trap them and their descendants into ever worsening debt spirals, make them use a system that actively works against them to get their health issues treated, and we’d sit them in places for eight hours a day, for five days in a row, where they must do as we say to survive. This isn’t an eye for an eye, this is a sucker punch after years of having our eyes systemically removed.
I guarantee you that if the shooter had the power to do that then he would have, but the point of the hyperbole is that violence does not solve all problems and instead can be quite detrimental.
The ideal world would have people vote for politicians which oppose privatized healthcare and would make his profession illegal. An ideal world would see class action lawsuits bankrupt him. An ideal world would consider his company denying ability to get necessary care, despite qualifying for reimbursement, as an illegal act similar to assault, and have him sent before a jury.
The outcome we got is the worst possible outcome: the USA elected a bunch of explicitly pro-privatization officials and somebody felt violence was the only resort.
Lol what youre seeing now is nothing compared to how bad it could be.
Look to war torn countries whose democracies collapsed and see for yourself the possible outcomes. Only 70% of people getting healthcarw is your concern? Oh, baby, that number can go much lower and they can take away their bread, too.
Yeah the ideal world would also want its populace educated to be able to participate in democracy in the first place. This world is not ideal. This is what happens in reality when you’re in the business of crushing souls, as it rightfully should. Monsters should fear their own footfalls.
It has always been this way. The degradation of leadership across generations of a society until the people are forcefully unified through suffering to enact meaningful change. That meaningful change always comes wearing the face of violence. Because it is the only face despots recognize.
We all wish it weren’t so. We wish the struggle of people from power didnt lap like the tide against our societies. But that is not reality. In reality power structures corrupt and degrade over time, again and again no matter their nature or intention. This is the meaning of Jefferson’s statement on the Tree of Liberty. You may not like it, but violence is the foremost effective tool of the people. The secret thats always erased and kept from us is how to correctly use it.
Judge them as correct maybe. Society is and has always been built on violence. Kings, emperors, dictators, CEOs all leverage violence directly and indirectly to maintain power. Every successful social movement has been backed with violence or the threat there of.
Of course, why just yesterday I used violence to solve a fellow’s computer problems and then when my car engine light came on I fought 47 men and the light went away. I shudder at the day I suffer heart failure, I can’t imagine how many I’ll have to fight to magically cure it, on top of the people I have to fight that day to make crops grow dinner.
Wait, was it fighting? No no, I’m pretty sure there might be some other pillars to human society… Mutually beneficial coexistence of specialists with a strong democratic rule of law to settle disputes, or at the very bare minimum some temporary excuse to maintain a social contract of minimization of harm done to each other? No no no, definitely fighting. Fight not hurt brain like think think do.
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.
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.
I guarantee you that if the shooter had the power to do that then he would have
You don’t know that. Killing the rich is ethical; torturing them is not. And since the shooter has better ethics than you do, I doubt he’d violate such a basic principle.
that’s funny because suddenly after the enucleation insurance companies seemed to feel generous and denials dropped dramatically, and a famous decision on limiting the time frame in which anesthesia is covered got overturned. so some things were neutralized.
Another truth: there can be no real, actual equality until all possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been totally destroyed.
The exploiters can be defeated at one stroke in the event of a successful uprising at the centre, or of a revolt in the army. But except in very rare and special cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at one stroke. It is impossible to expropriate all the landowners and capitalists of any big country at one stroke. Furthermore, expropriation alone, as a legal or political act, does not settle the matter by a long chalk, because it is necessary to depose the landowners and capitalists in actual fact, to replace their management of the factories and estates by a different management, workers’ management, in actual fact.
(Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin)
Revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritarian thing in the world. Revolution is an act in which one section of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles, bayonets and guns, all of which are exceedingly authoritarian implements. The victorious party is necessarily compelled to maintain its rule by means of that fear which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. If the Paris Commune had not employed the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie, would it have maintained itself more than twenty-four hours? And are we not, on the contrary, justified in reproaching the Commune for having employed this authority too little?
Let’s step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR’s trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.
But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.
From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.
Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called “land of the free” still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women’s suffrage and workers’ rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.
Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.
And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.
In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR “worked out” but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.
Do you really think all progress has to look huge? You’ve got to be trolling at this point, or you’re so loaded with emotions you’re just fighting people now.
An eye for an eye doesn’t make the whole world blind. It makes a few people blind until they wise up and realize “Wait, I like making people blind, but I don’t want to be blind!” And then they stop blinding people, thus removing the need to blind them in return.
A legislative solution? The people making legislature literally work with CEO’s, accepting their money in exchange for enacting policies that benefit them. They’re partners. I’d love a country where the government works for the people to hold back corporations, but this country specifically believes the opposite should be true. There will be no legislative solution insofar as capitalism is still the American system. There is no way within the current system for rich people to be brought to justice, only people working outside the system can make that happen.
Brian Thompson made a living making people blind, sometimes even literally, and it was all well within his rights in the eye of the law. Us giving him a taste of his own medicine is already showing results in those other CEO’s that don’t want to suffer the same fate. We’re literally already seeing what “an eye for an eye” gets us, and it’s fear among those who have been free to blind people for decades without ever worrying about being blinded themselves before now.
It doesn’t matter if you think a legislative solution is silly, this is never going to end any other way. If it is legal then people will do it, forever.
Well, yes, you’re right. People will continue to do it forever. So long as accumulating capital is the goal of the country, companies like United Healthcare will exist, and will be free to ruin people’s lives in the name of gaining more capital. However, unless we literally overthrow the system, it too will never change. Currently, the only viable solution that I can see actually happen is that every few years we need to remind the CEO’s that they’re not entirely safe by culling a few. Because we literally have no other way to influence them - the law is on their side, and we would need to overthrow the law itself to change that.
Your solution is only the right one in a hypothetical world where a legislative change is possible, but we do not live in that world. We might be able to change the world to make it a viable option, but to do that would require a lot more killing of a lot more powerful people, otherwise known as a revolution. Even then, in the scenario where we tear down this system and build a new one, greed will always exist in society, and those that seek power will always eventually worm their way into powerful positions. The new system would work for a while, but when greed and power inevitably come back together again, we’ll need to tear that system down and start over once more.
