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.