Property & The State

And, if by "state" one means an entity that claims sovereign authority over a certain area or group, and enforces such authority with violence, then no, such an entity could never abolish private property. I say this because, the state that forms to lead the working class is never made up of the entirety of the working class. It is made up of a political class claiming to act on behalf of the working class. Yet, as they come to manage the resources they take from the private sector (which is a necessity if they are to maintain their sovereign authority) this political class becomes the new ruling and owning class. They become the new bosses and owners that everyone else is coerced into working for, obeying and serving.

What if all property is owned in common by the working class and the state merely acts as an enforcer of the new laws as dictated by the people themselves? Just as the current bourgeois state does not own all the land it claims authority over, it is divided among individual members of the bourgeois, why is it not possible for the working class to have ownership over all the land while having a separate state to enforce its claim to such ownership?

And, again, the reason they have to put this property under state control instead of allowing communities and workers to directly manage it, is that allowing direct management will mean the sovereign authority of the state won't be able to maintain control of the communities and individuals they feel the need and right to rule.

What if abolition of the state under the wrong circumstances led to the defeat of the revolution at the hands of foreign states?

So, since political power over an area or group is impossible without economic power over them (and vice versa), the state will always feel the need to control the material resources people depend on in order to maintain control over the people they claim to represent.

I feel this is a rather ahistorical way of looking at something, as if a certain form of organisation always breeds the same results. If we are to look at the world through the same lens then we can argue that unions always lead to reconciliation with the bourgeois thus making unions counter revolutionary yet there are very strong currents within the anarchist movement that hold that unions are important struggles against capitalism. How would you reconcile such seemingly contradictory positions?

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