LMK when a country exists that doesn’t have accumulating capital as a goal for its people, until then we can use the method I mentioned which actually works.
Sure, you let me know when your method actually works. I’d love it if it did - it’d sure be a game changer literally around the world. Until then, let’s just be happy that this random gunman actually did something that worked, even if only temporarily.
Buddy, we are just animals trying to survive. The wealthy lack every transcendental value that makes humans special. They’re more like orcs. You want me to say please and thank you as they destroy my world and poison my family?
Rejecting reason and giving into animosity, into self-serving instincts, precisely describes the people poisoning the earth. Have fun being just like them. No good outcomes will come from your violent revolution, I can tell you that right now.
The person rejecting reason is you. Turning the other cheek is not rational. My conclusions are grounded in first principles, whereas your stance is closer to a religion.
This is basically the tolerance paradox but for violence. If people are willing to use violence on me (denying healthcare, keeping us poor, stochastic terrorism) then I’m fine using it back, otherwise they get free reign.
Political action is violent by definition. To rule somebody essentially means nothing else than to enforce your will upon somebody by force.
There can be no talk of consensual politics in a society where opinions are shaped by media owned and managed by the ruling tiny, very wealthy minority.
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.
And they fucking should, because a billion dollar company shouldn’t get off scott free for taking and not giving the agreed upon amounts owed to the people. THAT is how laws work. People need to build a system to deal with these billionaires, to correct the system that created them, not a system that forces people to become savage animals and solves nothing.
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.
The “violence” of only the majority of people getting the healthcare they need is nothing compared to the “violence” of riots and murders in the streets.
Nor would more violence in any way remedy the old violence.
I explicitly did like when it was done to the rich, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the perpetrator. The enemy of my enemy is just some dude with a gun.
That dude with a gun left an unmistakable political message on his casings that resonates with literally every single American that has never been massively wealthy. Disliking him for pretty much any public thing we know about him paints you as the type of person that honestly has a few casings waiting for you someday unless you give up your wealth and work towards helping your new found class.
Nope, just ignorant. You’re ignorant. I don’t doubt you’ve been educated enough to read the book in question, but you’ve specifically and explicitly shown that you have not read the book in question.
Now instead of taking the advice to heart and growing, you’re dismissing all criticism. That’s okay. I’m sure you’re right. Go back to posting on reddit, le epic sir.
That was a reference to the texts the perpetrator had written in the shell casings he used, which were a reference to a book. He definitely sent a message with the act, and it was very much a political one at that.
Then why are you celebrating the death of a bad person in the first place? That’s the actual “eye for an eye” shit that’s making you blind. The death itself isn’t worth celebrating, only the effect of it on the world.
We are under attack dumbass. We’re being parasitized by the rich! The democratic system in the US is gone with the election of Trump. What the fuck do you actually think that would look like if not this? You’re either in denial, or too cowardly to actually stick to your word.
There are no “effects on the world” from this and if there will be then those effects will be purely negative such as more copycat killers attacking random targets. A bad person is just dead, its results are purely therapeutic.
No, the question boils down to the effect it has on consciousness. How many people broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule of those who may have seemed untouchable to them less than a week ago is hard to fathom.
Not to mention that it was yet another instance of a large scale masks-off event for the exploiter class, with both Democrats and Trump as well as their media lackeys proving once again that they are really just one single party of capital.
Of course however, this does not mean that it also poses a threat of some people falling into the erroneous conviction that risks resulting in anything more than repression by the authorities, that the problem is personal and not structural.
The number of people who “broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule” don’t have any impact on the system that creates and restrains billionaires. Even if more people die in the streets nothing, aside from more death, changes.
Real change has to come from ballots. From pen on paper. Or else, if you utilizr violence to the extent of permanent systemic change, you will absolutely have a worse system at the end of it. A system where the strong kill the weak and take what they want. A system where the faction with the most absolute and unquestioned loyalty wins fights and slaughters their intellectual betters.
Voting is over. I’m not kidding when I say that. Trump is a fascist, and until he dies, there will be no more fair elections. We won’t be able to restrain the rich with the state, as there will be no more rule of law. It’s only the rule of one man now.
Even if you have total faith in liberal democracy being the best system, you need to understand that we lost it. The liberal experiment came to an end at year 248. The system is toast. The Leviathan of the state will no longer listen to us, and the social contract has been irreparably burned by the fires of fascism.
We’d need a new contract to get that system back. Trump will cause a level of change to our government that we haven’t seen since FDR.
The GOP congress are the ones with the real power and they’re anything but unified. Trump is one of the worst presidents of all time but there have been monsters before and there inevitably will be again.
But a violent uprising is more beneficial to Trump than it is to us. The chances of a better system replacing the current one is basically zero without the majority of people willing to agree on what a better system looks like and how to organize it quickly without concessions, otherwise the USA will just become a corpse for the looming vultures to land on.
Trump will override whatever the GOP congress decides at the barrel of a gun. SCOTUS gave the president explicit permission to commit violence against his political enemies. Does the “Night of Long Knives” ring any bells? Trump takes direct inspiration from Hitler, including with how he plans to purge dissent.
His base is not on the side of the dissenters, and will only cheer him on. That’s what ousting Kevin McCarthy was all about. Removing anyone who will say no. If they try to gain leverage, he can use the power of the state to brutally suppress them. If you know a godamn thing about project 2025, you should know that it doesn’t plan to worry about what congress thinks.
That’s also probably part of his tariff strategy. He knows both political parties want free trade, as global capitalism was an important part of America’s geopolitical strategy. However, free trade also hurts many sectors of our economy, particularly the industry side. This has led to the antisemitic tinged hatred of (((globalists))), allowing anger from capitalism to be redirected towards the Jews. When GOP congress members speak up on behalf of capitalism or Jewish people, Trump will make a hit list of the loudest voices.
