I mean, I actually believe that it won’t be accomplished without bloodshed - but there’s a world of difference between ‘civil unrest’ and ‘civil war’, and I see people fantasizing about the latter far too often. Force is the tool workers use to prevent the use of overwhelming force against the workers - but using it as a tool of overthrow itself is… often strategically unsound, unless matters have already spiraled into chaos.
This is where supposedly communist regimes tend to go wrong - they skip straight to revolution without taking the necessary preparatory steps to do things like level inequality and shore up democracy. This just means that the wealth and power reconsolidate almost immediately into authoritarian state capitalism or similar - generally a worse state than preceded it, and definitely not communism.
Again, I don’t dispute that force is necessary for self-defense, for pressuring the government, and, once taken by democratic means, for use of state force to implement the necessary changes. Only that the use of force to overthrow the government is probably a strategic mistake at this junction, moral issues aside. No coup worth succeeding will succeed, and civil war would be… brutal, even if by some miracle leftist forces emerged and won.
I think we probably agree but are caught up in semantics and details.
I mean, I actually believe that it won’t be accomplished without bloodshed - but there’s a world of difference between ‘civil unrest’ and ‘civil war’, and I see people fantasizing about the latter far too often. Force is the tool workers use to prevent the use of overwhelming force against the workers - but using it as a tool of overthrow itself is… often strategically unsound, unless matters have already spiraled into chaos.
This is where supposedly communist regimes tend to go wrong - they skip straight to revolution without taking the necessary preparatory steps to do things like level inequality and shore up democracy. This just means that the wealth and power reconsolidate almost immediately into authoritarian state capitalism or similar - generally a worse state than preceded it, and definitely not communism.
The force is necessary though.
this is what liberals actually believe
The Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Cubans should have leveled inequality and shored up democracy before they took power.
Again, I don’t dispute that force is necessary for self-defense, for pressuring the government, and, once taken by democratic means, for use of state force to implement the necessary changes. Only that the use of force to overthrow the government is probably a strategic mistake at this junction, moral issues aside. No coup worth succeeding will succeed, and civil war would be… brutal, even if by some miracle leftist forces emerged and won.
I think we probably agree but are caught up in semantics and details.