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Debating the right to exist
(lemmy.ml)
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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."
Especially on an ml instance. I'm waiting for some bozo to post Engels' "on authority" again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think I could chill with Marx¹, he was a shockingly decent guy for the time. Engels was a piece of fucking shit and I'm not reading anything else he wrote.
¹teaboo capitalism-loving steam engine fetishist that he was
Engels' contributions to Marxist theory are critical works, such as Anti-Dühring and On the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and neither him nor Marx by any means loved capitalism. He was crucial to the development of dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, and was Marx's biggest sponsor and comrade.
Then I suppose I will never fully explore Marxist theory. How sad.
Guess not. I agree, it is sad.
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
Really, just about anybody that looks to historical examples to inform their perspective.
Very white take, congratulations.
Only white people have states, yes.
Very disingenuous of you to not recognize white people wielding the state have persecuted indigenous people all over the world.
Yeah and white people have also done that while having teeth so clearly that means we need to knock out all our teeth.
The state has been used to persecute and exploit people because it is an effective means of wielding power, so virtually everyone everywhere uses it, if they can. There's just this silly martyr complex where people would rather lose and get themselves killed in practice, so that they can remain pure in their ideals. I suppose it's useful for winning arguments. Not so much at actually achieving anything.
Is this a bit?
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.