“I’m non-violent. I can’t support that form of protest.”

Then how are you squaring your support for the violence of the status quo? Not just the actual violence we choose not to count in our statistics, like robbery, theft, simple and aggravated assault, sexual assault, and murder (so long as it’s being committed by agents of the state). No, how are you also squaring the violence that comes from the threat of the loaded gun pointed at you?

Isn’t it still violence for a man with a loaded gun to point it at you on your way home from work, ask you kindly, “Won’t you please hand over your wallet?”, even if he gives you a few bucks back after taking most?

So why is it not violence for your boss to rob you before you leave work, for you to produce wealth for your employer but receive only a small portion of your surplus-value back?

“That’s ridiculous. My boss isn’t threatening me, and I can choose to go work somewhere else if I want to.”

Yes, you can choose to go get robbed by another man, but he’ll have the same gun pointed at you, and that gun is “life without money in a capitalist society”.

If it’s illegal to exist — to feed yourself, slake your thirst, to sit, sleep, shit, piss — in public without sufficient wealth to legally access the private property that gatekeeps those things, that means your existence is always subject to literal men with literal guns showing up to deliver all of their direct violence at any time.

The loaded gun of capitalism is the threat you will exist in it without enough money. Yet, like a mafia thug remarking what a shame it would be if your house burnt down, your boss doesn’t have to say out loud what they know to be true: you’ll accept being robbed a lesser amount if it spares you some worse violence and total removal from society.

A conservative looks at all this and says, “the hierarchy is good, worthy of being defended with massive violence, and people get what they deserve”.

A liberal looks at this and says, “as long as Republicans aren’t in power, the hierarchy is good, worthy of being defended with massive violence, but I hear you (and people get what they deserve)”.

If you think that’s uncharitable, look at California or any Democratic-run city. Try to reason with a cop, landlord, politician, or employer, and see how far that gets you before the threat of violence curtails further conversation.