>And I should add that "strong-ish" means a state that's not corrupt, strong enough politically to enforce its own rules via police action, and ethical enough t

>And I should add that "strong-ish" means a state that's not corrupt, strong enough politically to enforce its own rules via police action, and ethical enough to attract popular support. I don't think these things can be quantified, so people corrupting the system, or gaming the laws can always argue about whether or not the state is "strong-ish" enough. Yeah, I was really surprised to see this piece was published in May 2020 without any notes of the major shifts in partisan politics of the past few years. For instance, one wouldn't critique the Left today for being too decentralized or libertarian-municipalist. One would critique the Left today for being, essentially, the interests of the neo-feudal "center" wrapped up in moral language, with a social base that tilts far more educated, metropolitan, and white-collar than the rest of the population. And then, of course, there's ignoring the elephants in the room: Trumpian right-wing nationalist populism, and COVID-19. Both have pushed official politics in a direction of greater "state capacity", and the former is explicitly rooted in the identity and interests of the neo-feudal "hinterland" being asserted against those of the "center". Like Marx pointing out the falling rate of profit, I think you've hit on the contradiction in this "neo-feudalism": the networked metropole of "global cities" has to be maintained, militarily and infrastructurally, by nation-states that give people in the "hinterlands" a vote, often a vote that "weighs more" than that of the people in the "centers". Insofar as a company like Facebook or Google props up the San Francisco real-estate industry, that's great, and they can even worm their way around paying California taxes by various clever means. But an electoral revolt from the "hinterlands" so severe that both major parties now put up candidates and platforms centered around telling the "centers" (ie: San Francisco) that they're a bunch of loony extremists who need to be brought to heel? That's a political problem for neo-feudalism.