and
Not at all. Liberals and Marxists, indeed any advocate of the state, holds that mostly people cooperate because of socialization--opinion, as Hume put it, consent, in Gramsci's terms. But there are disagreements, conflicts, shirkers, cheaters, violent people. These things require, ultimately, if negotiation doesn't work out, the gun to the head. But that isn't to say that the gun is the only way to enforce cooperation. It's just a necessary condition.
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CB: Ancient society's mode of production would be just as vulnerable to shirkers, cheaters, violent people, yet, for tens of thousands of years custom ( not law backed by the special bodies of armed men which is the state) was sufficient to socialize people to cooperate, to communize for the good of the social whole. There is no reason to believe that people could not be similarly socialized in a society with higher technique, especially if society were truly not exploitative.
Nor would they have to experience this as oppression of the freedom of the individual, once bourgeois consciousness had been dumped on the scrap heap of history.
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2. SPECIAL BODIES OF ARMED MEN, PRISONS, ETC.
Engels continues:
"In contradistinction to the old gentile [tribal or clan] order, the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory."
Such a division seems "natural" to us, but it cost a prolonged struggle against the old form of tribal or gentile society.
"The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special public power is necessary, because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the cleavage into classes. . . . This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed people but also of material adjuncts, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing."
Engels further elucidates the concept the concept of the "power" which is termed the state -- a power which arose from society, but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.
We are justified in speaking of special bodies of armed men, because the public power which is an attribute of every state does not "directly coincide" with the armed population, with its "self-acting armed organization."
Like all great revolutionary thinkers, Engels tries to draw the attention of the class-conscious workers to the very fact which prevailing philistinism regards as least worthy of attention, as the most habitual and sanctified not only by firmly rooted, but one might say by petrified prejudices. A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power. But can it be otherwise?
From the viewpoint of the vast majority of Europeans of the end of the nineteenth century whom Engels was addressing, and who had not lived through or closely observed a single great revolution, it could not be otherwise. They completely failed to understand what a "self-acting armed organization of the population" was. To the question, whence arose the need for special bodies of armed men, placed above society and alienating themselves from it (police and a standing army), the West-European and Russian philistines are inclined to answer with a few phrases borrowed from Spencer or Mikhailovsky, by referring to the growing complexity of social life, the differentiation of functions, and so forth.