If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because "violence" is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo. Conditions that the state characterizes as "peaceful' are, in reality, quite violent. Even as people experience the violence of poverty, the torture of imprisonment, the brutality of policing, the denial of health care, and many other violent functions of this system, we are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating. When state actors refer to "peace," they are really talking about order. And when they refer to "peaceful protest," they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state. The more uncooperative you are, the more you will be accused of aggression and violence. It is therefore imperative that the state not be the arbiter of what violence means among people seeking justice. In the past, activists frequently leveraged the violence of police, taking actions they believed police would likely respond to with violence, in order to expose the brutality of policing and force the public to witness and confront it. Many of those actions, including protests carried out by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Nonviolen Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement, took place in a context that was very different from today's world of pervasive mass media. Today, people are much more accustomed to witnessing violence, including violence against protesters, as such imagery is shared widely on a regular basis, particularly through social media. The public has largely become inured to such imagery. The violence of the state in response to protest is rarely scrutinized to the degree that protesters are scrutinized. The idea that if you are defiant in the face of authority you should expect to incur its wrath is firmly entrenched in our culture. When people who defy police are abused, we often hear people ask, "What did they think was going to happen?" The ubiquity of the abuse puts the onus on the abused to avoid it, because they simply "should have known better." Protesters are expected to remain "nonviolent" at all times, regardless of the circumstances, while the state is assumed to be justified, at leas sometimes, in inflicting violence to quell "unrest."

Change is inevitable. A state that does not allow change through non-violent means will inevitably experience change through violence.

The violence of the pen is always rationalized and ignored.