I believe that due to the inherent contradictions of capitalism a revolution is inevitable, and necessary, but it's still not something that is easily palatable. Revolution is certainly romanticized, yet I still question every day whether or not I would be willing to die for my beliefs. My question to my fellow comrades is do you think non-violent form of revolution is possible, or will the state and reactionaries always crack down? I know that in the past those with power and prestige have been reluctant to give it up.
I mean it depends on the nature of the dictatorship right? Dictatorships of the bourgeoisie (what we live in) are incredibly violent. That doesn't mean there couldn't come a situation where say you get the military to turn on them. It wouldn't be free of violence but if your side was to overwhelmingly hold the arms the other side would be crushed in short order without too much death and protracted fighting. On the other hand look at how peaceably the Soviet Union collapsed, if you want to even call that a "revolution". For all the propaganda capitalists sling about it, it should be telling how it slipped away with a whimper and no violent resistance.
I don't think a communist revolution can be entirely peaceful though because to maintain the new order especially in certain very liberal places you are going to have to do house keeping. Whether you put them in gulags or some other solution involving violence of one type or another you are going to have to suppress using state violence massive swathes of reactionaries, anti-communist liberals, etc who will undermine and destroy your revolution if you do not put them in check as one of the first orders of business. It is not enough to simply intimidate them sadly as we have seen with the west's own success in building color revolutions in countries out of these supposed repressed (until they aren't) people who are just either willing, aware anti-communists or just useful pawns who are easily misled thanks to a lifetime of indoctrination into liberalism.
Allowing counter-revolution is directly contributing to the murder of a hundred million people or several hundred million. Because where counter-revolution succeeds the land is salted for communism for a lifetime or more and in that time the angry bourgeoisie take revenge and plunder and starve.
You're right, and you don't leave it at the euphemism "house keeping," but we really shouldn't engage in that sort of euphemistic doublespeak to begin with. If we're talking about putting someone in a cage or even killing them, there should be a good justification for that, and the justification should stand even if we accurately describe what we're planning on doing.
Personally, I'm optimistic about the power of media to deprogram chuds and the rest of the groups you mention. The whole premise of a podcast like Citations Needed (the official pocast of chapo.chat) is that media immersion can and does affect what people view as normal or acceptable. If we change what's normal/acceptable in our media that might go a long ways towards shifting how reactionary the country is.
There is a saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks. The sad fact is a 40-year-old person is much less likely to be able to psychologically deal with rejecting everything they believed in for 40 years in favor of the new paradigm. They are much more likely thanks to priming to just dismiss your propaganda as "commie propaganda" and shrug it off rather than engaging seriously with it. They may even bother to get a surface level understanding of it just to be able to pass in the new society but they will retain their liberalism and wear their communism merely as a cloak in the new order to get by. It's been said before but it bears saying again, America will need a cultural revolution.
Luckily, everyone under 40 has been driven further and further left by disenfrancisement. The oldest Millenials are like 38 now.
That's the thing about propaganda -- you don't have to engage seriously with it for it to be effective. Do you think the Fox News cranks are seriously engaging with that content now? They're just taking it at face value, or passively soaking it up as it plays in the background.
Plus, a great deal of propaganda in this country is subtle enough that most people would disagree if you even called it propaganda (think of shows like COPS, or even local news reports on crime that just reprint police press releases). Re-programming that stuff is just as important, and if someone flips it on or casually reads it in a newspaper it'd be harder to dismiss as "commie propaganda." You're right that there will be some people you just can't reach, but we should absolutely try to minimize the amount of state violence needed to stop them from sabotaging society.
It's only subtle because it is presumed to be eternal and by default. It is only subtle because it is everywhere and has been everywhere for the lifetime of everyone currently in existence. I'm sure liberals thought differently at the dawn of liberalism, had different opinions based on their lived experiences with previous systems. But capitalism has been around so long and so strongly sewn its own narrative and the narrative for its enemies like socialism that even old people telling stories are just telling stories about slight differences in the same system.
By contrast communist, anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist, anti-American propaganda would be INCREDIBLY jarring to people who have spent lifetimes not noticing or assuming as normal the things you're railing against.
So quite frankly you don't understand. For younger people growing up after the revolution it would be easier but they'd still have older people selling tales and lies about how things were different or better under capitalism. To get to the point we are now with capitalist propaganda not even being noticeable would require the first generation who grows up under socialism to have kids and die themselves and possible for those kids to also grow up and die to sever the memories and propaganda of the old.
It'd be different, but that doesn't mean jarring. If you do a quasi-documentary in the style of COPS but focused on the worst parts of our legal system, the format will be familiar enough even if the content is focused on how fucked up things are, not on watching pigs crack skulls. You can already find stuff like this, and it's even easier to find purely fictional media in this vein. No one is screaming "commie propaganda" at The Shawshank Redemption. It can be done, and it has been done -- the only question is how far you can go with it.
Neither of us has a crystal ball here.
Good comment, and to add to your last point, allowing a counter revolution to succeed in our epoch doesn’t just mean the bourgeoisie taking revenge on whatever proletarians it can get its hands on, it means inevitable climate catastrophe. We’re talking about a choice between crushing our class enemies or the end of widespread human life on this planet.