Dan Milway quoted The third revolution by Murray Bookchin
Anarchists have persistently used the words state and government interchangeably, to refer to the tyrannical entity they oppose. A state is a professionalized structure of legislators and executives who enjoy a monopoly of violence in the form of police, soldiers, and courts. States exist in the service of the monied classes and emerge historically along with classes. Even in republican states, ruling classes retain their power and the authority to exercise it by force. That all states are governments is obvious, but not all governments are necessarily states. Every society must have a government—that is. a system of institutions that make decisions about the society’s common affairs. But governments develop into states when the land and property-owning classes engage in appropriating labor and exploiting it in their own interests.
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*Historically states have taken significantly different forms. A representative state—such as Spain’s Second Republic—allows a degree of public participation in the workings of Its structure: a fascist state like that of Nazi Germany exercises brute force without any public consent; and a totalitarian state like Soviet Russia exercises arbitrary and autocratic rule. If the 1930s proved anything, it was that the kind of state under which the masses lived made all the difference for the prospects of a social movement. In Spain the Nationalist rebellion intended to create a state that would ruthlessly crush all liberal and leftist movements and obliterate all prospects of a new society.
Anarchists, however, have seldom distinguished among these states; ignoring the differences among democratic, republican, fascist, and totalitarian states, they condemned them all as authoritarian and equally tyrannical, ft became canonical to anarchists that a free society must be bereft not only of a state and government but of all laws—indeed, all restrictions on personal behavior, apart from the impingements of one person's behavior upon another’s autonomy. So fundamental was this view to anarchists that "anarchy” became, in the minds of its proponents, an ideal condition in which the individual is bereft of all restraints, a situation that would render any society dysfunctional. Yet in European and Middle Eastern history the masses were the first to demand government by law, fundamental law as embodied In constitutions. The early lawmaker Hammurabi, for example, was revered because he created written, precise legal barriers to arbitrary and oppressive authority.
— The third revolution by Murray Bookchin (Page 4-191 - 4-192)
Reminiscent of Chomsky's discussion of the need to update classical liberalism to account for e.g. corporate power.
