Okay here’s a breakdown on State power. *deep breath*

The State is represented by wealthy people who get paid by other wealthy people to work in the State to further their interests. The State can only function if it has these four things: police, prisons, borders, and armies.

The reason a State needs these four things is because it must have a claimed citizenry, and a non-citizenry. It needs borders to make external distinctions of that, it needs prisons to manage internal distinctions of that.

And, of course, a State needs police and armies to *enforce* those distinctions. Otherwise, those wealthy people who represent it would only be some random people declaring things in a room together. And they wouldn’t be wealthy either.

So, every law that is every passed is fundamentally either a police order, or a military order, as it falls on those two arms of power to actually enforce it, regardless of what it is.

Wealth isn’t money. Money, as we’ve seen, is a social construct that is meant to reflect/stand-in for wealth. Wealth is *access to resources.* We were all equally wealthy on earth once. It was only the consolidation of POWER that makes so few of us wealthy now.

Even were something as nebulous as the stock market to vanish tomorrow, the wealthy of today would still be wealthy because of their access and control over resources. Those resources were and are continually stolen from the rest of us.

The State uses other constructs beyond wealth or citizenry to divide and conquer a populace. It has structural patriarchy to create imbalance of power among genders. It has structural white supremacy to create imbalance on the basis of socially constructed race.

In settler colonial States, it has structural colonialist practices to create an imbalance of power between settlers and Indigenous people, whom the State also needs to displace to create its power and set its borders.

Imbalances of power are what keep the State stable. They need a hierarchy that goes into as many relationships as possible, so that many people involved are dependent on the system to maintain whatever power they have, even as they are being crushed by someone else’s power.

All that said. The State is also porous. It consists entirely of people just showing up to work. Government workers AND non-governmental workers. Were any substantial amount of people to just, collectively not show up to work one day, it would all stop in its tracks.

Even with all the State’s power in both armies and police, those forces only ever amount to a tiny percentage of the population. Were the above thing to happen on large enough scale, there would be nothing they could do. So, what they actually do is *project* their power.

What’s stopping anyone (who isn’t morally opposed) from shoplifting when they need to? Not the fact that a cop is on every corner. But that a cop *could* be on *any* corner. That’s what projecting power means.

So, what about electoral politics? Well, electoral politics is based on this simple myth: that we can all reduce our political agency to a symbolic demonstration (voting) every few years, and that in return the State will limit its OWN power.

But, as we know, this is not how this works. Power congeals. Power protects itself. Any time that the State ever comes across something that threatens its sovereignty, it crushes it. It will never limit itself in self-preservation regardless of what its official policy says.

Electoral politics, when said and done, is allowing space in political discourse for people to blow of steam, but at the end of the day still go home and yield to State power. Investing it with legitimacy because, you know, at least they got to yell about it.

Capital also works on you, from the other side of things. You have to work, hustle, grind for 40 hours a week to make a living. What do you do when you’re exhausted by that? Buy something mind-numbing and check out until the next shift starts.

That is how they also keep people from engaging in their political agency. They burn you out, burn you up, and keep you going until you drop. Keep giving you scraps and then taking them back from you until you die or otherwise check out from the world.

They keep weekly work hours long and hard, even when it doesn’t make sense (ex: making cashiers stand all day). The more you are likely to see that the system doesn’t function for you, the harder they will work you to make sure you don’t resist.

And always on the outside of the grind is the ever-present threat of houselessness, starvation, death, for you or your loved ones. And the inside of a jail-cell if you do resist. Where they’ll keep working you at literally cents/hour. All of this so you’ll submit to their power.

This is, of course, simplified and incomplete, but it was all that could be done on a single Twitter thread! If you have anything you’d like to add, reply or qt and I’ll retweet you if I think it’s a solid and accurate point!

Anyway, I try to do think kind of thing on a regular basis to make information more accessible to others. I will always do it for free, but if you like it and want to show your support you can either give love to my tip jars or join my Patreon: http://patreon.com/butchanarchy 

As always, thank you for learning with me!