Marx of course understood the dictatorship of capital and the nature of revolution as a violent affair. That Mao quote is abused as a thought-terminating cliche to be honest. He is referring to the fact that if you want to change a system systemically you need tools like guns, if you’re going to be a revolutionary, if you’re going to fight imperialists, you need guns. If you’re going to retain your independence against encroachment and attempts at overthrow by capitalist forces, you need guns. But those are largely affairs of the revolution and external defense. Internally Mao absolutely agreed with Marx on political authority and legitimacy of the party through its connection to the workers, which Mao phrased as the Mass Line. So in this way there would be agreement in a sense with Rousseau’s line (and Marx’s) here though there was a lot more to it from Rousseau obviously and I’m not trying to say Mao or Marx’s thought derives from Rousseau at all.

This cartoon is kind of all over the place. For the first 4 panels it features thinkers, philosophers stating how things -should- be run in their thinking to create a society, not necessarily how things were run in their time but how they should be. Then suddenly in the last two panels it goes from proposals for how to structure society to analysis of how society exists or is seen to exist at a given point in time and how its authority is derived.