They will tell you to wait. They will tell you to march quietly, to vote harder, to trust the process, and to believe that justice will come if you simply endure long enough. They will insist that freedom can be negotiated, that power can be persuaded into compassion, and that the empire will loosen its grip on your throat if you just ask nicely enough.

They are lying.

There has never been a moment in human history when the oppressed have begged their way into freedom. Chains do not dissolve from prayer alone. No empire has ever surrendered because its victims appealed to its conscience. Power does not negotiate with the powerless; it crushes them, absorbs them, contains them, and, when it feels threatened, destroys them without hesitation.

This is the first lesson of political education: repression is not a mistake or a flaw within the system — it is the design. The system does not malfunction when it exploits us, kills us, or discards us; it functions exactly as intended. We are not living within a democracy corrupted by a few bad actors. We are living inside a machine built to extract, control, and dominate. To understand this is to understand why there is no revolution without confrontation, and no confrontation without force.

I. A World Built on Violence

They tell us to respect the law, as though the law itself wasn’t written with blood. They demand we honor property, as though that property wasn’t stolen. They call this system a democracy, as though its foundations are not mass graves.

Before a single brick was laid, the soil beneath us was soaked in blood. First came genocide. Entire nations of Indigenous peoples were massacred to make way for settlers. The Trail of Tears was not a tragic accident; it was deliberate policy. Smallpox-infected blankets were not an aberration; they were strategy. Indigenous children were stolen from their families and forced into “boarding schools” where their languages were beaten out of them and their culture buried alive. Even today, reservations function as open-air prisons for the dispossessed, while oil pipelines slice through sacred lands and treaties are violated without shame.

Then came slavery. Millions of Africans were kidnapped, shackled, shipped, and sold to fuel an economy built entirely on stolen labor. The wealth of this country — its railroads, its banks, its universities, its monuments — rests on the backs of our ancestors. Every plantation was a battlefield. Every whip crack was a declaration of war. Yet we fought back relentlessly. From the Maroon communities of escaped Africans to the Stono Rebellion to Nat Turner’s uprising, resistance was constant. But every attempt at liberation was drowned in overwhelming force. The message was unmistakable: this system’s wealth depends on Black subjugation, and it will kill to maintain it.

After emancipation, they simply changed the uniforms of violence. The Ku Klux Klan became the paramilitary arm of white supremacy. Jim Crow codified racial apartheid into law. Sharecropping replaced chattel slavery with debt bondage. Redlining stole generational wealth from Black families, ensuring poverty would be inherited like property. Police patrolled our neighborhoods like an occupying army. Prisons became the new plantations, and mass incarceration replaced the auction block. From the plantation to the prison, from Wounded Knee to Ferguson, from Hiroshima to Baghdad, violence has always been the core engine of this system.

There has never been a period in which this society has ruled without violence. Police bullets, economic starvation, foreign wars, and domestic surveillance all serve the same purpose: to maintain the hierarchy of power. Yet they teach us to believe that liberation can be achieved peacefully, that somehow our chains are gentler than those of the past.

II. The Lie of Nonviolent Liberation

They push a morality they themselves never follow. They tell us to be peaceful while they arm police with tanks and give drones the power to incinerate entire families overseas. They claim that “violence never solves anything” while their entire empire was forged through conquest, slavery, and war. They parade the image of Martin Luther King Jr., stripped of his radical politics and frozen at “I Have a Dream,” while erasing the King who condemned capitalism, imperialism, and police terror.

But history refuses to conform to their mythology. The Civil Rights Movement didn’t succeed because America “found its conscience.” It succeeded because the system was destabilized on multiple fronts — through boycotts, rebellions, mass organizing, and yes, armed self-defense. The Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana protected activists from Klan terror with rifles. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, whose black panther symbol later inspired the Party, built independent Black political power and armed its members for protection. The Black Panther Party itself patrolled the police, fed children, established clinics, and taught political education while openly carrying weapons in full compliance with the law.

The sanitized narrative of “peaceful progress” is a deliberate distortion. Every right we have today — the right to vote, the right to desegregate, the right to organize — was wrested from the state under the constant threat of disruption and resistance.

