The State

Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class-the bourgeoisie-use cultural institutions to maintain wealth and power in capitalist societies.

Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory.

His best-known work, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, retells the historical rise of state domination (and domination generally) through a poetic investigation of the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan.

His major works, including Skepsis und Mystik (Skepticism and Mysticism, 1903) and Aufruf zum Sozialismus (Call to Socialism, 1911), articulated his view that the state is not an institution to be violently overthrown but a social relationship that can be replaced by creating new, voluntary forms of community.

Panitch was the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and nine books including Working-Class Politics in Crisis: Essays on Labour and the State (1986), The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour (2001), and Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination (2008) in which he argued that capitalism is inherently unjust and undemocratic.

From 1870 until his death in 1876, Bakunin wrote his longer works such as Statism and Anarchy and God and the State, but he continued to directly participate in European worker and peasant movements.

Society Against the State (La Société contre l'État. Recherches d'anthropologie politique), 1974

He published several books on Marxist theory and the criticism of capitalism, such as Parliamentary Socialism (1961), The State in Capitalist Society (1969), and Marxism and Politics (1977), and he edited the Writings of the Left series (Jonathan Cape and Grove Press, 1972-1973).

For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of individual and collective empowerment.

the literature on developmental states had unduly ignored the constraints that class power imposed on state-building

There, Lenin began work on the book that became The State and Revolution, an exposition on how he believed the proletarian state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on the state would gradually wither away, leaving a pure communist society.

" Spencer argued that the state is not an "essential" institution and that it will "decay" as a voluntary market organisation comes to replace the coercive aspects of the state.

She is also the founder of the Science and Democracy Network, a group of scholars interested in the study of science and the state in democratic societies that has met annually since 2002.

According to Habermas, a variety of factors resulted in the eventual decay of the public sphere, including the growth of a commercial mass media, which turned the critical public into a passive consumer public; and the welfare state, which merged the state with society so thoroughly that the public sphere was squeezed out.

This ethical socialism has been described as part of the liberal socialist tradition which is for egalitarianism and free markets, with Proudhon, among other anarchists, taking "a commitment to narrow down the sphere of activity of the state".

But under system of a free market without state monopolies and privileges, which he believed to, among others, prevent zero-interest loans from being accessible to the workers, the capitalists would have a right to suppress aggressive strikers.

Goldman was a committed war resister and was particularly opposed to the draft, viewing it as one of the worst of the state's forms of coercion, and was one of the founders of the No-Conscription League for which she was ultimately arrested and imprisoned in 1917 before being deported in 1919.

Thus, Kropotkin wrote that maintaining the state would paralyze any true social revolution, making the idea of a "revolutionary government" a contradiction in terms:

Parvus was the primary author of the "Financial Manifesto" of December 1905, which urged citizens to undermine the state by withdrawing their deposits from banks in gold.

This involves the simultaneous destruction of the state, wage labour, and the proletariat's own existence as a class.

A dictatorship does not aim for the destruction and absorption of society, and a dictatorial power is a power of the state against society, that presupposes the distinction of the two; the plan of a totalitarian party is to merge state with society in a closed, united and uniform system, subordinated under the fulfilment of a plan, "socialism" in the case of the USSR.

He defended the principles of revolutionary spontaneity, autonomy, diversity, self-determination and direct action, and advocated for the violent overthrow of the state and capitalism through propaganda of the deed.

According to Tilly, through war-making the state is able to monopolize physical violence, enabling the state to title any other entity practicing violence as unlawful.

What I aim to show is that if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle.