Hello guys. The theme of the video of today is "Revolutionaries and the issue of violence ": who really defends the peace?
Last year Gregory Duvivier on his TV-Show Greg News made a video saying that revolutionaries like Lenin were militarists in favor of violence, unlike the Social Democrats. Those are Democrats and Peacekeepers.
It is very common to hear in the liberal and moderate left and right discourse that revolutionaries, in particular anarchists and Communists, are advocates of violence, of blood, and that they like to see death.
But is it really true? Are Revolutionaries The Defenders of Violence? Do they have a fetish for violence?
The real story is not like that! Before entering into a historical analysis, it is important to make some theoretical considerations: the revolutionaries - especially Marxists - believe that violence
is a datum of the structure of the capitalist system. Capitalism as a socioeconomic system works by oppressing and exploiting the vast
majority of the population, and as such needs violence to reproduce. So it is no coincidence that in every capitalist country in the world the main victims of
police violence and the penal and prison system are poor people from the working class. It is also no coincidence that every time there is a Popular Rebellion, an
attempted revolution, or even a series of mass protests, the response of the bourgeois state is repression, repression and more repression. What the Marxists realized was that violence is a fact of life whether we like it or not. Capitalism does
not work without systematic violence against those below. Of course, in some countries, the daily use of violence is higher than in others. In countries of dependent capitalism, as Brazil, the violence in working class daily life is
much greater than in Central Capitalism countries. For example if you compare the police lethality rates, it is much higher in Brazil than in England. However, those differences, while important, are explained not because capitalism in
Europe is more democratic, more humane , but because it is one of the world's centers of capitalism, and the wealth extracted from the whole periphery of capitalism enables a level of income distribution a little better, and the
contradictions and the class conflicts tend to be less extreme. But even that in Europe itself is already changing. It isn’t a current reality, especially because there is no more welfare state in Europe: it has been almost all destroyed.
The other very important consideration to make is that the bourgeois theorists, the ideologists of capitalism tend to underestimate the role of violence in the reproduction of this system and not only bourgeois thinkers feel this way, even left-
wing critics end up falling into this illusion. For example, from the 60s it became fashionable in Western Europe from certain comprehension the rather misguided of Gramsci, that say that the domination of classes in developed
capitalism got over the use of force, but is exercised by hegemony , for convincing. So schools, churches, political parties, the official media, would be the main instrument of domination of the ruling class. Michel Foucault went on to talk of
a microphysics of power: a society with capillaries custodial institutions: both the school with a psychiatric clinic, would be a prison institution, in a downward analysis of power: that is an understanding of the power from the
bottom to the top. The bourgeois state with its criminal justice system, armed forces and repressive apparatus in general would not be the strategic center for the exercise of power, but rather these micro-relations of powers over the whole
of society. Still in France Pierre Bourdier began to speak of a symbolic power, that this would be the true center of a critique of The Domination. Apart of a left field, Habermas and Hannah Arendt began to say that politics has no violence . The
politics are a sphere of consensus and of inter-subjective dialogue between the sides, and if there is violence it is not politic. Violence would be by definition The negation of the political dimension of human life.
All of this is very pretty. And great to sell books, to produce films, to win a productivity grant of  "Capes , CNPQ " (institutes of investigation), but in the real world capitalism will never dispense violence, especially in the periphery of the
system. What the revolutionaries understood is that the violence is an organic structural datum of capitalism, there is not one example in the history in which a ruling class accepted the loss of its power, its wealth and its prestige peacefully, without the most brutal violent reaction against the emancipatory movement of the ones below. By the way,
Latin America itself gives us hundreds of examples of this: the cycles of military business coup on our continent, were not for the most part against revolutionary political projects. They were against very moderate reformist projects: an example of this is the military Business Coup in Brazil of 1964: the João Goulart government was not a communist
government, a revolutionary government. João Goulart was a nationalist politician who advocated in name of a agrarian reform, banking reform, end illiteracy, health and things like that. A moderated project as this was seen by the Brazilian ruling class and by US imperialism as the something unacceptable, and the result we all know.
And so there's no point in idealizing. The ruling class will never surrender its power without an extremely violent reaction, and violence is a structural datum of the capitalism.  It does not mean of course that the domination of class is given only by repression. As did show Antonio Gramisci - and this is his actual contribution - the domination exerted by
the bourgeois class takes place in a complex and strategic combination of coercion and consensus: persuasion and repression. The ideological apparatus of the ruling class works to legitimize the violence of the bourgeoisie, and the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie guarantee that the ideological apparatus of the dominated class – the workers -
are repressed, fought for the bourgeois ideology become hegemonic within the society. So repression and persuasion works in an organic way, combined in the bourgeois order. This does not mean however, that repression had lost importance in the current forms of capitalist domination. It is exactly the opposite: to have a simple example of
this, at France that is shown by many as an example of a country democratic, civilized country, when had began the protests called The yellow vests, government of Macron in a month had arrested more than a thousand protesters, and France starred in scenes of brutal police violence against the protesters. If there is any political crisis,
popular uprising or attempted revolution, the response of the bourgeoisie will always be a sea of blood and brutality .