Globally, the truth is even clearer. No colonized people have ever freed themselves without resistance. The Haitian Revolution overthrew slavery and colonialism through one of the most successful armed revolts in history, defeating both French and European imperialism. The Algerian War of Independence expelled the French through guerrilla warfare and mass mobilization. The Vietnamese defeated three empires — France, Japan, and the United States — through decades of disciplined armed struggle. The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya faced brutal repression but helped dismantle British settler colonialism. Even apartheid in South Africa fell not because the regime discovered morality, but because armed resistance, sabotage, mass organizing, and international solidarity made the system untenable.

The lesson is unavoidable: oppression does not negotiate its own demise. It must be dismantled.

III. Understanding the State

Why can’t we simply vote our way to freedom? Why can’t reforms work if we just push hard enough? The answer lies in understanding the nature of the state itself. The state is not neutral. It does not exist to mediate conflict or balance competing interests. It exists to protect the power and property of the ruling class.

Police were not created to serve and protect us. They evolved from slave patrols, strikebreakers, and Pinkertons — forces designed to suppress rebellion and protect capital. Prisons exist not to rehabilitate but to warehouse populations deemed “surplus” to the needs of capital, disproportionately Black, Brown, and Indigenous. The U.S. military does not defend freedom; it secures resources, markets, and strategic dominance for corporations.

To appeal to the state for liberation is to ask the plantation owner to burn down his own house. He will not. And when reforms are won, they are temporary. Voting rights, labor protections, civil liberties — every gain is clawed back the moment it threatens profits or power. The system adapts to preserve itself, even if it must destroy millions of lives in the process.

Understanding this reality forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: there is no peaceful path to liberation. Armed struggle is not optional; it is inevitable.

IV. The Discipline of Armed Struggle

Armed struggle does not mean chaos. It is not random violence. It is not revenge. It is organized, disciplined, collective defense against a system that has waged war on us for centuries. It begins not with weapons but with political education and strategy.

History teaches us that uprisings without preparation are doomed to fail. Nat Turner’s rebellion terrified the slaveholding class but was brutally suppressed. Tulsa’s thriving Black community in Greenwood was burned to the ground because it lacked the means of defense. In contrast, the Haitian Revolution succeeded not simply because the enslaved rose up, but because they built a disciplined, coordinated army and studied the weaknesses of their oppressors. Vietnam’s victory over the United States came from decades of patient preparation, strategic alliances, and mass mobilization.

Armed struggle, then, is not the beginning of revolution but its culmination. It requires political schools to develop consciousness, networks of solidarity that transcend borders, dual power institutions to serve the people directly, and disciplined leadership capable of guiding collective resistance. Without education, organization, and preparation, armed struggle risks becoming premature sacrifice.

V. Building Revolutionary Capacity

Revolution is not spontaneous combustion. It is not an explosion of anger that burns brightly and dies quickly. It is the patient, deliberate construction of power from below. That means teaching people to understand the nature of their oppression through political education. It means uniting workers, tenants, students, and oppressed communities under a shared program capable of wielding collective strength.

It also means creating institutions that bypass the state entirely. People’s clinics, community-run food distribution, independent schools, and neighborhood defense committees all serve to weaken the legitimacy of the system by proving that we can govern ourselves. These institutions also prepare us materially and psychologically for the day when the state can no longer meet our needs and will, inevitably, turn on us with even greater force.

International solidarity is just as essential. The empire exploits globally, and so our struggle cannot be confined within national borders. The same government that militarizes our neighborhoods also bombs villages halfway around the world. Our liberation is bound to the liberation of those resisting imperialism abroad.

VI. Preparing for Repression

The more we organize, the more they will come for us. History offers no illusions on this point. When the Panthers built free breakfast programs, they were hunted and assassinated by the FBI. When the MOVE organization in Philadelphia resisted eviction, the state bombed an entire Black neighborhood. COINTELPRO infiltrated, disrupted, and destroyed movements that dared to dream beyond the limits imposed on them.

Understanding this is part of political education. We must prepare ourselves to endure repression and outlast it. That requires discipline, security culture, mutual support networks, and clarity of purpose. We cannot afford romantic illusions about the nature of power.

VII. A World Worth Defending

This struggle is not simply about tearing down the old order; it is about building the new. Revolution means housing instead of homelessness, schools instead of prisons, healthcare instead of debt, and dignity instead of dispossession. It means transforming the structures of society to serve human need rather than profit.

But the birth of a new world will be resisted with every weapon the old one possesses. The ruling class will defend its wealth and power with all the tools at its disposal — surveillance, propaganda, militarization, and terror. If we are serious about liberation, we must be equally serious about defending what we build.