• We never really laid out what it means to be a “State.” Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, and gets into technicalities.

      For Anarchists, the State is a monopoly on violence. Workers having unified horizontal coalitions and equal power, in their eyes, counts as stateless.

      For Marxists, the State is the portion of Government that enforces Classist society. Get rid of class contradictions, and the elements that make up those contradictions, Private Property Rights for example, and you achieve Statelessness, even with a government.

      Using either of the previous definitions, Capitalism still fails to exist without a State, it requires a monopoly of violence and class society to exist.

      • Yeah, so the state is always a problem, from what I can see in your comments. But there can be other bad actors who aren’t government (we see them in every society) and they need to be dealt with one way or another, preferably in a way that the community approves of, and all of a sudden we have laws and government, which is a more general definition of Statehood.

        So what I’m seeing here is that people who seem to think everyone will agree on how things should be done use the name for the group that enforces the rules, good or bad, that other people agree with as an epithet, while studiously ignoring that they will need similar bodies to deal with the bad actors within their society, since the only place where an ideal society exists is in the imagination.

        Not that I have a problem with ideals, they can help provide a road map to get to where you want to be, and perhaps a achievable interim goals that are also worth striving for.