No

Yes, but there are bosses right now. And they would still be very powerful, even if they lost control of the state. They don’t care about what’s best for everyone. They care about what’s best for them. They would still control all those machines, institutions, money, private armies, the media and they would have the total support of all the capitalist militaries of the world, ready to come in and completely crush horizontal power and suppress mutualism. So the class of bosses wouldn’t magically disappear over night.

If people organized (either “horizontally” or otherwise) to form some thing, some kind of organization or institution or loose federation of grassroots cooperatives or whatever you want to call it, that would be able to suppress this boss class and their military and everything. That thing would be what marxist leninists call a state by definition. Because when we talk about a state, we mean nothing more or less than a weapon able to force the will of one class upon another. Even if that will is just:“stop forcing your will on us non-bosses”. How horizontal it is internally dosn’t matter at all for the definition of a state.

materially, socialist states tend to be much better to workers. straight up, it isn’t even a contest.

as a communist i agree that in an ideal world the state should not exist. as a third worlder, i doubt we can defend ourselves against the burgeoise and imperialism without it in the real world. history shows it pretty clearly over here. maybe westerners can have straight up communism, we don’t have that luxury.

that said, i understand why countries like china are overzealous with censorship because when you give too much leeway to them, they will worm their way into people’s heads out of the sheer amount of resources dedicated to pushing anticommunism.

also when i look into most anarchists i meet here, it’s usually just ancaps or libs.

The basis of the state is class struggle, so to eliminate it you eliminate class. The basis of class is differences in relation to the means of production, so the answer is to collectivize all production. Until we get there, classes will remain, thus elements like police are necessary to keep the proletariat in control and capitalists oppressed, and as production and distribution collectivizes then so too will the basis of the state itself become unnecessary as class struggle fades alongside class itself.

It isn’t by magic, it’s based in sound analysis of socialism and the economic basis of class and the state itself.

From here

Once the proletarian state possesses political power and controls the means of production, it will “wither away” over time as it suppresses the bourgeoisie and moves toward a classless society. While the state must exist while class distinctions remain, it becomes superfluous in a classless society. The use of force is no longer necessary to suppress class antagonisms, because there are no classes. Lenin includes a long quote from Engels to explain this phenomenon, a portion of which is sampled below:

As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’. It withers away. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase ‘a free people’s state’, both as to its justifiable use for a long time from an agitational point of view, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the so-called anarchists’ demand that the state be abolished overnight.” (From Anti-Düring)

If you agree with the premises behind this argument, the conclusion must follow. If the state arises from class antagonisms in society and exists for the purpose of class suppression, it must therefore exist while there are classes (even during a proletarian revolution!) and start to die off once class is abolished. Engels’ description, “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production,” explains the change in the nature of the State very well. Lenin points out that under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the State is no longer “the State” proper, but a different kind of institution altogether.

anarchist:

just got to wait for the capitalist state to whither away

socialist state:

so I guess we agree?

But the state is my enemy.

Do you want to go back to hunting gathering? Anything further will inevitably create the classes.

Yes, but it was also based on hunting and gathering. The state arose alongside technological improvements in production creating class society, we can’t just look to early communalism and use it as the bedrock for future society.

Not at all. The Spanish revolutionaries were communists. Some in the communist party, but even the Spanish anarchists called what they fought for “libertarian communism”.