So many different statements here and almost none of them from my blog.
- many of the ideas you advocate for make it stronger
Not so.
The states main sources of power are not it’s health care department or it’s welfare programmes, they are it’s police, it’s military and it’s prisons.
Things like workers rights, minimum wage, stable health care and a basic inalienable income make people stronger, not the state. What these things bring to the power of the state is minimal compared to what it brings to the people.
- Increased taxes
Not something I ever argued for. Although obviously if the state wanted to take money from rich people and put it into better benefits and health care I would not complain. Fuck the rich.
- more welfare means that more people will be dependent on it (I.E unwilling to abolish it)
Untrue. Resistance to authority and the state has always been strongest when the welfare state was strong and people were provided for, and weakest when the welfare state was cut away. Fighting the state takes energy, physically and mentally, which people are best able to commit when they have some basis of security. People become willing to think about abolishing the state when they do not have to worry about things like food, shelter and health. People become desperate for any kind of safety and very willing to support the state when their whole life is a struggle for survival.
- you advocate for health and safety laws/accessibility requirements that only the largest companies can afford
Several mistakes here:
- Small companies are not inherently less evil. Many are just as capable of being terrible.
- The idea that small companies can not afford accessibility requirements or safety laws is fundamentally untrue.
- If we’re not building a better world that’s accessible to all, who are we even building it for?
- How can you oppose something, yet seek to make it ever stronger?
Stripping the state of it’s elements of welfare while keeping the police and military alive doesn’t bring us any closer to smashing the state, it creates a situation where we are brutalized and incarcerated while also being poor, starving and sick. That’s about as far from our goals as we can get.
And I don’t know about you but I care about people. I want them to not be poor, starving and sick. And I wouldn’t expect them to listen to me if I was actively trying to get rid of just those the parts of the state that keep them from being poor, starving and sick, before even building alternatives.
Welfare states with a weak police force and a small military are much better breeding grounds for a real revolution than aggressively neoliberal states with mass incarceration.
Does that mean we should all become social-democrats? Fuck no.
Obviously the state does not offer real solutions. Solutions come when we build our own organisations that can feed, house and provide health care to all. But we do not have the energy to do that when we are starving, dying and rotting in prisons. Abolishing the complete welfare part of the state can only take place after we’ve build real functioning alternatives. I am not prepared to sacrifice the sick and poor for the sake of a utopia and I believe any attempt to justify that is very very far from anarchism and doomed to fail.
