3 ms·
"The state is the institution or complex of institutions which bases itself on the availability of forcible coercion by special agencies of society in order to
by mtreis86 9y ago
"The state is the institution or complex of institutions which bases itself on the availability of forcible coercion by special agencies of society in order to maintain the dominance of a ruling class, preserve the existing property relations from basic change and keep all other classes in subjection."
Hal Draper
- manofmanysmiles 9y agoThanks, that’s very succinctly put! Besides Hal Draper, what authors would you recommend to further explore this thought? I’m educated as a programmer and only beginning to deliberately explore ideas outside of science and engineering.
- mtreis86 9y agoI have been reading "Strategy: A History" by Lawrence Freedman, and reading the papers and books mentioned in the bibliography as I go.
- jcims 9y agoJust a term you may not have heard before that will lead you towards similar conversations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
- ibeckermayer 9y agoReason and Liberty by Shayne Wissler. It can be downloaded for free online.
- manofmanysmiles 9y agoThanks everyone, I'll do some reading! Maybe I'll even follow up in a month or so. No promises. Replying at the end of the thread because I think that makes the most sense.
- klokoman 9y agoTake a look at anarcho-capitalism and Murray Rothbard. You can find many works of his on mises.org
- musage 9y ago> What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government. -- Noam Chomsky