Most of you upvoting this would need to go to Wikipedia before you could have a remotely intelligent conversation about revolutionary violence.
I have no problem saying that if I woke up in a country where political change was brought about by killing elected officials, I’d leave. Fuck that noise and fuck political murder.
Unfortunately, with political bribery fully legalized, there really isn’t another recourse that will effect the status quo. You can always count on the kind of people who seek power in the first place to be greedy and corruptable, and when the wealthy can just “donate” to their Pacs to mandate their will, no amount of shaming, protest, or honorable vibes can overcome that.
So either all the peasants who own almost nothing relative to the owners…
…can start GoFundMes in a hopeless attempt to out-bribe our elected officials, or we can revolt, that thing that’s too unseemly for you to consider. And reminder, sanctioned “protest,” with a permit from the bribed politicians, at a designated non-disruptive protest location, at designated protest times, isn’t protest at all, it’s as productive as masturbation.
Or third choice and the one we’ll almost certainly choose: jack shit nothing as the circumstances for most continues to decline until societal collapse in a generation or two due to greed driven ecological collapse.
I do think you’re a bit pessimistic here - great change is still possible through a combination of leverage and the iron law of institutions. Just as the implicit threat of violence caused the creation of the modern welfare state, and the destruction of explicitly racial laws during the Civil Rights movement, so too can this be defeated. All it takes is growing discontent and disorder, combined with the ambitious, to restructure a society, even radically so.
Of course, such is also a game of chicken, with each side daring the other to swerve first, and the best way to win a game of chicken is to prefer collision to swerving…
You already live in a country where the domination of the rich is maintained by social violence.
Based on what? Exactly what violence is taking place that if it ended the rich would lose their “domination”?
Nearly every aspect of modern life is backed up by the law. Law is nothing more than codified coercion. As I noted elsewhere, this is not inherently bad - but every legal protection fundamentally springs from, and is enforced by, violence. This is one the main things discussed in sociology with regards to governments. It’s very basic.
As those with outsized influence are the ones who, well, have the most influence on the laws, as a demographic or class, such laws are naturally made to benefit the influential. As I mentioned before, this is not inherently a bad thing - many laws benefit ordinary people as well. But the vast corpus of private property and contract law, beneficial though it may sometimes be, has the primary and highest purpose of protecting the influence (ie the wealth) of the powerful.
The use of these laws to protect their interests, even while others starve, go deep into medical debt, or otherwise end up physically or mentally destroyed in the process of participating within the legal structures created by these laws, is a form of violence. It’s just a form of violence that people are willing to accept - some without even considering it, it would seem.