Again, I’m not joking about this. This is how Trump will become the dictator he promised to be. Checks and balances are finished, elections are finished, and neither party can do anything about it. NOBODY really has rights anymore. Even the rich are in danger if they seriously challenge Trump.
Jfc that narrow-minded idealist obsession with Trump. Trumpism cannot be defeated with lesser evilism when the lesser evil is basically also far right, only slightly more to the left and that is also dubious with all the war mongering, which Trump’s promise to put it to an end indisputably helped him secure a victory, alongside a slew of economic shortcomings affecting the working class (even though his solutions are no solutions at all)
A system where the faction with the most absolute and unquestioned loyalty wins fights and slaughters their intellectual betters.
This reeks of a bourgeois fear of the masses rising up to demand what’s rightfully theirs, of thinly veiled elitism and misunderstanding of the basics of class relations. No, it’s not blue vs white collars but people living off others’ toil and the toilers.
Who are these “intellectual betters”? Capitalist apologists? Corporate technocrats? The same people whose “brilliance” built a world teetering on ecological collapse? Spare us the melodrama. Revolutions don’t thrive on blind loyalty; they’re built on solidarity and the shared understanding that the status quo is unsustainable.
Your argument boils down to a defense of complacency: ballots over barricades, submission over struggle. You seem more afraid of the risks of change than the certainty of suffering under capitalism. But history teaches us that systemic change demands courage—not the cowardice of hoping billionaires and their henchmen will play nice. Keep clutching those ballots; the rest of us will be busy building a world where they aren’t needed to decide who gets to live with dignity.
Lmao, I fear the masses indeed because I am among them and they have a grand proclivity for self harm and violence while your pathetic masters look down in glee at you for doing their bidding: conscious or otherwise.
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.
Your comment reads like a manifesto for maintaining the status quo dressed up as pragmatic wisdom. It’s almost charming, in the same way, an infomercial about a “miracle” weight-loss pill is charming, assuming the audience hasn’t read the fine print. But let’s get to the real business of dismantling this labyrinth of myths you’ve built.
The number of people who ‘broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule’ don’t have any impact on the system that creates and restrains billionaires.
Oh, so now we’re pretending that mass shifts in consciousness are irrelevant? History begs to differ. The abolition of feudalism, the rise of unions, civil rights movements—all were powered by collective awakenings. The Paris Commune was ridiculed as a blip, yet it shaped proletarian strategies worldwide. The suffragettes, who were once dismissed as a hysterical sideshow, rewrote the political landscape. Sure, individual enlightenment alone won’t topple billionaires—but dismissing the transformative potential of collective action? That’s some industrial-strength cynicism masquerading as “realism.”
Real change has to come from ballots. From pen on paper.
This Hallmark sentiment belongs on a motivational poster, not in a serious discussion about systemic change. Who controls the ballots? Capitalist elites, through gerrymandering, corporate media, voter suppression, and lobbying. Let’s talk specifics: Tsipras in Greece was democratically elected to resist austerity. What did ballots deliver? Betrayal. Ask the Greeks who were prevented by the banksters from withdrawing more than 50€ a day. Bernie Sanders inspired millions, only to capitulate to the Democrat machine with imperialist war criminals at the helm, because Democrats were never a party that served the working people. They had so many chances to e.g. codify abortion when they were in power, before Roe v Wade got struck down. Meanwhile, Corbyn faced a relentless smear campaign and sabotage from within Labour and now virtually all of the Labour left is purged and Sir Starmer happily approves more and more money being wasted on warfare while denying the possibility of renationalizing the water companies which have turned British rivers into one of the most polluted in Europe, because his narrow reformist mindset rejects the possibility of expropriation without compensation, even if it’s something so indusputably belonging to all, a common (outside_ the WEF and other ultra-rich psychopath meetings, of course).
The conclusion? Ballots are a tool wielded by the ruling class to manage dissent, not overthrow it.
If you utilize violence to the extent of permanent systemic change, you will absolutely have a worse system at the end of it.
Ohh the old pearl-clutching “violence begets chaos” trope. Conveniently ignores the systemic violence baked into capitalism: poverty, imperialist wars, environmental destruction, police brutality.
Over 100 million people displaced in the last year.
56 wars raging worldwide, the highest figure since WWII.
Nuclear warfare back in business after three decades.
Approx. 5-20 million people dying annually due to preventable causes
Revolutionary violence isn’t arbitrary carnage; it’s the oppressed defending themselves against the daily brutality of the ruling class. In fact, it is out of the fatigue with the incessant brutality, injustice and deprivation of the existing order that revolutions are born. Look at the revolutionary wave that followed after the Great Slaughter of WWI.
Capitalist states routinely murder and displace millions to maintain power. Revolutionary violence seeks to end that barbarism, not perpetuate it.
Take again the Russian Revolution—initially a relatively bloodless overthrow. More people got trampled over when the storming of Winter Palace was being reenacted 10 years later for a movie than during the actual event. The ensuing violence was primarily defensive, against counter-revolutionaries and imperialist invaders. Without the Red Army, the October Revolution would’ve been a footnote. If you don’t believe me, read Ten days that shook the world by John Reed.
Capitalism’s birth was hardly a bloodless affair—whether through the American or French Revolutions, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, La Conquista, Opium Wars, colonialism in Africa, India or Indonesia, it was drenched in violence. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and freedom of the press. The civil war resulted in the death of roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population. During the Russian Civil War, about 0.7% of the population died, a large portion of which can be attributed to the White Terror. Yet, the Bolsheviks, despite the brutal conditions, attempted to minimize violence. They first sought to rely on agitation among intervention forces, and even amid famine, Lenin organized the largest international aid operation of its time, importing vast amounts of grain into the USSR between 1918 and 1921—much of it sabotaged by the Whites, Esery or kulaks. The mutinies within the foreign troops and the strikes and blockades organized in solidarity by French or British workers also contributed to the withdrawal of many of the Allied troops. Still, you wouldn’t think of questioning the legitimacy of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions or the U.S. Civil War, would you? And in fact, if not then rightly so. Beacause freedom is the recognition of necessity. They played their progressive role at their time, along with capitalism. But that potential is long gone and now capitalism is holding human potential back.
