This is mostly a serious question. Also, not for the tankies/MLs. I already know what your answer to that question is. I may not always agree with you on everything, but you do have an answer that if the conditions became right, could actually work.
No, this is for the type of anarchist completely against the wall, gulags, seemingly any amount of getting hands dirty. What is the solution to those types of people? There are so many of them in the US, a lot of which are heavily armed, that they could easily topple a socialist system, and even if they didn't do that, their existence would be incompatible with any marginalized group living their lives, since they love to harass them at best, outright murder them at worse. So what's the solution? Anarchists often seem to avoid this, seemingly believing that if there was a socialist or communist society, they would just say "aw shucks, guess I was wrong about that. Guess I'll no longer be racist or xenophobic!"
So am I missing something, what's the answer?
There are flows of power behind the levers of power.
A trillion-dollar military cannot exist without taxation. Any breakdown in tax revenue, or any other part of its logistics, will result in it shrinking. You don't need to face the armed forces in open conflict, the same way you don't need to shoot down a plane to bring it down to earth, if it doesn't refuel it's going to have to land.
So your plan is to do revolution by having everyone stop paying taxes? Or are you just talking about a symmetrical warfare? Like destroying the means of collecting taxes or just destroying the armament factories directly? Getting that level of popular support would be amazing.
Asymmetrical warfare (really, "symmetrical warfare" has been the exception throughout human existence) is a large part of it. I'm not saying "refusing to pay your taxes is a revolutionary act" as much as "a country at war with itself will have a constantly diminishing tax base, and its military will be increasingly strained".
Most centralized party proponents have this constant retracing of 1917-1922. Things aren't going to be like that; we have blurred class relations, GPS in everyone's pocket, extensive consumer profiles just one polite request from government hands, drones that can kill without a trace, and MoP that are a day's truck drive away from consumers.
In the context of a breakdown of the state apparatus, it becomes less of a question of combat, and more of a question of survival. Militaries are not economies unto themselves; they must parasitize a national economy to exist. The polities (or persistent organizations) that survive a governmental collapse are going to be the ones that are the most efficient, and the ones that have less weakness in their supply chain.
With every lapse in order, it becomes harder to bring back the capitalist world order. The communal, non-commodified order has been lurking beneath the surface, and it will flourish again if it is given space to.
I'm not saying I have an answer for "what starts all the dominoes falling". I just think the situation won't necessarily be so confrontational and dire as MLs typically imagine.
The collapse of capitalism is inevitable, it's a wholly unsustainable mode of production. I guess the options become a reversion to some sort of less centralized feudal system or organized resistance to the preservation of that status quo on a smaller scale and the eventual development of socialism. The military will play a big role in the initial footing we have during that struggle, but you're right about it not having sticking power once conflict disrupts its tendrilous supply chains.
I just thought of a better, more concise way to express it.
MLs are constantly asking "how are you going to supply tank divisions when the White Army invades".
This is my counter: how does the neo-White Army re-establish control? How do they keep from getting bogged down in a costly and marginally beneficial guerrilla war? I don't need to defeat them, I just have make it prohibitively expensive to subjugate my area.
The reactionaries sustain their power by exploiting others. Liberate yourself (whether from debt, from housing and food insecurity, or from literal confinement), and then help others liberate themselves. That's the entire strategy, in brief. Self-sufficient populations won't take up arms in aggression against you, or your collective or your union or your co-op or your party or your commune.
KIS and Uncle Ho would like to have a word
Those were the cases of nation-states in the process of escaping colonialism.
You do have a point, but I'd argue that there was a cost-benefit analysis to slaughtering millions of people in Korea and Vietnam.
In a core imperialist nation, the computation would be different, because instead of killing people in some far-off land (potential trading partner), a government or faction would be killing their own countrymen, harming their own economy and society.