Anarchists, what's your definition of the state and why do you disagree with the Marxist one?

Anarchists, what's your definition of the state and why do you disagree with the Marxist one?

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marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch14.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
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Trash bins.

Tough to answer, in general though a state is any organization of people which is given an authority to exert force and violence on the people and land it lays claim to.
I don't disagree with classical Marxism on the use of a DotP, but I believe such an organization must be as democratic as possible and exist largely to protect people and maintain society and not exert violence on the people unless completely justified. This becomes tricky because such justification is difficult to determine.
But not all anarchists are anti organization and thus I don't necessarily have an issue with the DotP, I just worry about how much power it is given and fear ML style vanguardism

State is the monopoly of violence.

The thing about the DotP is that it is not supposed to be democratic and participatory for all people. It's supposed to surpress the capitalists, the same way liberal democracy surpresses the workers. I know you would never get along with it but you should watch Finnish Bolsheviks video about the Soviet election system and system of governance:

youtu.be/9PoYzPfguJc

A centralised body which overrules other organisational bodies by common consent or by force

I see. From reading Marx I got the impression that the DotP was supposed to be the organization by which the working class facilitates the transition to communism. The way I saw it, the proletariat represents the vast majority of the population anyway, so even if capitalists were allowed to participate they'd be no better for it. With the DotP they'd have to seize the media by force and liberate it from the capitalist class to educate the populace in a more truthful manner than we are now, to avoid the issues we witness in regard to media under our current perversion of democracy.
To be honest tho I have read much Marx that speaks on the character of the DotP and the transition phase, most I've seen it mentioned is in the manifesto. Where does he speak on this more? Virtually everything I've read by him is his analysis of capitalism

Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not, if only because of the confusion that surrounds the two words.

. . . Politics is not statecraft, and citizens are not "constituents" or "taxpayers." Statecraft consists of operations that engage the state: the exercise of its monopoly of violence, its control of the entire regulative apparatus of society in the form of legal and ordinance-making bodies, and its governance of society by means of professional legislators, armies, police forces, and bureaucracies. Statecraft takes on a political patina when so-called "political parties" attempt, in various power plays, to occupy the offices that make state policy and execute it. This kind of "politics" has an almost tedious typicality. A "political party" is normally a structured hierarchy, fleshed out by a membership that functions in a top-down manner. It is a miniature state, and in some countries, such as the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a party actually constituted the state itself.

The Soviet and Nazi examples of the party qua state were the logical extension of the party into the state. Indeed, every party has its roots in the state, not in the citizenry. The conventional party is hitched to the state like a garment to a mannikin. However varied the garment and its design may be, it is not part of the body politic; it merely drapes it. There is nothing authentically political about this phenomenon: it is meant precisely to contain the body politic, to control it and to manipulate it, not to express its will–or even permit it to develop a will. In no sense is a conventional "political" party derivative of the body politic or constituted by it. Leaving metaphors aside, "political" parties are replications of the state when they are out of power and are often synonymous with the state when they are in power. They are formed to mobilize, to command, to acquire power, and to rule. Thus they are as inorganic as the state itself–an excrescence of society that has no real roots in it, no responsiveness to it beyond the needs of faction, power, and mobilization.

Politics, by contrast, is an organic phenomenon. It is organic in the very real sense that it is the activity of a public body–a community, if you will–just as the process of flowering is an organic activity of a plant. Politics, conceived as an activity, involves rational discourse, public empowerment, the exercise of practical reason, and its realization in a shared, indeed participatory, activity. It is the sphere of societal life beyond the family and the personal needs of the individual that still retains the intimacy, involvement, and sense of responsibility enjoyed in private arenas of life. Groups may form to advance specific political views and programs, but these views and programs are no better than their capacity to answer to the needs of an active public body. . . .

By contrast, political movements, in their authentic sense, emerge out of the body politic itself, and although their programs are formulated by theorists, they also emerge from the lived experiences and traditions of the public itself. The populist movements that swept out of agrarian America and tsarist Russia or the anarcho-syndicalist and peasant movements of Spain and Mexico articulated deeply felt, albeit often unconscious, public desires and needs. At their best, genuine political movements bring to consciousness the subterranean aspirations of discontented people and eventually turn this consciousness into political cultures that give coherence to inchoate and formless public desires. . . . - Bookchin

and I disagree with the Marxist one not because its wrong but because it isn't broad enough. It is true, the state is tool for one class to oppress the other, but a state is other things besides this.

Read The State and Revolution. It's full of long quotes by Marx and Engels, and then Lenin sort of repeating and expanding upon what they're saying. It's very focused on this one question of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat, so I think it might be the best thing to read if you're interested in that, even though it's not written by Marx himself.

That's what I figured. I will read it, kinda sucks tho that the majority of work in regard to this concept is second hand. Wanna hear it from the man himself but it seems it wasn't his focus.

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Which of his works is that from? I don't remember that quote

The New Municipal Agenda
dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/libmuni.html

I think the only time when Marx described what could be a DotP was in the Critique of the Gotha Program. Arround the mid-19th century, the word "dictatorship" wasn't necessarily used to describe an autocracy, but rather how the Romans used it: A transitional, limited period of time where a single or few indivuals are being equipped unusual competences. Maybe Friedrich Engels has more to say about that in "On Authority" and "Anti-Dühring":
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch14.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

The Marxist-Leninists development of the DotP is more systematic and detailed, for that you can only read Lenin.

Marx died before I could go more into detail about this. He spent half his life critisizing capitalism which took up more time than he thought. He literally told Engels a decade before he released capital that "in three years, I'm finally done with this economic shit".


Capitalist relations are abstract, they are not tied to the legal institution of private property, Yugoslavia had many capitalists

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Thank you famalam another one to read

I know he didn't mean dictatorship in the way we typically think, though I do know use of that word does tend to spook some anarchists. Thank u for the reading recommendations though from Engels. Definitiely need to check those out

Where did the idea that anarchists are opposed to statism originate? What strains of anarchism could've possibly inspired this misconception? If such people exist, what exactly is their ideology?

Every form of anarchism I'm aware of has some form of state, differing from non-anarchist ideologies in its lacking fixed individual hierarchy of the sort that breeds authoritarianism.

All power to the soviets.

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