Any sufficiently large gang, left well enough alone for long enough, will become the de facto state.

Again this is kind of non sequitur. No one argued that they wouldn’t. States are definitionally just gangs that have been legitimized.

Your own local anarchist conclave may all be friendly and would never do such a thing to their neighbors. But if the next one down the road decides they need your land and resources, and if they outnumber and outgun you, then you’re just done for. No one will come to help defend you. No one will arrive to mete out vengeance afterward.

And? None of these are gotchas of any sort. Even that case is still preferable to the state doing it. If the state does it does that make it better/more acceptable. And at that point wouldn’t that group be a burgeoning state anyway? This is why anarchist are strong advocates of arming the populace.

The state holding an implied monopoly of violence is what enables said state to enact their atrocities, but is also what prevents smaller groups from falling into the same trap.

Smaller groups are capable of less total violence at scale. That’s like saying, more violence is justified, otherwise we would effectively have less violence. It doesn’t make the sense you seem to think.

Oh and there is also a huge difference between the state acknowledging that it is at War for territory. And not being at war for territory. In the United States my people are constantly at war with the state to preserve what little territory we’ve been left. Let alone get back what the state stole. But it’s okay because the state did it therefore it’s okay. Otherwise some roving gang might have gotten much smaller section of it. And that would be so much worse than losing nearly all of it as we did.

And no community is an island. You keep mentioning “my community” as if that is all there is. Or that having neighbors and allies is impossible. All you arguments realistically just boil down to “we need the state, or else the state”. Classic circular reasoning.

But if the next one down the road decides they need your land and resources, and if they outnumber and outgun you, then you’re just done for.

Which is different from states invading their neighbours how?

we return to the “might makes right” era of human history

We never left it. The might just calls themselves governments and CEOs.

We don’t have territory wars within the US states because if you start shooting at your neighbors, the police arrive.

You are aware of ICE going around and terrorizing and shooting at people, and doing all kinds of property damage… commiting literally tens of thousands of crimes… and the police largely just do nothing about this, in the moment, often outright aiding them in this?

This is where your model breaks down.

You don’t even need ICE. You just need ‘protestors’ the police are friendly toward, vs ‘protestors’ they are not friendly toward.

Or, howabout civil asset forfeiture? Police can legally steal your money, literally charge the money itself with a crime, and the money is presumed guilty untill proven innocent… the onus is now on you to prove that your property is not guilty of a crime.

Or, a similar kind of thing, scaled up is when states do this to other state’s funds, ‘freezing’ them is usually the terminology used.

Or what about mass, systemic, persistent wage-theft? One class of people/legal entitities are just allowed to commit… on the book, illegal crimes, all the time, every day… and nobody really looks into that, the victim usually has to do an inordinate amount of work. Compared to the reverse situation where an employee embezzles money or steals a thing from a company, or where a customer steals a thing off a shelf.

States and state-based and state-backed/favorrd organizations play by the same actual rules as anarchists do.

Anarchists just don’t lie about that fact, as state-based/backed/favored organizations often do.

You’ve missed the point.

I can put you in a dungeon if you break my rules.

… when a person acts this way, they tend to be viewed as a serial killer or perhaps vigilante or terrorist.

What’s the difference?

Scale of power? Perception of legitimacy or moral justness?

Although it might seem contradictory, something can be abstract and concrete at the same time. These are relative qualities.

Relative to anarchy, the state is abstract. It depends upon a socially shared model of thinking that gets acted out by individuals. Take away this layer of abstraction and you are left with anarchy, i.e. the precursor of the state.

Prison is itself an abstraction, though its consequences feel very concrete to a prisoner. All of your thoughts and feelings are abstractions, and yet they seem concrete to you.

They are abstractions in the sense that they are collections of rules that people made up.

They are real in the sense that those rules are reliably and effectively enacted and carried out.

You can say just the same for a single person with a moral code, or a group of people, some kind of organization with its own rules, codified or implicit.

A person can decide to shoot you or stab you, or give you a donut or sing a song in praise of you, depending on their rules… just in the same way as a group, or a state.

The difference is just scale, and the number of layers it takes to get from something you can drop from above the ground and reliably know it will fall, and things that have massive effects via much more complex processes.

The state ‘exists’ to roughly the same extent that ‘I’ exist.

I might change my rules, my behavior, so might a state.

A person’s personality, the way a state functions and acts… both are emergent patterns or concepts or ideas that ultimately derive from something physically real, yet themselves are not directly, tangibly ‘real’…

They’re also not static, the way gravity is a static rule of reality. Their ‘nature’, their own internal rules are mutable. The speed of light, ohm’s law, set theory… things that we discover, not invent… those are static, universal rules, spatially and temporally invariant.

Emergent patterns of course also often have particular ways that they tend to behave, rules that they tend to follow… but the more abstract, the more indirectly ‘real’ the thing is, the more complex and nuanced those rules tend to be.

Odd things begin to happen when you treat certain emergent patterns, certain rules, as more primarily, fundamentally ‘real’ than they actually are.

Ok, I’d love to hear of a modern example of a system that isn’t based on some form of capitalism. If the broad statement being thrown around that capitalism in any form is inherently evil, what is the alternative?

I wasn’t imagining something that just makes decisions that are handed down. They collate and evaluate the decisions and input from below.

It was influential, but capitalism had essentially already come about in a limited form.

You’re so far off the deep end that it doesn’t make sense trying to rebut you, so I ask questions that have easy answers to try and discuss something more productive. As usual with folks who think they’re very smart though, you don’t want to answer because it’s not on your terms.

Take a class in politics. Or hell just read a book.