When terrorism is successfully used to achieve power it is no longer called terrorism. When the Zionists were fighting the British to create Israel (including assasinations & bombings) they were called terrorists, now that they have won they are called freedom fighters. Now they call their enemies terrorists.
A state is not necessary to defend the revolution, even if only part of the world goes anarchist and the other does not. Simply arm the workers. Form decentralized, democratic militias, if necessary, to wage guerilla war against any imperialist invaders. The classic example of this is the Makhnovists, but there's also the anarchist militias in Spain as another example.
The main function of the state may arguably be to defend the ruling class, but even if true that does not mean all class based violence is a state. If a worker hits his boss he does not suddenly become a state. The state is characterized by centralization of power and monopoly or near-monopoly of force, not merely class based violence.
To say "State is a product of the existence of social classes" isn't really correct. The inverse is equally correct, "Social classes is a product of the existence of the state." They are two sides of the same coin. If you have a state you will have a (minority) ruling class and vice versa. Eliminating the relations of production that result in social classes does not require a state.
The state is defined by:
1) A "monopoly of violence" in a given territorial area;
2) This violence having a "professional," institutional nature;
3) A hierarchical and authoritarian nature - centralisation of power and initiative into the hands of a few.
The means of production should be directly expropriated by the workers during the revolution. We all take over our workplaces and run it directly democratically (or by consensus or some other non-hierarchical means) via worker assemblies. After that the various worker assemblies should form decentralized confederations to coordinate their activities in a decentralized fashion, with actual decision making power staying in the worker assemblies. Once this is set up it is a simple matter to abolish commidity production and implement need based production.
The whole point of an anarchist revolution is to abolish classes. The moment the means of production are expropriated by the working class the bourgeoisie ceases to exist. There is no ruling class.
Former capitalists may exist, but an actual capitalist class would not longer exist. There would no longer be a class system.
In Marxist usage "centralism," like "state," has a shifting two-sided meaning. On the one hand there is its usual meaning: subordination to a central authority (or "one deciding will" as Engels put it). On the other hand it is sometimes used in an overly broad manner that confuses centralization with coordination. Lenin does this in state & revolution. It is entirely possible to coordinate actions without centralism. The typical Marxist approach to defending oneself from decentralist criticisms, employed by Lenin & others, is to defend centralism in the overly broad sense (equating it with coordination) and then erroneously equating that with support for centralisation in it's ordinary sense (subordination to a central authority).
The relatively quick discrediting of CBS's forged documents was made possible by the media's own biases. The IAEA exposed Blair/Bush's Niger Uranium documents as forgeries well before the invasion of Iraq, but the media ignored it. It wasn't until after the insurgency had developed and democrats started attacking Bush over the Niger documents that they were exposed in the mass media. Contrast this with CBS's recent documents, which were attacked immediately and discredited among the mass media within weeks.
There shouldn't be a Jewish state anymore than there should be a Muslim state or a Christian state. Israel is the Jewish Iran.
A person who voluntarily sells his/her self into slavery is still a slave. If the wage contract were made for an indefinite period of time, instead of a fixed period of time, it would in fact constitute full-fledged slavery. Instead the wage contract is repeated over and over, making a kind of transitory slavery - wage slavery. Furthermore, it isn't really voluntary as the capitalists' monopoly over the means of production, which is the result of
government coercion, forces us to sell our labor to them.
The United States is not ruled by "the people," it is ruled by the rich and high-level bureaucrats. If the workers vote the wrong way the owners will withdraw their investments, causing the economy to crash. Then that party will lose the next election. Usually what happens is the elected representatives abandon the policies that cause the owners to withdraw their investments & adopt policies more favorable to the capitalist class, so that they will not be creamed in the next election. Plus the state bureaucracy can effectively undercut the policies of elected representatives. The CIA has overthrown lots of governments without the knowledge of congress, sometimes even without the knowledge of the President, and could easily do so domestically if the wrong people got elected. In addition, there are added layers of control including the two-party system, the tendency of the police & FBI to suppress any radical leftist party that gets large numbers of votes (the suppression of the Socialist Party USA is a well known example), media bias against radical left candidates, the fact that rich people can more easily win elections since they have more money for advertisements and things of that nature, the "revolving door" between government service & corporate executives, bribery of candidates ("campaign financing") and the dependancy of candidates on the rich for money to run their campaigns.
In actuality, the nature of capitalism forces us to sell our labor to capitalists (or organizations they control) in order to survive. The capitalists have a (state-protected) monpoly on the means of production. In order for us to survive we must sell our labor to them, otherwise we will starve. That monopoly is the result of
state violence and requires state violence, usually in the form of enforcing private property, to survive.
Chavez is a former paratrooper with plenty of military support. That's why the coup attempts aren't working. The US will probably try invasion by proxy.
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