HeavenlyPossum
The state and your landlord both extract money (which you can probably only earn through laboring for someone else at their command) under threat of violence.
The state no more provides services than the landlord provides housing. They simply extract through social fictions of sovereignty or ownership, both of which ultimately originated in violent expropriation, and both of which center on control of land you need to live on.
Marcos Dione
@HeavenlyPossum Depends on your state and your landlord?
Here the state provides free healthcare, free education, unemployment benefits, police and firefighters, all roads except highways, affordable and decent public transport, and more. My landlord mostly fixes everything that is broken as long as the law prescribes that they should do it (consumables like lamps are paid by us).
Can you explain a little bit more your concept?
HeavenlyPossum
Q: what’s the difference between a landlord who charges you rent and a state that charges you taxes?
HeavenlyPossum
Nothing! There’s literally no difference. This was a trick question.
HeavenlyPossum
@immibis @abolisyonista @mdione
If the state could include “the anarchist commune,” what precisely would you be anarchisting against?
immibis
HeavenlyPossum
@immibis @abolisyonista @mdione
No, an anarchist commune could not claim a monopoly over force an still claim to be an anarchist commune.
No, this is not the same thing as passivity in the face of aggression.
Cooperative self defense by members of a community against aggression is not a synonym for the exercise of a monopoly over violence by an institution. You can defend yourself, in cooperation with your neighbors, without using violence against your neighbors to enforce your own rule.
HeavenlyPossum
@immibis @abolisyonista @mdione
I rely heavily on Weber’s definition of a state as the institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate* exercise of force in a given territory.
*Legitimate in this sense refers to the likelihood that subordinate authorities will execute the orders of the paramount authority, not a moral judgement.
immibis
immibis
HeavenlyPossum
@mdione @immibis @abolisyonista
Leaders ≠ state
States don’t come organically emerge from voluntary community rules
HeavenlyPossum
@abolisyonista @immibis @mdione
There are societies without leaders.
The existence of leaders does not imply or lead to the formation of states.
immibis
immibis
HeavenlyPossum
@immibis @mdione @abolisyonista
But we know empirically that this isn’t true—people do not axiomatically establish leadership structures or states (of any scale).
immibis
immibis
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