I’m not celebrating that a bad person died, but that the bad people are afraid. It’s fucked up to think any justice was delivered from the death of one guy. The justice comes from how this motivates people to work towards systemic change; a world where these rich sickos are held back rather than encouraged. These rich people are not like us, and their panic is driving that truth home. Make them panic more. Let them widen the divide between us and them. Force them to show their true colors.
Simping for him is the right thing for us to do. It furthers his act of terror against the rich without spilling any blood. It doesn’t matter that it’s an empty threat for most of us; the more we celebrate him, the more people will take out their anger on the best targets imaginable.
If we don’t do it, that lonely white man will just shoot innocent people for infamy like they’ve been doing. They will join the cops or vigilante fascists in lynching trans people of color like me to scratch their itch for blood. This agitation propaganda is helpful in combating the agit-prop from the right. They’ve been doing stochastic terrorism against children for years, so fuck them and their mother if they complain about civility.
We’re in a state of nature now, with no political or economic sovereignty to speak of. We don’t have any human rights thanks to these rich idiots not appreciating the sweet deal they had, so I only feel empowered when I call their murderer hot.
I’m simping for the opening of CEO season.
I can’t believe that after thousands of years humanity still struggles with “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
When under attack, defend yourselves. When a potential possible attack some time in the future seems likely, or when a benefit provided by society via democratic system is taken away, if you attack preemptively then you’re probably just a POS.
We might be happy this time, but the next person might kill somebody we like. They might feel emboldened to target trans folk and democratic socialists. If violence escalates to riots then one side might start gunning the other down in the street. The only people who want the poor and ignorant to kill each other are enemies of our society as a whole.
You do not get to decide who lives or dies. No one does.
If an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, one person denying over 80% of insurance claims is a whole lot of eyes, which is a crazy ratio. I don’t think your analogy works.
Nation wide, 305 million Americans have health insurance. Over 80% were being denied because of a faulty system these companies refused to fix. That is 244,000,000 people. Two hundred and forty four million people being rejected.
United has 51 million people it “”““covers””“”, being generous and saying it was only 80% who were getting denied from this system means that’s still 40 million 800 thousand people.
All your what ifs already happened because of 2016 btw.
If I had my way him and his ilk would be facing life in prison.
BTW, United had a denial rate of 32%, double the national average. Idk where tf you got 80%.
The man didn’t gun people down in the street, he refused to pay for their treatment and his victims didn’t know how to fight it. Less than a fifth of a single percent of denied claims are appealed by the people whose claims are denied, they literally don’t even realize a system exists to fight against the injustice.
But now we’re moving on to violence in the streets? Well for your sake, I hope your side wins despite the massive sacrifices.
His systemic violence is far more dangerous than street justice. Stop being a libcuck. If someone wants to hurt you, or your community, or your entire planet, there is nothing unjust about stopping him in anyway necessary and this was certainly necessary.
“His systemic violence” is going to keep happening because nobody is doing a fucking thing about it, the killing in the street included. The only real solution is to change laws and pass sweeping reforms of the system, which demonstrably people are reluctant to do.
capitalism can not be reformed. the core value system of it and it’s prevalent iteration of neoliberalism is based solely on exploitation, individualism, differential advantage and monetary profit and is antithetical to life and thriving of life. you can’t fix this system with minor tweaks and reforms
the structural violence the plutocrats participate in and reinforce through myriad means like advertising and economic coercion is exponentially more devastating and deadly than someone venting like with this ceo shooting
edit2: the “real solution” is mutual aid, community building and dual power movements with an emphasis on anarchist ideas. to partially quote Buckminster fuller To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. but unfortunately sometimes the only language these monsters understand is violence, which is ironically what their colonial projects always claim about the oppressed
There is no reality in which tearing down the US system of government via violence and forceful action results in a better system than what currently exists. There is no precedent for such a situation. There is no way foreign adversaries wouldn’t leap at the chance to take control during the conflict. There is no way native adversaries wouldn’t leap at the chance to take control during the conflict.
If that’s your plan, a civil war that creates anarchy, then you might as well just hand the keys to the kingdom over to the richest americans because they absolutely would come out on top in that hypothetical.
What you’re really asking for is just for Americans to kill each other off only to make things worse, to make the entire world worse.
We are in anarchy at best under fascism. The rule of law is gonna breathe its last breath in January, so we better set up ways to exist without the protection of the state.
The strategy isn’t to kill every rich person, but see that they undermine their popular support. Let the Democrats have no popular support. Let the rich desperately kiss the ring of the crazy old tyrant.
We aren’t gonna need to kill Trump, just wait for him to die. He’s done a fantastic job of ensuring that no one else stands out around him because he doesn’t care about legacy. Even if he tries now, there’s nobody who can take his place. The MAGA movement will fracture without him. It’s what he’s made sure of. We need to give the rich nothing to grab onto except him.
No more spineless Democrats. If they don’t help us, let them flounder. I have no faith in the Gavin Newsoms of the world. We aren’t gonna get far catering to him. We need build up independently, using an anarchist strategy of mutual aid outside of the corrupt system. We won’t even need it for gaining political power, but to survive.
I’m not gonna do anything to hurt the rich personally, but I’m not about to stop anybody from doing that. Opposing violence hasn’t gotten progressives much electoral political power recently. They still get branded as violent rioters as the police state expands. Their efforts then get watered down and turned into controlled opposition, despite them being the only people working to save liberal democracy.
The biggest thing we need is to build up our support systems for everyone, NGO style. Provide people healthcare, food, and other necessities. Electoral politics should be ignored until we get closer to the midterms. By then we’ll know better what can and can’t be done.
lol what the fuck are you talking about
I’m think the reactions to the killing of the CEO highlights how people feel they have no control in changing the healthcare system. The recent events is seen as some form of justice, and a feeling that someone is standing up for the little man.
