> [Corey writes...]
>
> If the state did not exist, capital would not have any means of violence
> at its disposal to defend itself. Therefore capital wouldn't exist. Now
> if they mean all the sophisticated modern instruments of derivatives,
> central banking, and all the rest, fine. But if we think of this in a much
> more primitive sense of control over material resources, why do they think
> that? Why wouldn't the situation be one in which someone or some group has
> a set of resources -- minerals, food, whatever -- and a goon squad to
> defend it? Why do these people, in other words, assume that without a
> state, capital -- or the controller of resources -- wouldn't have other
> means at his/her/their disposal to protect those resources? It's almost as
> if the anarchist presumes that without the state, capital would be much
> more vulnerable to the organized cry and violence (or maybe non-violence0
> of the masses, where I would assume just the opposite (and everything we
> know about societies where the state c!
> rumbles tells me I'm right): you'd have a situation of warlords in which
> people would be even more vulnerable.
>
> Your thoughts?
>
>
No anarchist, I but... it strikes me as possible that at least some
anarchists see the state and capital as sufficiently intertwined that a
well-/self-organized network of alternative collectives that throws of the
yolk of the state simultaneously undermines the/a key political pillar/leg
in (something like) the three-legged stool of capitalism (I'm not now
prepared to say exactly what the other two plllars/legs would be).
Myself, I can't imagine how anyone can write as if capital and the state are meaningfully empirically distinct phenomena, anymore than how these two relations/forms could be conceived of as distinct from technoscience, naturecultures, etc. Just about the whole discussion - on all sides - has treated the state and capital as if they were things rather than relations and that has seriously constrained the character ofd the discussion... or so it has seemed to me from here.
I thought a key element of Marx's analysis was that a predicate of capital - the relation - was the violence of the state's role in the myriad alienations embedded in the manufacture of private property/social labor.
Furthermore, following on Jim O'Connor's work in the 90s, since the rise of capital, the state has mediated capital's access to what Jim took to calling the ecological, personal and communal conditions of production, which are labor's (our) conditions of life. Without the state private property becomes deregulated and the reliable reproduction of ecological conditions treated like natural resources, personal conditions treated like labor power and communal conditions treated like productive infrastructures collapses. This might present opportunities to well-/self-organized groups to generate new patterns of the production of natures, people and communities... but unless that organization/those groups are really engaged in movement, it is more likely to produce barbarism...
My apologies to Carrol Cox for writing speculatively outside of direct engagement in and with actual/lived movement/s.