this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Careful, you mention hating the state get everyone riled up. Conservatives, Liberals, Communists, all of them.
Conservatives: "I want a state that exists to brutalize the third world on my behalf and cycle me through anxiety/relief of foreigners/BIPOCs on TV"
Liberals: "I want a state that will subtly extract value from the proletariat so I can gamble on it in the market and kill anyone who resists in an overseas black site."
Communists: "I want a state that will coordinate labor between sectors and preserve the civil rights of citizens under a well-organized and easily navigate-able proletarianized bureacracy."
Lemmy: "I hate these fucking Tankies."
Really, just about anybody that looks to historical examples to inform their perspective.
There are examples of non states working, but it is unclear if it would be possible to maintain large societies.
Non-states or weak states very quickly run into collective action problems which are made significantly worse at large scales. Generally, they work when the material conditions allow for it, for example, the Zapatistas are in rural mountains that nobody really cares that much about. If they happened to be sitting on top of a bunch of oil, then the situation would be quite different.
States are the most effective means of solving collective action problems that currently exist. Even the fundamental goal of keeping people safe from other states cannot be achieved in most cases without some degree of centralization. "I can't go up and defend the pass, I have to stay here and protect my farm." That's what decentralization gets you, and the result is that the enemy, who is solving such collective action problems through the mechanism of a state, is (generally) able to subdue each individual with overwhelming force. But it extends beyond defense, "I can't help build that bridge so we can all trade with our neighbors, I have to tend to my crops or I'll starve." While these problems can be solved on a very small scale, on a local level where people know and trust each other, it generally cannot be scaled up to similar situations beyond that.
:-/
Especially on an ml instance. I'm waiting for some bozo to post Engels' "on authority" again.
ML's explicitly are anti-state and believe it to be in charge of managing irreconcilable class differences so it must be destroyed and replaced with something else. This is written explicitly in Lenin's State and Revolution.
Almost, MLs understand that the state is necessary until class is abolished, so what replaces the bourgeois state is a proletarian state that withers with respect to collectivization of production and distribution. Revolution for MLs doesn't get rid of the state overnight, but creates a new state that cannot but wither.
Tell that to this MoFo.
I've lost count of how many times MLers were trying to school me of how anarchism's end-goal is delusional.
Yeah, I don't identify as a ML I just read books lol. Most people don't
What an insufferable human. Fuck the police and fuck the state.
I do think hating socialist states with the same or worse ferocity that capitalist states get is a serious misjudgement. Administration is necessary for large scale production and distribution, whether you count that as a state or not. Communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society would have no class, but would still have administration.
Lmfao, the consistent dunking on the ml instance has got to be my handsdown favorite meta joke on Lemmy.
And the fact that the upvote to downvote ratio is perfectly split is chef's fucking kiss, hahahahaaa