Gonzalus

So long as the state exists all political power ultimately depends on violence or the threat of it. To reject the use of violent struggle is to cripple your movement in the face of a government which can use all means including violence to defend the existing order.

Additionally peaceful protest cannot make the fundamental changes to society which only the use of violence makes possible. Peaceful protest cannot and has not ever made the ruling class peacefully relinquish power. Only through armed struggle can the power of the ruling class be replaced by popular power.

Those who dispute this often cite the work of Erica Chenoweth, whose work hinges on a faulty definition of revolution or successful resistance.

For example many of the movements which bolster Chenoweth's arguments fall in line with the so-called color revolutions of the early 2000s. The problem is that these protest movements sought modest goals: unseating a president, anti-corruption legislation, new elections, etc. And because of these modest goals it is intellectually dishonest to say these movements are equatable to the world-historic revolutions of France, Russia, and China which sought to fundamentally reorder society and create an entirely new state machinery.

As one might expect it is much harder to achieve the much more comprehensive change that violent revolutions seek to enact. It is not that violence isn't effective, rather that it the goals violent movements seek tend to much harder to reach.

Capitalism should be replaced