Growing up poor and working class you are inevitably exposed to violence regularly.

This can be public school bullying, abuse & neglect at home by parents, violent crime like street gangs, police brutality, and so on.

Much of this violence comes from the same few sources: people who’ve been isolated and exploited, unable to provide for themselves or others, feeling inadequate and depressed. Deprived of a life worth living in addition to the time and energy to enjoy life they turn to drugs/alcohol as escapism, take their frustrations out on others, and in general develop anti-social tendencies as they lack the social network needed to provide for them and the capitalist state provides no aid.

When you’re surrounded by violence you yourself have to embrace it as a matter of survival. I’ve been both the victim of violence and the perpetrator of it; the bully and the bullied; the one who started fights and the one who ended them. I didn’t have a choice in the matter as that choice was already made for me. When violence was done to me I was forced to respond with violence for no one else seemed willing or able to stop it. Parents, teachers, employers, law enforcement, etc.

I tried, once, to follow the rules and not fight back just as the bourgeois mouthpieces always tell me to. I relied on the existing authorities to resolve the conflict. They completely failed. I was assaulted at my workplace (multiple times in one day) by a co-worker for no apparent reason (maybe because I was small and thus an easy target or maybe he was just bored, I don’t really care regardless) and my employers did nothing. He would go on to harass me for several months and despite multiple complaints the issue was treated as a “teamwork issue” where the entire team was apparently at fault for being unable to “work together”. For management the issue wasn’t one employee harassing another but a whole group that just couldn’t work together. For once I took the pacifist route and it completely failed me; I did as I was told and as I was expected to do and nothing happened. The system in place was disinterested in my plight and, in effect, told me to just “get over it”. No one around me stood up to speak in my defense; everyone treating it like it was just an issue of two people unable to get along and not a co-worker being bullied by another.

I can’t afford non-violence. If I fight back I might get fired, my ass kicked, maybe even arrested but if I don’t I’ll have to stomach further abuse that could eventually lead to my death. I can’t rely on apathetic authorities. I can’t rely on apathetic bystanders. I think about all the instances where I didn’t fight back and wish I had. I think about those few times where I was victimizing someone else and they didn’t fight back and I wish they had. People need to be able and willing to stand up for themselves.

But the bourgeoisie don’t want us to. When we’re facing violence we’re supposed to walk away, grab an authority figure, and let them “fix” the issue. We become dependent on authorities; nice and docile. This works to the benefit of the ruling class when those same authorities are used to suppress dissent; be it in the workplace or in public. They tell us “violence is wrong” so that we allow the baton to come down on our skulls. That is to be expected though, right? Obviously they don’t want us fighting back against their oppression. But there’s more to it: some of them actually, unironically believe that all violence everywhere is actually wrong out of moral principle.

Because of course they can say this with a straight face: they have walls and cameras to keep out burglars, security guards to protect them from assassination, lawyers to take their abusers to court, et al. They can afford to be non-violent. They have the means to cut themselves off from the parts of society inflicting violence against them. They never have to worry about things like drive-by shootings, muggings, etc. They can switch schools if they’re being bullied, cut toxic people out of their lives, uproot their entire life and start over elsewhere. They have the privilege to avoid violence if they don’t want to face it - the kind of privilege proles like me will never have. Even the authorities who do nothing for those of us at the bottom are more useful and compliant to those coming from wealth and status; more helpful and cooperative.

And always these privileged types have the same privileged opinions: increased gun control, talk to an adult if you’re being bullied, call the cops if you’re being threatened, vote for different leaders if you want political change, etc. Even self-defense - usually the one act of violence that is universally deemed acceptable even by many self-proclaimed “pacifists” - sometimes isn’t acceptable to them. I can only imagine what kind of life can lead someone to develop these kinds of views and attitudes toward violence because they’re not my lived experience. It’s a common trope in media that people exposed to extreme violence end up swearing off violence as they grow disgusted by it. I hate this trope not only because it’s often used as preachy way of saying “violence is wrong” but also because the people most opposed to violence are often those who’ve never experienced it first hand. They never had to actually defend themselves before in order to safeguard their own life and well-being so of course they can say it’s never okay. Maybe they did face violence but the same authorities that neglect the violence proles face actually a gave a shit this time because the victim was someone of wealth and status.

(To be clear: this isn’t to say people with PTSD from violence don’t ever swear-off violence; those people absolutely do exist and it’s perfectly understandable as to why. They’re just not the norm and are usually people who experienced war or genocide, the two most extreme forms of violence there is.)

I can’t be a pacifist. I tried and that didn’t help me at all. If anything not fighting back just made things worse. I don’t have the privilege that allows me to evade the violent reality of my violent surroundings and especially not the inherent violence necessary for the class struggle. The capitalist society is one built on violence at its core; the violence of the state against the workers to keep us down and also the violence between workers to keep us divided. The poverty we exist in serves not only as a consequence of our exploitation but also as a trap to keep us hostile & aggressive, further justifying state violence.

Only those who live outside the reality of the proletarian experience can really truly live as pacifists; selling their violence to others and cutting themselves off from it entirely. Their pacifism is born out of privilege.