>>2872836>power must ultimately be maintained through the application of violenceNot necessarily. Direct violence is always the last resort.
>Am i more powerful than a dictator if i shoot them with a gun until they're dead?Well, this concerns general arguments about "legitimacy". What is the mechanism which transfers power? In an assassination, a leader is killed, but power is not transferred to the assassin, while in a revolution, the murderers become the new leaders by right - the same pretext as a "right to the throne" which initiated wars, like the Battle of Hastings. So, as per the saying, you can "kill the man", but not "the idea". Power is in "the idea", therefore, not the man, the same way God as an idea is powerful because God is not present.
>can power be wielded as a tool for goodAll power must be justified, and so power always serves good - but only an exclusive good. So this is a larger debate about morality, but in politics, goodness is often seen as class interest.
>produce a constant cycle of abuse of it in order to maintain power?Well, that is the ancient opinion in people like Plato, Aristotle and Polybius, that politics is a cycle of violence (e.g. Monarchy, Oligarchy, Democracy, etc.) which has no resolution. These opinions certainly seem valid given the history of politics, where no permanent state has ever been maintained, due to contradictions within and without. Realists of political violence are people like Hobbes and Locke who see that the social contract is a temporary peace treaty between self-interested parties. Peace can exist, but not forever, and so the social contract is broken by a means of war. Heraclitus believed that all things in nature were at war, and if this is so, then power is simply a cycle of abuse - projected onto life as a whole, this becomes Darwinism. I personally have a mutualist view of nature - not because I think all things can exist in peace, but that there is clearly an ecological equilibrium at play, otherwise life would have already destroyed itself.