While I think most people don’t usually like to celebrate murder, it does put the things in to perspective, and highlights the unjust system, because you can compare the act of the murder and the acts of insurance companies. You need to understand the context of these reactions and not just say people are “bad” for thinking it’s somewhat fair.
Politicians should take these reactions as a sign that things need to change. Hopefully this will be a catalyst, so something good comes out of it. Otherwise I think resentment will keep brewing and might cause more violence.
Edit: just wanted to add that the recent events has given people hope that things can change, which I think is the only positive side of this.
Well I hate to break it to you, but people were very much aware of the injustices and failures of the healthcare system. So you basically agree that nothing will change because of this, but more violence could come instead.
Yes, people were aware but feel they have no way to change it. Be it lying politicians, or the general problems of a two-party system.
The killing of the CEO made people feel it is possible to fight back at the system. Futile or not, at least “something”
This is what happens if citizens feel disenfranchised, which is the key here. This will scare some powerful people which it should. This is what you get in an unjust system.
I agree that that things will most likely not change, at least if we don’t take the opportunity to discuss why this happened and why people “cheer” on the killer.
Right. So what’s your plan for doing this then?
…
Oh, right, you can’t do it because $200 Billion are leveraged against you being able to do this.
Violence is the authority from which all other authority is derived. We respect laws and governments because we have ceded them the right of violence to maintain and enforce those laws. Governments and corporations do not respect us because governments (and by America’s extension, corporations) hold the monopoly on violence.
Therefore, the credible threat of violence is required for a fair and equal negotiation. We don’t need to go in and gun down every C-level executive in the country, the same way the cops don’t need to arrest every single person in the country to impress upon the rest of us what they are capable of. The opponent merely needs to think that you might do it in order to fear and respect the prospect appropriately.
This assassination hasn’t solved any problems directly, not in the least, but what it has done is hand us a bargaining chip that is now ours to squander. We have proven that we, citizens as a block, are capable and perhaps willing to exercise the authority of violence, and the corpostate no longer holds the monopoly. This has the corpostate immediately scared, and puts us in a position to negotiate to prevent more of these, or even for someone else to wield us in their own negotiations (think some politician in a back rooms talk with insurance reps, “look do you want the citizens to keep taking pot shots at you forever or do you want to actually do something about it?”)
We, the people, don’t want violence. It isn’t ours to wield. We gave it up intentionally when we wrote the laws of our lands. But it is the last tool left to us when all others are taken away. The lesson that should be learned here and the real solution we should be looking for is to return to us the other tools we had for negotiation, so that violence isn’t the only remaining way for us to voice ourselves. When corporations were busy union busting and warping tax code and shrinkflating and lobbying down the minimum wage, they forgot that the reason all those things existed was to keep the people happy so they don’t rise up. We already had a corpo hellstate in America once before, and by the end of it, companies gladly instated all these worker benefits after mass general strikes and the third or so time all their corporate offices were firebombed. Skip a few generations and they’ve either forgotten why those policies existed, or they’ve ignored it completely in some show of demented grandeur.
But if I’m being honest I fully expect this opportunity to be thoroughly wasted and for us as a whole to generally learn nothing. It is possible that I will be pleasantly surprised. But I’m not really holding my breath for anything these days.
Vote against privatized healthcare, you stupid assholes. Vote against the GOP. Vote Dem.
and how’s that working for you? and everybody else?
The killing in the street included, except for the fact that they changed their decision.
Will it be implemented again later? Probably. But this event caused change now.
Nothing has changed, tho. United Healthcare still insures millions, will still deny claims with an automated approach. Millions still don’t know how to request information about denied claims, such as who denied them and where they are licensed to practice, or how to appeal.
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
If it was an eye for an eye we’d trap them and their descendants into ever worsening debt spirals, make them use a system that actively works against them to get their health issues treated, and we’d sit them in places for eight hours a day, for five days in a row, where they must do as we say to survive. This isn’t an eye for an eye, this is a sucker punch after years of having our eyes systemically removed.
I guarantee you that if the shooter had the power to do that then he would have, but the point of the hyperbole is that violence does not solve all problems and instead can be quite detrimental.
The ideal world would have people vote for politicians which oppose privatized healthcare and would make his profession illegal. An ideal world would see class action lawsuits bankrupt him. An ideal world would consider his company denying ability to get necessary care, despite qualifying for reimbursement, as an illegal act similar to assault, and have him sent before a jury.
The outcome we got is the worst possible outcome: the USA elected a bunch of explicitly pro-privatization officials and somebody felt violence was the only resort.
Obviously violence doesn’t solve all problems, but it does objectively solve a lot, if not most, of them.
And when we normalize solving problems with violence then the weak and disadvantaged will be slaughtered like lambs.
We’ve mostly not been and yet that is exactly what’s happening now. I’d at least like to try something else.
Lol what youre seeing now is nothing compared to how bad it could be.
Look to war torn countries whose democracies collapsed and see for yourself the possible outcomes. Only 70% of people getting healthcarw is your concern? Oh, baby, that number can go much lower and they can take away their bread, too.
Yeah the ideal world would also want its populace educated to be able to participate in democracy in the first place. This world is not ideal. This is what happens in reality when you’re in the business of crushing souls, as it rightfully should. Monsters should fear their own footfalls.
It has always been this way. The degradation of leadership across generations of a society until the people are forcefully unified through suffering to enact meaningful change. That meaningful change always comes wearing the face of violence. Because it is the only face despots recognize.
We all wish it weren’t so. We wish the struggle of people from power didnt lap like the tide against our societies. But that is not reality. In reality power structures corrupt and degrade over time, again and again no matter their nature or intention. This is the meaning of Jefferson’s statement on the Tree of Liberty. You may not like it, but violence is the foremost effective tool of the people. The secret thats always erased and kept from us is how to correctly use it.
If you want to live in a violent hell then thats just you, society will judge you for your self-justifying actions.