From the historical point of view communists have always been Defenders of Peace. In the time of the Social-Democratic labor movement , in the period of the Second International, while the revolutionaries  as Clara Zetkin , Rosa
Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky were against Colonial politic of the capitalist states in Africa and Asia, the reformers were favorable. And so Eduardo Bernstein, for example, had defended the colonialism in Africa by the German state, and said it was legitimate: that the German state was pursuing its interests. The revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg has
always been against the colonial politics and defended the peoples of Africa against the greed of the state of the German monopolies. In World War I, while the Reformers were totally in favor of the war and dedicated themselves to calling the workers to kill the Workers of other countries, the revolutionaries were totally against the war.  Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg,
Trotsky, Stalin and so many others so - called violent, repressive - were against the First World War: denouncing the war as a inter- imperialist war aiming the colonial conquest of the world. After the final of the World War II, the great movements that have gone down in history in defense of peace and against war had the Communists as protagonists:
movement against the Korean war, against the aggression of French colonialism in Algeria, movement against The Vietnam War and a series of world peace campaigns played had a key role from the Communists. By the way, talking about Communists, while the social democratic parties of Europe, or supported directly or pretended not to see
the US imperialist promotion of state coups in Latin America, the Communists not only were the main chased by those  military dictatorships, as well as the communists had played a key role in take back the bourgeois democratic protocol. In the Real History of the 20th Century - This Age of Extremes, As the late Historian Eric Hobsbawn said - the Social
Democrats were not for Peace. They evidently had defended the bourgeois democracy in their country, but they were wholly enthusiastic about colonial policy and the politics of war of the imperialism throughout the periphery of the capitalist system. The Italian historian and philosopher Domenico Losurdo even came up with a concept to address this reality: he called this left movements, the
Imperial left: that is a left movement in France, in England, at the United States, Canada and several other countries advocating a democratic and peaceful policy, but they support their bourgeois state and their capitalist monopolies in exploiting the looting, repressing the entire periphery of the system, and
receive benefits from those super profits that their countries - as central countries of capitalism - get from all of the exploitation. Therefore, in the real history of capitalism, where there was a strong movement for peace, that movement was protagonized or at least had an intense communist participation.
We do not have any kind of fetish for violence. Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and several other revolutionaries openly criticized the terrorists. In Russia, for example, there was very strong the political culture of left-wing terrorism: intellectuals who understood that great acts such as killing a primer-minister
would arouse the masses to the fight. Lenin has always fought this kind of conception, and argued that terrorism has no mass mobilization capacity whatsoever, and far more important than kill a primer-minister is to be able to organize and politically educate the
working class to understand that within capitalism, within that bourgeois form of state it could not achieve its fundamental objectives. The defense of the communist revolutionary violence is a defense based on a critical and real understanding of what are the dynamics of capitalism, but that is not any kind of fetish for violence
or thirst for blood. Two examples are enough to illustrate this: during the Second World War the Japanese army was famous for Its brutality: it was an army that had no prisoners: every time they managed to conquer a region of China, they use to kill everyone, and
before killing the women they use to make rounds of collective rapes. In the other hand, the forces of China's National Resistance, led by the Communist Party not only didn’t use to kill the Japanese prisoners of war, as it use to promotes a political education work with them: did agitation and propaganda against
imperialist war: against the Extermination among members of the working class. Many of those prisoners were released, they returned to the Japanese army and had continued to reproduce the anti-War campaign to the point that from 1944 the Japanese army began to shoot all the soldiers who were arrested by the
Chinese army and then released, because According to Japan's high military  command, communists are very dangerous and anyone who has contactwith them is contaminated by the ideology of pacifism. Another very important example is the demonized
Korea's People's Democratic Republic: North Korea. It is said that this country is a militaristic, violent country that promotes war. In reality the ancient Korean nation was divided into two by US imperialism in a war that killed more than 2 million Koreans.
After the armistice was signed - with a kind of war break - the United States maintains - from the 1950s to today - more than 30,000 troops divided between Japan and South Korea appointed to North Korea - including nuclear weapons in this region - and
constantly threatens the country with a new neo-colonial war of  destruction. North Korea was able to develop an great military power, developing even nuclear weapons, and it is thanks to the fact that Korea has nuclear weapons and a powerful army that did not happen today a new war in the region.
The armament capacity of the North Korean economy, mainly as a result of its planned economy, guarantees peace in the region. It is significant the example of Libya when it was ruled by Gaddafi. Gaddafi had a Libyan atomic bomb project. For pressure from the Imperialism, Caddafi gave up in this project.
Early after that was NATO invading Libya, destroying the country that had the highest HDI (Human Development Index) of Africa, leaving the country in a sea of blood and chaos as it is today.The militarism in North Korea is essential for peace, also because the issue of
Peace and War should not be understood mechanically, but in the form of dialectic. In the world dominated by imperialism, arm yourself is a guarantee of peace for the people that fight for their emancipation.
The imperialism only understands the language of the strength. "And if you want to guarantee the peace, prepare yourself for war." As well said Plínio de Arruda Sampaio (former member of the Party of Socialism and Freedom, PSOL) during the presidential campaign of 2010 (Brazil)
“no one should have atomic weapons, but if the United States has atomic weapons, if Israel has atomic weapons, other peoples in its defense also have the right to have it. In short, revolutionaries are not violent, bloodthirsty, promoters of violence. We are against the imperialist wars, the neo-colonial invasions;
we are frontline in combating the daily violence of the bourgeois state against the working class, but we do not idealize the conditions of class domination in capitalism. We understand that violence is a structural fact of the capitalist system that the ruling class - especially on the
periphery of capitalism - will never surrender its power in peaceful form and that the revolutionary violence of workers and their organizations is an insurmountable historical necessity in the conquest of political power by the workers and in the construction of the new world: the socialist world!
As well as we understand that the experiences of socialist transition need to create a strong defense establishment to protect themselves from each and every one of the attacks of the imperialism.The otherwise than what think Gregorio Duvivie and several theoretical and political leaders, defend an abstract pacifism will not make the real violence ceases to exist.
