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I appreciate that you took the time to explain, and I also regret asking for it and reading it.

Completely fair.

The material outcome is worse than spitting in the faces of the surviving victims and pissing on the graves of the dead.

Would you like to elaborate? Contrary to stereotypes regarding Marxists, appending the word "material" to something does not make me approve of the statement.

And fuck you

Thanks

Maladaptive, certainly,

You can replace the noun with whatever you want because fundamentally the part that mattered to my argument is that it is maladaptive. This means that it is a coping mechanism that is overall detrimental to their health and also not fundamental to them. Whatever exercising of violence for the sake of satisfaction is called, it seems we agree that it fails to close wounds but in my view what you are failing to acknowledge is that this attitude is itself a wound on the minds of some subset of people psychologically traumatized by violence, hence it being maladaptive, and contrary to what you say I don't think it's true that even that wound is closed merely because the person who hurt them has been skinned alive or whatever deed inflicts enough pain to "satisfy" them, but rather it just proceduralizes the maladaption.

I didn't want to go on for even longer than I already was, but the specific story from Blowback that I was thinking of was not some revolutionary "hero" dictating procedure to survivors of colonial violence, it was the story of a victim himself, who had been captured and treated brutally and then later found himself helping to run a prison back on the communist side and eventually one of his former captors wound up under his watch. I'm not arguing from him being some faultless figure who we agree we need to emulate generally and therefore need to emulate here, but rather trying to show how these rituals of traumatizing and killing are not actually fundamental to how people relate to the world, each other, or themselves, and with a number of tools such as education and therapy we can encourage alternatives, though I obviously think that trying to get the entire population on the same page here is fundamentally much less important in a wartime scenario than winning the war, so if there are pointless floggings here and there, it's not something to really worry about. China's land reform was a good example of this, with no shortage of grassroots flogging initiatives because trying to mitigate such things really wasn't feasible. However, the goal was land reform, not flogging, and the allowance of flogging was a means to an end that was not universally applied.

Incidentally, the Cultural Revolution also gives us examples of pitfalls in leaving it to whoever so chooses among the working class to be judge, jury, and executioner, even if the bigger problem was the conservative faction and also there were merits that usually get glossed over. It was still a serious problem how frequently things devolved into blood feuds, among other problems.

Bring our loved ones back, heal them and us, pay reparations, and we'll no longer want (need) vengeance.

In a way, we partially agree, because you cite healing and reparations as an alternative to vengeance, though I know it's basically just a byproduct of a rhetorical flourish. As far as reparations, I think you'll have a much easier time getting someone to pay with labor than with blood, the latter of which isn't that valuable.

But also, while the original context of the argument appears to have mostly been left by the wayside (which is fine), I again need to point out that the option very concretely isn't always "Do you let this asshole live for the sake of it or do you kill him for 'grim satisfaction'?" Sometimes it's a choice between getting a strategic benefit or getting 'grim satisfaction' and my argument is in large part that the strategic benefit (if there is one) is almost always preferable. Again, I'm not actually arguing for universal mercy for the sake of mercy, I'm arguing for selective "mercy" (I don't agree with the concept but whatever) for the sake of practical benefit.

Ok. I'm cherry picking, but didn't Marx say these?

Marx said a lot of shit, though your first quote is not relevant in my view. I'm talking about Marxism as an analytical framework rather than citing Marx as a prophet whose every statement must be taken as fundamental truth. That said, I'm happy to try and discuss the other quote if you want, and I may as well post a little bit of the context for others, though you surely know it yourself.

I think in some respects this mirrors what I said above about practical organizing benefits, and otherwise he's probably overstating his case a little. If someone is bothered every minute of the day by a building having not been burned down, I generally am inclined to think that the person needs help but that help is not in the form of burning the building down (though of course some hated building being burned should by no means be a chief fear of organizers in the situation Marx describes, as I've said). Certainly I agree it would be a strategic error to merely let hated bourgeoisie and their dogs run free, generally speaking, but that also doesn't mean torturing or killing them when you have the means to imprison them securely.

Also, perhaps I should have mentioned this sooner, but I think that I should also acknowledge that "what the vanguard should agitate for" and "what a proletarian state should do at a given time" are often not the same thing. It is important for a vanguard to try to raise consciousness, but it's necessary for the DotP to actually be a DotP and therefore be democratically responsive, so if popular opinion at a given time opposes what the vanguard is saying, the policy should follow popular opinion even if you were to think that the vanguard is "correct" in some sense. The goal is to work toward a better future, which can only be accomplished with the agreement of the majority, and if some extra petite-bourgs get trampled in that process I'm not losing sleep over it.