An anarchist can believe that the modern liberal state is necessary for really-existing
capitalism to be established and perpetuated. An anarchist can believe that the modern
liberal state is not necessary for the establishment and perpetuation of a libertarian
socialist commonwealth republic.  There are socialists who believe that the modern
liberal state must first be commandeered by the industrial proletariat, and that a proletarian
state must be instituted in the place of the commandeered liberal state. These are marxist
socialists, who believe that the capitalist state must be actively captured by the proletariat,
or that the organized machinery of authoritarian and dictatorial state power must actually
be toppled and eradicated by the proletariat. In other words, marxist socialists believe that
the modern liberal-capitalist state must be conquered, revolutionized, and terminated.
Marxists believe that the modern liberal-capitalist state will not wither away, that it is the
proletarian state that will eventually wither away. Which is to say that every marxist socialist
believes that anarchism is the final outcome, that anarchism will be the best of all possible
future end-products of human effort and achievement.

Of course, there are the bakuninist anarcho-communists, who advocate anarcho-
communism as the best of all possible and attainable human creations; but, the
bakuninist socialists believe that the modern liberal-capitalist state must be
violently abolished, and that we can immediately go from a statist régime to an anarchist
arrangement without the necessary mediation of a transitional state -- i.e., without what
the marxists believe to be the unavoidable and needed dictatorship of the proletariat.
Both Marx and Bakunin were anarchists; but, Marx believed that another state -- an other-
than-bourgeois-liberal-state -- was needed to mediate a workable and successful transition
from the existing capitalist state to a future anarchist society. On this very important
theoretical issue, Mikhail Bakunin very strongly disagreed with Karl Marx.

I tend to agree with Marx, that because the modern liberal-capitalist state exists, a
transitional and dictatorial proletarian state must be created, in order that the state will
be able to wither away. A proletarian state would be a majoritarian state; and as a
democratic state, it must eventually wither away, because a democratic state is itself
a contradiction, and must, sooner or later, become uselessly unnecessary and thus
dispensable. But, I also believe that we must needs be fully aware of Bakunin's very
reasonable scepticism -- his suspicion of Marx's proletarian dictatorship as a temporary
and transitional form of the state.





I do not advocate a legislated banning wage contracts; rather, I believe that in a
successful future socialist arrangement, wage contracts will simply wither away.





Knowledge does not always have to mean acceptance of what is, or a belief that what is
real today is what is natural, necessary and/or constant.





The laborer wants to sell his or her labor only because a wage contract is the only legal
access that a propertyless worker can have to some means of livelihood. The laborer
must sell his or her labor for a wage because the existing means of production are
someone else's legal private property. The worker's freedom is restricted and reduced
by the existence of private property in the means of industrial production, in the physical
means of personal livelihood.





Each and every person owns their own productive and creative labor power; and each
and every person owes their own labor as the moral means of earning what they need.




To believe that money stores value is to believe in a mystical myth. We do not need money;
we need what money can buy. We do not eat money. We need money only because our
labor is paid with money, or our property generates an income; and we then must use this
money, this income, to buy what we truly need.





Free exchange is both a money-free and a market-free exchange.  We can govern
ourselves without money. Money is a human invention. We can live fully and freely
without that artificial creation called "money".





In a commodity-producing economy, every good is produced for the market; in a
non-commodity form of economy, the surplus product alone is traded for the surplus
product of another community, or of another cooperative.





There are plenty of examples of people working productively, but earning no pecuniary
income from the work. If I work at home, then I am not selling my labor for a wage. When
I do volunteer work, I simply am not working for a wage. etc.  When parents care for and
teach their children, this is productive labor, but it is not wage labor.





Commodity exchange is generalized production for the purpose of selling the product
on the market.  Surplus exchange is not the generalized production of goods for the
purpose of selling the product on the market.





Freedom cannot be a choice between either poverty or prosperity.





"The Civil War was really a war between Charleston and Boston."
-- Anonymous