Judge them as correct maybe. Society is and has always been built on violence. Kings, emperors, dictators, CEOs all leverage violence directly and indirectly to maintain power. Every successful social movement has been backed with violence or the threat there of.
Of course, why just yesterday I used violence to solve a fellow’s computer problems and then when my car engine light came on I fought 47 men and the light went away. I shudder at the day I suffer heart failure, I can’t imagine how many I’ll have to fight to magically cure it, on top of the people I have to fight that day to make crops grow dinner.
Wait, was it fighting? No no, I’m pretty sure there might be some other pillars to human society… Mutually beneficial coexistence of specialists with a strong democratic rule of law to settle disputes, or at the very bare minimum some temporary excuse to maintain a social contract of minimization of harm done to each other? No no no, definitely fighting. Fight not hurt brain like think think do.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Your appeal to these ideals is as hollow as your argument.
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.
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.
The Allies of WW2 would like a word.
The Allies were on the Defence. They, for the most part, treated nazi soldiers with dignity and even fair trials and rehabilitation.
Ganking any unarmed civillian in any context is not comparable that.
You don’t know that. Killing the rich is ethical; torturing them is not. And since the shooter has better ethics than you do, I doubt he’d violate such a basic principle.
This isn’t “an eye for an eye” this is about the neutralization of a serial eye remover. An eye for a thousand eyes seems a very easy choice to make.
Nobody neutralized shit. They just took an eye.
that’s funny because suddenly after the enucleation insurance companies seemed to feel generous and denials dropped dramatically, and a famous decision on limiting the time frame in which anesthesia is covered got overturned. so some things were neutralized.
(Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin)
(On authority by Frederich Engels)
Oh yeah the USSR worked out super fucking well for everybody. /s
Let’s step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR’s trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.
But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.
From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.
Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called “land of the free” still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women’s suffrage and workers’ rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.
Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.
And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.
In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR “worked out” but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.
Jfc these Tankie bastards
Describing Stalin as Counterrevolutionary reads to me that they’re not a tankie
I would argue that people we care for are already under attack and dying… some of them directly because of bad policies, political and corporate.
Oh well look at all those great policies that got written overnight because we murdered a dude. /s
Do you really think all progress has to look huge? You’ve got to be trolling at this point, or you’re so loaded with emotions you’re just fighting people now.
If this “progress” were “huge” it would be war in the streets.
An eye for an eye doesn’t make the whole world blind. It makes a few people blind until they wise up and realize “Wait, I like making people blind, but I don’t want to be blind!” And then they stop blinding people, thus removing the need to blind them in return.
Yeah, I’m sure after we murder more people they’ll start thinking twice about putting people in debt. /sarcasm
Without pursuing a legislative solution, no matter how many people you kill: the problem will never go away.
A legislative solution? The people making legislature literally work with CEO’s, accepting their money in exchange for enacting policies that benefit them. They’re partners. I’d love a country where the government works for the people to hold back corporations, but this country specifically believes the opposite should be true. There will be no legislative solution insofar as capitalism is still the American system. There is no way within the current system for rich people to be brought to justice, only people working outside the system can make that happen.
Brian Thompson made a living making people blind, sometimes even literally, and it was all well within his rights in the eye of the law. Us giving him a taste of his own medicine is already showing results in those other CEO’s that don’t want to suffer the same fate. We’re literally already seeing what “an eye for an eye” gets us, and it’s fear among those who have been free to blind people for decades without ever worrying about being blinded themselves before now.
It doesn’t matter if you think a legislative solution is silly, this is never going to end any other way. If it is legal then people will do it, forever.
Well, yes, you’re right. People will continue to do it forever. So long as accumulating capital is the goal of the country, companies like United Healthcare will exist, and will be free to ruin people’s lives in the name of gaining more capital. However, unless we literally overthrow the system, it too will never change. Currently, the only viable solution that I can see actually happen is that every few years we need to remind the CEO’s that they’re not entirely safe by culling a few. Because we literally have no other way to influence them - the law is on their side, and we would need to overthrow the law itself to change that.
Your solution is only the right one in a hypothetical world where a legislative change is possible, but we do not live in that world. We might be able to change the world to make it a viable option, but to do that would require a lot more killing of a lot more powerful people, otherwise known as a revolution. Even then, in the scenario where we tear down this system and build a new one, greed will always exist in society, and those that seek power will always eventually worm their way into powerful positions. The new system would work for a while, but when greed and power inevitably come back together again, we’ll need to tear that system down and start over once more.
LMK when a country exists that doesn’t have accumulating capital as a goal for its people, until then we can use the method I mentioned which actually works.
Sure, you let me know when your method actually works. I’d love it if it did - it’d sure be a game changer literally around the world. Until then, let’s just be happy that this random gunman actually did something that worked, even if only temporarily.
Bhutan
You’re the epitome of the cautionary adage that all it takes for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing.
As for your claim that an eye-for-an-eye is somehow bad? Tit-for-tat is an excellent strategy for maintaining successful cooperation.
Lastly, there’s no coherent normative theory according to which killing is bad categorically. That’s simply ridiculous.
I’d rather die a good man than start killing unarmed civilians. Evil can have this worthless hell if more of them truly exist than the rest of us.
I am unafraid, of them or you.
Killing the rich is self-defense. This planet is dying. Every oil executive, private jet owner, and wealthy polluter is guilty as fuck.
Also they’re not civilians. They’re not even human, as far as I can tell.
Dehumanize the enemy and give them no quarter, but you’re so certain that you’re the good guys. Tale as old as time.
Buddy, we are just animals trying to survive. The wealthy lack every transcendental value that makes humans special. They’re more like orcs. You want me to say please and thank you as they destroy my world and poison my family?
Rejecting reason and giving into animosity, into self-serving instincts, precisely describes the people poisoning the earth. Have fun being just like them. No good outcomes will come from your violent revolution, I can tell you that right now.
The person rejecting reason is you. Turning the other cheek is not rational. My conclusions are grounded in first principles, whereas your stance is closer to a religion.
The CEO did.
