Let me preface this by saying that I am deriding the people who fed you that line, not you for repeating it.

Moderates love to talk about how their proposals are more “realistic” than the radical ideas. While this is not false as a rule, it is overwhelmingly asserted without evidence and never has that been more the case than with the “Reform or Revolution?” debate. For the sake of convenience, here’s what I told another DemSoc:

Do you believe the rich and powerful will submit to being voted out of power? Do you think they won’t ratfuck anyone who gets close and buy off, intimidate, or assassinate anyone who gets in? We’ve seen what that looks like internationally, it looks like coups and the slaughter of peaceful actors. Do you think that, with such violence used to protect the appendages of capitalism, they will roll over and allow you to claim their beating heart?

“Ah,” the close reader says “But what the user you are responding to now said was ‘the only realistic way to get socialism without bloodshed,’ which is a somewhat different claim!”

Correct, I’m covering my bases. The second point that I want to make is that “without bloodshed” is doing an immense amount of heavy lifting for the justification of your idea, and it is no coincidence that it is also a lie of catastrophic proportions. Let us pretend that what we have already established is false – that the rich and powerful are like the Jurassic Park T. Rex, they can’t see you if you move slowly enough – is true, and in the far-flung future we can succeed in voting our way to socialism. Who does this save? Most directly, it protects the capitalists and their jackbooted thugs, plus the fascist paramilitaries that would assist them in fighting to suppress communist revolution.

“But doesn’t it also save people on our side?” the reader now interjects “Surely you don’t proffer a fantasy in which the Vanguard triumphs over Washington without casualties!”

Right you are, many revolutionaries would die. However, what you are failing to take into account is that a potential revolution is not the only violence that may exist or does exist in society. Specifically, you are entirely ignoring the extraordinary violence of the status quo which kills people every day. There’s a reason for the old slogan “Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied.” Injustice will keep being done every day, people will be threatened, starved, tortured, murdered, forced to live like animals, every single day while we wait for this far-flung future where the appointed time has finally come and the moderates declare that we as a society may now have justice, on a boiling planet with a peace soaked in the blood of people who never had a chance to fight back but were butchered by the state just the same.

But dropping now the counterfactual that such a future exists, what we are left with is the understanding that the job of the moderates is to continuously stall the radicals, claiming to support change while only stifling it, to be on our side while constantly betraying us, to abhor violence while tacitly perpetuating a violence bloodier than a thousand revolutions.