The state is just an institution of violence-control.
Inflicting violence and restricting others' access to violence is literally all it does. Everything from zoning laws to welfare serves that sole purpose.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
561 points (99.0% liked)
Late Stage Capitalism
3024 readers
342 users here now
A place for for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
A zero-tolerance policy for bigotry of any kind. Failure to respect this will result in a ban.
RULES:
1 Understand the left starts at anti-capitalism.
2 No Trolling
3 No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism, liberalism is in direct conflict with the left. Support for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it are not welcome or tolerated.
4 No imperialism, conservatism, reactionism or Zionism, lessor evil rhetoric. Dismissing 3rd party votes or 'wasted votes on 3rd party' is lessor evil rhetoric.
5 No bigotry, no racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any type of prejudice.
6 Be civil in comments and no accusations of being a bot, 'paid by Putin,' Tankie, etc. This includes instance shaming.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This is 101 of political sciences at the uni.
people need to wake the fuck up and acknowledge nazi germany 2.0 aka amerikkka
but they won't. that's unhappy thoughts, so they'll just ignore it and go business as usual .
i'm so fucking glad i never had kids
This would actually be Amerikkka 3.0. The US was the blueprint for much of Germany's policies and actions. Eugenics, US policy. Concentration camps, US inspired. The corporations that built the Nazi infrastructure and was protected against US bombing in Germany were US companies.
That is literally the function of the state and it's definitely not unique to capitalism or America. A state is a mechanism for controlling the application of violence, laws are threats of violence used to create a society. In an ideal government, the state would only wield violence to fairly help maintain the overall safety and justice of its constituents and would have mechanisms of control to make sure the minimum possible violence is used for the best and most just purposes. Violence outside of that would be potentially dangerous vigilantism. America IN ABSOLUTE THEORY is set up like that (or at least meant to appear like that), in practice it has always fallen varying degrees of extremely short of that, but it exists nonetheless to provide some attempt at control to completely unregulated might makes right use of violence.
In an ideal government, the state would only wield violence to fairly help maintain the overall safety and justice of its constituents and would have mechanisms of control to make sure the minimum possible violence is used for the best and most just purposes.
My favorite Karl Marx quote:
"freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it."
A state that is completely subordinate to society would still have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but society itself would decide how the state exercises that monopoly.
Violence outside of that would be potentially dangerous vigilantism.
Maybe the best description of US foreign policy I've ever seen.
Precisely yes
You even discuss anything beyond a useless protest and you get deleted and banned on Reddit and even Lemmy. So what hope is there? You can’t even talk about it
Depends, Lemmy is a bit more nuanced.
But no, we can't straight up advocate murdering people here. If we turn into an insurgency site, it will be taken down and we can't do what we have to do.
Having said that, we all know we are going to war with USA.
You're right that is funny. It's funny in the way that a train obliterating a clown car is funny, but still.
The wealthy and powerful own the State, so they’re “the man behind the curtain”. The money wants the violence so it can retain control and make more money.
Let me tell you about the monopoly on violence. It is a pillar of any democracy (as long as it is one).