This is basically the tolerance paradox but for violence. If people are willing to use violence on me (denying healthcare, keeping us poor, stochastic terrorism) then I’m fine using it back, otherwise they get free reign.
But the violence will never end. By using violence back on them you change nothing. The solution is not violence, it is political action.
If you have any actual impact on politics via violence then you’re justing going to tear down a bad system for an obviously worse outcome.
Political action is violent by definition. To rule somebody essentially means nothing else than to enforce your will upon somebody by force.
There can be no talk of consensual politics in a society where opinions are shaped by media owned and managed by the ruling tiny, very wealthy minority.
Lmao taxing big businesses for operating in an economic region and using those funds to create railroads, libraries, hospitals iS 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.
And they fucking should, because a billion dollar company shouldn’t get off scott free for taking and not giving the agreed upon amounts owed to the people. THAT is how laws work. People need to build a system to deal with these billionaires, to correct the system that created them, not a system that forces people to become savage animals and solves nothing.
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.
The violence already doesn’t end. Why should I sit and take it? Obviously we need political stuff too, but violence is a useful tool to those ends.
The “violence” of only the majority of people getting the healthcare they need is nothing compared to the “violence” of riots and murders in the streets.
Nor would more violence in any way remedy the old violence.
The violence has been escalating longer than you’ve been alive. This instance is smaller than the day before it.
You don’t have a problem with violence, you just dislike it when it’s done to the rich.
I explicitly did like when it was done to the rich, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the perpetrator. The enemy of my enemy is just some dude with a gun.
That dude with a gun left an unmistakable political message on his casings that resonates with literally every single American that has never been massively wealthy. Disliking him for pretty much any public thing we know about him paints you as the type of person that honestly has a few casings waiting for you someday unless you give up your wealth and work towards helping your new found class.
Please respond without telling someone else that they may be murdered
The only way, shape, or form that this “message” is “political” is that it is apparent less people believe in politics than ever.
Go read the book, then go ahead and edit your comments so you don’t look as silly.
Wow look at that pointless non-argument. Just call your opponent uneducated and ridiculous. Gosh, I better respond in kind, when in rome and all that.
Nope, just ignorant. You’re ignorant. I don’t doubt you’ve been educated enough to read the book in question, but you’ve specifically and explicitly shown that you have not read the book in question.
Now instead of taking the advice to heart and growing, you’re dismissing all criticism. That’s okay. I’m sure you’re right. Go back to posting on reddit, le epic sir.
That was a reference to the texts the perpetrator had written in the shell casings he used, which were a reference to a book. He definitely sent a message with the act, and it was very much a political one at that.
deleted by creator
Then why are you celebrating the death of a bad person in the first place? That’s the actual “eye for an eye” shit that’s making you blind. The death itself isn’t worth celebrating, only the effect of it on the world.
We are under attack dumbass. We’re being parasitized by the rich! The democratic system in the US is gone with the election of Trump. What the fuck do you actually think that would look like if not this? You’re either in denial, or too cowardly to actually stick to your word.
If anyone ever wondered who would sympathize with the British in 1775, posts like OPs should answer that question
There are no “effects on the world” from this and if there will be then those effects will be purely negative such as more copycat killers attacking random targets. A bad person is just dead, its results are purely therapeutic.
No, the question boils down to the effect it has on consciousness. How many people broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule of those who may have seemed untouchable to them less than a week ago is hard to fathom.
Not to mention that it was yet another instance of a large scale masks-off event for the exploiter class, with both Democrats and Trump as well as their media lackeys proving once again that they are really just one single party of capital.
Of course however, this does not mean that it also poses a threat of some people falling into the erroneous conviction that risks resulting in anything more than repression by the authorities, that the problem is personal and not structural.
The number of people who “broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule” don’t have any impact on the system that creates and restrains billionaires. Even if more people die in the streets nothing, aside from more death, changes.
Real change has to come from ballots. From pen on paper. Or else, if you utilizr violence to the extent of permanent systemic change, you will absolutely have a worse system at the end of it. A system where the strong kill the weak and take what they want. A system where the faction with the most absolute and unquestioned loyalty wins fights and slaughters their intellectual betters.
Voting is over. I’m not kidding when I say that. Trump is a fascist, and until he dies, there will be no more fair elections. We won’t be able to restrain the rich with the state, as there will be no more rule of law. It’s only the rule of one man now.
Even if you have total faith in liberal democracy being the best system, you need to understand that we lost it. The liberal experiment came to an end at year 248. The system is toast. The Leviathan of the state will no longer listen to us, and the social contract has been irreparably burned by the fires of fascism.
We’d need a new contract to get that system back. Trump will cause a level of change to our government that we haven’t seen since FDR.
The GOP congress are the ones with the real power and they’re anything but unified. Trump is one of the worst presidents of all time but there have been monsters before and there inevitably will be again.
But a violent uprising is more beneficial to Trump than it is to us. The chances of a better system replacing the current one is basically zero without the majority of people willing to agree on what a better system looks like and how to organize it quickly without concessions, otherwise the USA will just become a corpse for the looming vultures to land on.
Trump will override whatever the GOP congress decides at the barrel of a gun. SCOTUS gave the president explicit permission to commit violence against his political enemies. Does the “Night of Long Knives” ring any bells? Trump takes direct inspiration from Hitler, including with how he plans to purge dissent.
His base is not on the side of the dissenters, and will only cheer him on. That’s what ousting Kevin McCarthy was all about. Removing anyone who will say no. If they try to gain leverage, he can use the power of the state to brutally suppress them. If you know a godamn thing about project 2025, you should know that it doesn’t plan to worry about what congress thinks.
That’s also probably part of his tariff strategy. He knows both political parties want free trade, as global capitalism was an important part of America’s geopolitical strategy. However, free trade also hurts many sectors of our economy, particularly the industry side. This has led to the antisemitic tinged hatred of (((globalists))), allowing anger from capitalism to be redirected towards the Jews. When GOP congress members speak up on behalf of capitalism or Jewish people, Trump will make a hit list of the loudest voices.
