Hello everybody, welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show recurring guests, one of my favorites, two black, to talk about part two of his essay, nonviolence is violence too. Part one was called Somebody's Got to Die. This one is subtitled, we're all in

the gunk. There are two parts of basically a singular essay that dialectically examines the

relationship between nonviolence and violence, the violence of your opposition, strategic

violence in your same movement, the violence inherent in the state and the need to

defend any gains you may have with the state, the need to appeal to the state in certain instances,

etc. So really complicating the false binary of nonviolence versus violence, not naively arguing

for one over the other. I think, you know,

perhaps if you were just to read the title or just kind of make an assumption, you might think,

oh, they're arguing for violence over nonviolence, not at all. He's contextualizing nonviolence

in a violent concrete situation that already exists and navigating the relationship between

nonviolent movements,

nonviolent electoral strategies for socialism,

whatever it may be,

into the broader context that violence is always there.

Violence is in the state.

Violence is in your opposition.

Violence is in the ability to defend, you know,

your position ultimately or any gains that you may have made,

etc. So I think it's just a really serious, deep way of thinking about these problems that

rejects the false binary and approaches these things dialectically, which is, you know,

incredibly important. And we end this conversation at the end of it with a discussion on

what this means for actual organizing, what this means for how we carry ourselves as socialist, as communist, as anti-imperialist, with regards to other aspects of the left ecosystem, as it were, and just how you actually appeal to people.

...