Electoral politics doesn't get the job done

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Police brutality against the working class tends to make sympathists of onlookers, activists of sympathists, militants of activists and radical militants of ordinary militants.

So, one could only hope. They usually go this route, and then we have legendary responses like the French Résistance , or for that matter, the French Revolution.

Except in the twenty-first century, we get to record the brutality and fighting on video so the public can be inspired.

So until the general public is out numbered and outgunned by AI-commanded armies of swarming killer robots (a near future possibility), brutality by the state is always to the advantage of the movement, even if it doesn't go so well for the individuals who perish in the conflict. Mahsa Amini never got to enjoy the uprising she started (and ended with negotiation) in Iran, and that's a crying shame.

It says right there in the COIN manual (a running treatise of counter-insurgency in development for centuries) that you don't brutalize the protestors, but have to capture hearts and minds, and also respond with good governance. And curiously, every autocratic despot seems to refuse to try this.