Again, I’m not joking about this. This is how Trump will become the dictator he promised to be. Checks and balances are finished, elections are finished, and neither party can do anything about it. NOBODY really has rights anymore. Even the rich are in danger if they seriously challenge Trump.
Jfc that narrow-minded idealist obsession with Trump. Trumpism cannot be defeated with lesser evilism when the lesser evil is basically also far right, only slightly more to the left and that is also dubious with all the war mongering, which Trump’s promise to put it to an end indisputably helped him secure a victory, alongside a slew of economic shortcomings affecting the working class (even though his solutions are no solutions at all)
(2/2)
This reeks of a bourgeois fear of the masses rising up to demand what’s rightfully theirs, of thinly veiled elitism and misunderstanding of the basics of class relations. No, it’s not blue vs white collars but people living off others’ toil and the toilers.
Who are these “intellectual betters”? Capitalist apologists? Corporate technocrats? The same people whose “brilliance” built a world teetering on ecological collapse? Spare us the melodrama. Revolutions don’t thrive on blind loyalty; they’re built on solidarity and the shared understanding that the status quo is unsustainable.
Your argument boils down to a defense of complacency: ballots over barricades, submission over struggle. You seem more afraid of the risks of change than the certainty of suffering under capitalism. But history teaches us that systemic change demands courage—not the cowardice of hoping billionaires and their henchmen will play nice. Keep clutching those ballots; the rest of us will be busy building a world where they aren’t needed to decide who gets to live with dignity.
Lmao, I fear the masses indeed because I am among them and they have a grand proclivity for self harm and violence while your pathetic masters look down in glee at you for doing their bidding: conscious or otherwise.
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.
deleted by creator
(1/2)
Your comment reads like a manifesto for maintaining the status quo dressed up as pragmatic wisdom. It’s almost charming, in the same way, an infomercial about a “miracle” weight-loss pill is charming, assuming the audience hasn’t read the fine print. But let’s get to the real business of dismantling this labyrinth of myths you’ve built.
Oh, so now we’re pretending that mass shifts in consciousness are irrelevant? History begs to differ. The abolition of feudalism, the rise of unions, civil rights movements—all were powered by collective awakenings. The Paris Commune was ridiculed as a blip, yet it shaped proletarian strategies worldwide. The suffragettes, who were once dismissed as a hysterical sideshow, rewrote the political landscape. Sure, individual enlightenment alone won’t topple billionaires—but dismissing the transformative potential of collective action? That’s some industrial-strength cynicism masquerading as “realism.”
This Hallmark sentiment belongs on a motivational poster, not in a serious discussion about systemic change. Who controls the ballots? Capitalist elites, through gerrymandering, corporate media, voter suppression, and lobbying. Let’s talk specifics: Tsipras in Greece was democratically elected to resist austerity. What did ballots deliver? Betrayal. Ask the Greeks who were prevented by the banksters from withdrawing more than 50€ a day. Bernie Sanders inspired millions, only to capitulate to the Democrat machine with imperialist war criminals at the helm, because Democrats were never a party that served the working people. They had so many chances to e.g. codify abortion when they were in power, before Roe v Wade got struck down. Meanwhile, Corbyn faced a relentless smear campaign and sabotage from within Labour and now virtually all of the Labour left is purged and Sir Starmer happily approves more and more money being wasted on warfare while denying the possibility of renationalizing the water companies which have turned British rivers into one of the most polluted in Europe, because his narrow reformist mindset rejects the possibility of expropriation without compensation, even if it’s something so indusputably belonging to all, a common (outside_ the WEF and other ultra-rich psychopath meetings, of course).
The conclusion? Ballots are a tool wielded by the ruling class to manage dissent, not overthrow it.
Ohh the old pearl-clutching “violence begets chaos” trope. Conveniently ignores the systemic violence baked into capitalism: poverty, imperialist wars, environmental destruction, police brutality.
Over 100 million people displaced in the last year.
56 wars raging worldwide, the highest figure since WWII.
Nuclear warfare back in business after three decades.
Approx. 5-20 million people dying annually due to preventable causes
Revolutionary violence isn’t arbitrary carnage; it’s the oppressed defending themselves against the daily brutality of the ruling class. In fact, it is out of the fatigue with the incessant brutality, injustice and deprivation of the existing order that revolutions are born. Look at the revolutionary wave that followed after the Great Slaughter of WWI.
Capitalist states routinely murder and displace millions to maintain power. Revolutionary violence seeks to end that barbarism, not perpetuate it.
Take again the Russian Revolution—initially a relatively bloodless overthrow. More people got trampled over when the storming of Winter Palace was being reenacted 10 years later for a movie than during the actual event. The ensuing violence was primarily defensive, against counter-revolutionaries and imperialist invaders. Without the Red Army, the October Revolution would’ve been a footnote. If you don’t believe me, read Ten days that shook the world by John Reed.
Capitalism’s birth was hardly a bloodless affair—whether through the American or French Revolutions, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, La Conquista, Opium Wars, colonialism in Africa, India or Indonesia, it was drenched in violence. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and freedom of the press. The civil war resulted in the death of roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population. During the Russian Civil War, about 0.7% of the population died, a large portion of which can be attributed to the White Terror. Yet, the Bolsheviks, despite the brutal conditions, attempted to minimize violence. They first sought to rely on agitation among intervention forces, and even amid famine, Lenin organized the largest international aid operation of its time, importing vast amounts of grain into the USSR between 1918 and 1921—much of it sabotaged by the Whites, Esery or kulaks. The mutinies within the foreign troops and the strikes and blockades organized in solidarity by French or British workers also contributed to the withdrawal of many of the Allied troops. Still, you wouldn’t think of questioning the legitimacy of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions or the U.S. Civil War, would you? And in fact, if not then rightly so. Beacause freedom is the recognition of necessity. They played their progressive role at their time, along with capitalism. But that potential is long gone and now capitalism is holding human potential back.
jfc
these tankies