I think such speculation is premature by at least several generations. If we’re lucky we’ll have planted seeds for a fruit we’ll never see ourselves. Personally, I’m not even attempting to aim for an end-goal of statelessness.
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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GenZedong
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Yes exactly right comrade, the one of the many ways it might happen is when capitalism as a whole is suppressed completely. We are fighting for the most part to implement a socialist state, and once we do that, as far and wide as we can, we can start to think about the withering of such states.
The state is a tool wielded by one class, the ruling class, to oppress an other, to keep the other class away from power and from means to take power. Under socialism, it's the proletariat who is the ruling class, it's the dictatorship of the proletariat. The remaining bourgeois after the revolution are stripped of their private properties and political power, maybe even of their personal wealth if need be.
In this state of affaire, the bourgeoisie canot continue their accumulation of wealth and are left only with what they had already accumulated, if it was not confiscated, being unable to continue to extract surplus value, their only choice is to either live of whatever wealth they have left without working or start working.
Either way, in this situation, the bourgeoisie as a class start slowly but surely vanishing, at the start the bitter dispossessed bourgeois will try everything in their power to get back their power and privileges, but as time passes, as the proletarianized bourgeois and their descendant get used to live as worker in a proletarian society, as the schools teach proletarian values, as the culture is cleansed of it's bourgeois influence and as standards of living start rising uniformly, the "bourgeois mentality" will die out on it's own. "We already live well, every necessity is free and everything we might want is affordable, why should we risk so much for the faint hope of getting back those untold riches you say you used to possess?" Their children will say.
And by this process, the bourgeois will one by one become proletarians until the bourgeois class finally disappear, and with it, classes as a whole will disappear.
Like said at the beginning, the point of the state is to oppress one class on behalf of an other, therefore, with the disparition of classes, the state stop having a purpose, and without purpose, all it's means of oppression (military, police, prisons, etc...), now useless, are dropped, and like this, the state dies, leaving in it's wake a simple administrative body without any means of oppression.
This is what I understand about the withering of the state based on my still very limited understanding of theory, if someone more knowledgeable sees this, please let me know what you think of my explanation ^^.
This, more or less. Class oppression will disappear, which eliminates the state by definition. Some kind of governance/administration will still exist, and central planning will likely still exist, but all operations of the "government" (whatever form it takes) will be transparent and everyone involved will be subject to constant public scrutiny and the risk of replacement if they're ineffective. Some kind of law enforcement will also likely still exist, with similar transparency and democratic control
Only after achieving an international state free of reactionary *logies can the state begin to wither away imo.
yes, it's extremely unlikely to happen before imperialism has been eradicated
no that sums it up pretty nicely, thank you for your contribution!
It will not be a withering. It will die screaming, burning, and dragging its subjects of empire into Hell with it. I pray my death comes soon. I don't want to exist in such proximity to the fascist ghouls that I was born mired in the land of. I don't even want my bones to rot in proximity to them, for fear of being mistaken for one when it's far too late to defend those remains.
They killed anything close to actual leaders we once had, and supplanted them with misleader puppets. We are still slaves, sharecroppers, and victims of lynching; the only thing that's changed is the methods in which the crackers pull it off. My rage will inevitably overtake me one day and I almost ache for it to happen at this point.
Speaking as a person of color myself, I totally understand what you feel, and I know there isn't a magic answer, but I implore you, please don't give up. You being alive is a good start. I want you to live to see the crackers get put in the dirt.
This isn't what is meant by the death of the state. The death of the state needs a world in which the great battles are already won, a world that is completely socialist and has rid itself of all reactionary elements, to even be imaginable. As long as there is even a speck of reactionary ideology left on the planet, there needs to be a proletarian state to mop that shit up. But once that has been dealt with and the generations go by until a time when capitalism can only be studied from a history book, the people and hence the organs of the state will be less and less influenced by the declining necessity for class struggle and resume normal life.
This will look like officers being dismissed from the people's police and the armed forces bit by bit, or adopting a style of work that no longer involves suppression. Perhaps the most logical development would be cops joining the firefighters or medical emergency response since these institutions tend to be grouped together already, and soldiers becoming some sort of standing response force against natural disasters, as we already have seen the PLA do temporarily during floods or coronavirus outbreaks.
While these developments seem natural, it is less obvious what would happen with those who served the proletarian state in bureaucratic or managerial positions. I suppose these people would need to undergo retraining or retire early. If China's recent interior policies are any indication, we ought to expect that there will emerge a great surge in the demand for scientific, engineering, and medical work as well as rural revitalisation, so I would expect such people to be pushed in these directions. But then again, we cannot reasonably expect to grasp the concrete policies of a world whose economic, philosophical, and political principles are bizarre and incomprehensible to the mind under capitalism.
If you look at the state as a unit of coercion that uses violent and nonviolent means to enforce and perpetuate class disparities, you can concieve of the state as something that can be separated from governance. It is possible that the state withering away means the withering away of brutal police forces and military, intelligence agencies, war industry and so on while governance still continues to exist in a more democratic fashion.
It's hard to say what things will look like that far into the future but I think structures like national central governments will continue to exist. They could cede significantly authority to provincial governments.
I should hope to have such problems as this someday!
true, a stage where that is widely debated would be one without capitalism and worldwide socialism. A glorious world.
It'll go like the ancient Roman empire and everything else preceding it; so slowly that it won't be noticed until an invading status quo steps in an brushes it aside (not necessarily by force).
Like ancient civilizations; no one will realize it had passed until several centuries later when people try to understand what it was like back then.
Your guess is as good as mine