Strictly speaking, s/he can't. Without a couple of strategies to compare, an activist insisting on strict practicality has a hard time. Take the confusion of violence with "radical" or "revolutionary." There are plenty of times when violence is used for reform, not for radical change. Think, for example, of Teamsters shooting at Greyhound buses during a strike. Are they using violence to replace capitalist ownership of the company with workers? I don't think so. Or white people lynching black people. Are they campaigning to send blacks back to Africa (a revolutionary change), or to "keep them in their place" (a reform, from their point of view)?

Violence is not the badge of radicalness or revolutionary fervor because it's constantly used for many purposes, including simple self-expression. What makes violence revolutionary is when it plays a role in a strategy for fundamental social change, and that strategy for the 21st century U.S. is something we are still waiting to see.

The strictly pragmatic, hard-boiled, non-moralistic practical revolutionist will want to be able to make a comparison between strategies using armed struggle and strategies using people power, in terms of which strategies are most likely to get us to our vision of a new society. Activists will then be able to argue among various armed strategies and nonviolent strategies.