The government runs a monopoly on violence, both physical and silent. This is how the US has gotten to where we’re at now. Whether it’s police beating people in the streets or banks redlining black neighborhoods as areas to avoid investing funding into to keep them poor and without access to essential services, it’s all violence.

It’s why they teach us that MLK marched nonviolently, but not that the Million Man March was a show of force and a threat of what else they could mobilize those people to do, nor that he supported the Black Panthers or that the only reason he didn’t do anything more than the sit-ins was because they were already breaking the law doing that. And it wasn’t until after his assassination and millions of dollars worth of property damage that things changed. Years of protests saw little change, but a week of rioting and burning cities saw the Civil Rights Act drafted, signed, and passed into law.

No oppressor has given up their power because their victims asked nicely. The wealthy have forgotten that unions were formed as the compromise to dragging factory owners out into the street and beating them to death.

Violence is the basis of politics; as in politics is literally just deciding who we want to do violence. If some group does violence in a way we don’t want, whatever social contract that did exist is broken and we need to do violence ourselves to reestablish who should be doing the violence.

And the state directs unimaginable amounts of violence towards political ends