I personally reject the notion that a just and equitable future can only be built on a pile of corpses.

Ok, then how?

u are a wierd type of “left” com u reject unprincipled anarchist views but by objecting to violence u also reject principled anarchist views. so let me ask u what the fuck are gonna do, like u cant not be violent when the ruling class will murder u if u do something that meaningfully challenges their power, so like why even believe in anything if u also refuse to do anything. like whats the plan try to do something and either fail or get close enough to “suicide” by 2 shotgun shot to the back of the head? like a stick of dynamite is gonna win a fucking war mate we need an army.

it functionally boils down to the same as being governed by an HOA

Yes. And that is one of the most tyrannical and dystopian things imaginable…

I believe that government must play a role in dismantling coercive power structures

So you acknowledge the need for a state to guide society through the transitional period of socialism from capitalism to communism. Good. Then we are on the same page.

the government must be accountable to the people it governs

The government must be accountable to the class it represents. Again, the keyword here is class. A state is an instrument of class rule. It upholds and enforces the power of one class over another. And as you have acknowledged already the need for a state, the only question that remains is what kind of state: a bourgeois or a proletarian one?

Of course we all know that socialism can only be built under the dictatorship of the proletariat. And because the proletarian state represents the collective interests of the working class that is the class which it is accountable to. As all proletarian states are and have been throughout history, with the power to elect and recall representatives being given to every layer of the system over the one above it.

This is what Mao called the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, what China today calls “Whole Process People’s Democracy”, or as it was known in the USSR, Soviet Democracy.

Anarchists may use violence, but targeted assassination and thrown sticks of dynamite cannot remotely compare

That’s hardly all the violence anarchists have done throughout history. Pogroms and banditry by the Makhnovites come to mind, as well as the CNT/FAI who called themselves anarchist and rejected the Bolshevik model while paradoxically themselves setting up what was essentially a state…with prisons, a criminal justice system and executions.

It turns out that in practice you don’t need to call it a state to do large scale, organized or semi-organized violence.

You might argue that your preferred violence is for a good cause, but you’ve got a bit of a trap on your hands, because every bad guy out there convinced themselves that theirs was the right choice to make at the time.

And that is why there can be no revolutionary praxis without revolutionary theory. Only through rigorous dialectical materialist analysis of the world and by studying the objective conditions that exist do we learn to set correct goals and implement correct policy.

On the other hand, if you shun theory, if you shun study of material conditions and class analysis, then of course you will be unable to distinguish between when tools such as the application of violence are used to further the liberation of the working class and when they hinder it. Then all you can do is look at how something looks superficially and not at what it actually is and does, in other words you are stuck thinking in terms of form over content, which is one of the main indicators of residual liberalism that you have yet to unlearn.

And it’s not like anarchism is this pacifist ideology that rejects violence on principle. Anarchism acknowledges the need to employ violence to defend against aggressors like fascists, imperialists and other counter-revolutionary forces.

In other words, the problem is that all organized violence is self-assured and self-justified

Which is why we must identify when it is actually justified and when it is not. And here we come to the crux of the issue. It is not that you reject violence but rather you have a problem with organized violence. Yet anarchic, decentralized and disorganized violence is both less disciplined (and thus more prone to abuses) and less effective as there is no unified command that sets a clear goal, develops a plan and organizes its implementation.

Small scale groups each acting on their own are by nature parochial and will often be myopic to the larger picture, and because of this will lack the understanding that is needed to take the right actions at the right time. Ideological heterogeneity which is bound to take hold in the absence of an ideological vanguard further exacerbates this chaos. And the forces of reaction will gladly take advantage of any disunity or lack of discipline to subvert and then crush all that you have achieved. Then all your lofty ideals count for nothing.

I appreciate that you are making an effort to engage in good faith so i have tried to do the same and not immediately be as dismissive as some of the other comrades here, but in general i highly advise that you read and learn more on these subjects to correct your misconceptions, not just on Marxist-Leninist theory, but also on socialist states where you seem to have fallen for certain anti-communist tropes spread by western and liberal propaganda.

not creating creepy secretive self-surveillance programs like you see in the US, China, and other major players.

So no modern security state apparatuses then? What’s your take on China’s booting out the CIA in recent decades and the constant attempts of the west- as well as its long and well-recorded history- of destabilizing and destroying states through “color revolutions,” insurgencies, etc?

Some Americans even rationalize the genocide of first nations by arguing that it resulted in the United States, which is a good thing in their opinion

Shitting on dumbass Americans is fair enough, but we all know that no one is promoting settler-colonialism and genocide here. There is no such thing as a retroactive justification, nor is genocide ever an acceptable answer. But you and I both know there’s no disagreement in this thread on that matter.

I personally reject the notion that a just and equitable future can only be built on a pile of corpses.

Personally I reject the notion that the idealistic path should be taken as the first option- that’s my response to that. Does a better future have to be built on a pile of corpses? Not necessarily, no. But the times when such a path has been possible are a rare, extreme minority, and in many cases throughout history- the establishment of the Soviet Union, PRC, and many post-colonial and revolutionary governments (including many of the now status quo “liberal, democratic” western governments) it could not be done.

Idealism has its place- where and when it can be afforded. For instance, if you look up how modern Communist China re-educated and rehabilitated Puyi, the last Qing emperor and a infamous Japanese collaborationist- it really is something that impressed me, reading it at the time. But that was during a time when Puyi had been truly defanged in every way possible; in comparison, would I blame the Bolsheviks for their handling of the Russian imperial family, or the French revolutionaries for their handling of theirs? Not at all, rather the opposite- these nobles still had their fangs; look up the letters and actions of Marie Antoinette seeking to call foreign interventions from her relatives, for instance (not to mention the other reasons of varying validity, for her charges of treason- the actions of sending the royal treasuries abroad, for instance), or consider the royal family’s significance to the cause of the Whites and to the multiple interventions by pretty much every other global power during the Russian civil war. Consider in the French revolutionaries’, or the Bolsheviks’ circumstances- how many more lives were spared by these actions, than not? Why is there such a focus on the “martyred” nobles, putschists, landlords, kulaks (farmer-landlords), plantation-owners, and all sorts of varying reactionary figures when contrasted with the mountains of corpses from deprivation, disenfranchisement, and abuses of all kinds that always existed behind the maintenance of the former order’s status quo, the sheer brutality brought to bear under their name and through their actions against those seeking to free themselves from their tyranny, etc?

What I’m describing is not limited to individual cases, nor the system of nobility alone- the same goes for liberals, for all manners of tribalists, reactionaries, all sorts of petty corruption, injustices, and criminality alike. Any sensible system will weigh the price of inaction or insufficient action- the “collateral damage” that comes in the form of innocent lives lost to reactionary backlash, irredentism, sabotage, and from merely the typical behaviors of those who are not properly reformed before being allowed loose on the world again.

A “just and equitable” future requires those involved to be willing to defend the process necessary to to create it, from start to finish. Anything else is just willful martyrdom- and I can promise you, while people might remember the countless martyrs of this world fondly, their peoples always, always, would have rather preferred they succeeded in the end, and the outcomes of their martyrdom are near always infinitely worse than if they had managed otherwise.