But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?

That would literally be a capitalist state in every meaningful sense.

keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.

Sorta like a police force of some kind?

It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.

You know what is really fucking organized? A state. It is almost like at the beginning of the country all the large landowners and capitalists got together and made one of those to protect their interests.

You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”

Lol. I am literally asking how your hypothetical system would handle class antagonisms, the primary concern of politics. I am very directly asking “but can you make it work”