One of the core tenants of neoliberal education is that violence is always wrong, it’s never the answer, etc. They repeat it so often and in so many places because it’s at obvious odds with the state. They use violence against us so often and on such wide scales that their only option is to convince that it’s not violence.

Over producing with limited resources is violence. Throwing away food while people starve is violence. Leaving buildings empty while people die of the cold on the street is violence. Preventing the sick and dying from accessing healthcare is violence. Evicting people from their homes is violence. Depriving the chronically ill and physically disabled of the means of survival because they can’t generate capital for capitalists is violence. Climate change is violence.

The truth is that they deeply fear what we would do if we actually recognized all those things as violence. They do literally everything in their power to prevent us from achieving class consciousness. They have infected literally every single facet of society in an effort to keep us from seeing each other as human.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessities of life, places them in conditions in which they cannot live,—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.