A short critique of pacifism

One benefit of the slow popularization of dialectical understanding is that fewer and fewer people are naive enough to go on claiming that living in a democracy means that they are free. We know that we are not. What passes for freedom is, we know only too well, a condition of relative civil liberation based on and expressed principally through the free consumption of commodities; the sham forms of political enfranchisement attendant on that free consumption are possible for us only because they are impossible for the masses of people who spend their lives in poverty and misery working to produce the commodities that we pick and choose. As popular political understanding becomes more dialectical, this fact becomes more and more obvious.