I. Division On The Question Of The State
First off the idea for this post largely comes from a, believe it or not, somewhat civil and productive discussion about anarchism vs. Marxism. Particularly a member of the Commune for Distributing Agitprop (CDAP) asked me this question:
What exactly are the institutions you would use to characterize a proletarian state? What do they look like, and how are they operated?
I think this is such a crucial and oft-ignored question even by many socialists. Worse still, both some anarchists and socialists will respond with the non-answer that destroying the bourgeois state, abolishing private property, and facilitating direct participation by the proletariat will inherently create communism, that ideal state of cooperative equality and liberation. We are faced with “What is Step 1?” and answer with a description of Step 76.
Most of the women were young, Black, together women who had come to college now because they’d not been able to get in before…A lot of them were older. They were very streetwise, but they had done very little work with themselves as Black women. They had done it only in relation to, against, whitey. The enemy was always outside. -Audre Lorde explaining a class she taught at John Jay College to Adrienne, Sister Outsider pg. 97-98
Habeas Quaestus 