Those who advocate for a world liberated from the monopoly of the state lack the historical sense and the intellectual rigor needed to comprehend that said monopoly has enabled all of the things that such people cherish, from bourgeois society to open markets. For that which existed prior to the bourgeois republics that have come be the dominant paradigm of the contemporary world and which inevitably led to the development of these republics was precisely the private ownership of the means of not only production, but of existence itself, which was in turn the result of fortunate, aggressive and opportunistic individuals who through organized violence and the imprimatur of organized religion dominated humanity, thereby curtailing the latent power of every individual to create its own reality.
It is precisely the existence of the modern nation-state which, through the judicious application of the rule of law, the guaranteeing of currency, the mediation of contracts between various parties, and the threat of punishment as a means of enforcing all of these prerogatives, sanctions and protects private enterprise and the markets on which they depend. The modern, bourgeois nation-state and private industry are one and the same, interchangeable and co-dependent. In fact, if one observes the historical transition from feudalism to the modern state, it immediately becomes clear that it was the slow, creeping development of mercantilism and the manufacturing guilds that created the modern state, with its underlying tensions between the movers and the creators of products and services. It has been apprehended by others as well that the town squares of the Middle Ages, which very gradually replaced the church as the town center, were the primordial versions of the modern shopping mall: profit generators which through tithes and taxes benefited the local autocrats of the feudal era and in turn ensured the gradual erosion of their power, as the merchants became stronger and organized beyond the church and the state.
Were the state to be made so faint as to be virtually undetectable except during times of conflict, as some would have it, the result would merely be a perpetuation of the same monopoly that these very same people rail against, for the singular essence of the state is the monopoly of force: all of its other aspects spring from this. Were the state to be disposed of completely, the limits imposed by it relinquished, the competing units of power – the constituents of the very state that they dismissed – would either annihilate or assimilate one another, until either a single individual came to dominate, or a group of individuals possessing approximately equivalent influence and muscle would inter pares come to dominate, creating a monopoly of force: the state once more.
What is revealing in the thought processes of such “libertarians” is their au fond tyrannical nature, for they reject the notion of equality before the law, employing meritocracy as a ruse for the attributes that they esteem: avarice, influence-peddling, vanity, and mendaciousness are the very same attributes for which they condemn the state for possessing. But to regard the pursuit of an egalitarian society as anti-nature is to be ignorant of the meaning of the word nature. Alexander Pope claimed: “Whatever is, is right,” perhaps it would have been more accurate (and more pedantic) to say, “Whatever is becoming, is right.”
Then what is to be done? How can humankind release itself from the bonds of the state, if to do so would mean nothing more than anarchy and the eventual dominance of one party: the state once more? How are we to exist without this ever-present monopoly of force emanating from one provincia or another?
The answer can be found in the people themselves, and not organized centers of power such as business groups or non-profit organizations. The very notion of organization in the modern sense must be eschewed in favor of a renewed version of the more ancient notion of cooperation. The state tyrannizes us, and one of the methods that it employs to perpetuate this tyranny is the range of advantages that it bestows. But these are mere comforts, and many of them can be maintained or wholly replaced through cooperation in the form of work exchanges and the like. In order to move beyond the state it is necessary for us to decouple ourselves from the comforts provided by it. We can do so without returning to the Paleolithic Age if we begin to work together outside the state and its attendant concentrations of power. The point is to make the state irrelevant.
But would not such parallel institutions eventually become the state once more? Time can only tell, but the destruction of the money economy and the arms industry would certainly help in such a transition from a dominative to a cooperative societal system. The only thing that is certain is that at the levels of global capital and destructive military and industrial capabilities the human race has reached, the massive paradigm shift involved in creating cooperative, non-governmental institutions is the only one that ensures our continuing survival.
That was the essence of the people power revolt - to walk away from the established government and set up your own, virtual government. If the majority of the population chose to recognize the virtual government rather than the traditional one, the generals would end up alone in their palace, trying to get someone to take their phone calls while their own televisions broadcast a message transmitted by their enemies. Recent history was loaded with examples, iconic moments in the transition of power - Walter Jon Williams, "Deep State"