"...The Anarchist case against the State is pretty simple to put in Marxist terms. You have your dictatorship of the proletariat. But immediately there's a problem. The state is not, and cannot be the entire class. In order to have a state, you have to put a subset of the class in charge. Call it a vanguard, a party, what have you. Let's assume for a moment that the new party really is comprised of the proletariat and isn't composed of nominally allied intellectuals. Even in this best case scenario what you have is representation, not actual rule by the proletariat as a class.
"Well ok," says the Marxist, "that's not a problem, the representatives will just represent the interests of the class as a whole." But instantly you have a problem, your dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's a dictatorship of the representatives of the class. For the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie this doesn't matter, because the incentives of the state align with theirs and you can be a member of the bourgeoisie while simultaneously holding office, in fact almost all representatives are.
But for the proletariat this is not true at all, the moment a proletarian take(s) control (...) they are no longer part of the class with no property, they have at their command the property of the state. This problem is exacerbated by any attempt to use the state to socialize the economy, the larger the share of the economy administered by the State, the more property the representatives now command.
Those representatives of the proletariat in the State now have their own interests: that of the management of the property of the state, that of the nation state itself, formerly alien to the proletariat as a class.
Furthermore, each passing day isolates the representatives from the proletariat itself. It isolates them physically, it isolates them psychologically, it isolates them in terms of mannerism and expectation.
And so every day the interests of the representatives of the proletariat drift further apart from their representatives until one day the dictatorship of the proletariat vanishes entirely and you're left with the dictatorship of an entirely new class produced by the State.
And this is the BEST case scenario, the one in which the representatives of the class are genuinely attempting to do their job. And then still the form of the state devours the dictatorship of the proletariat, that which was once its content. The state will not wither away because its existence produces new classes with their own functions and interests.
Lenin's State and Revolution demonstrates this problem: it calls for the state to become the landlord of the proletariat. Immediately, in a single instant, the pretense of the State as a special armed body of the class disappears. In its place is a new class of rent connectors whose interests have nothing in common with the proletariat.
This is just how the State works. The proletariat has nothing in common with the tax collector, the landlord, the manager, the planner. All of the functions of the old world absorbed and preserved by the State coalesce into new classes and socialists are left spinning their wheels, trying to abolish two systems, the State and the class system, with an institution (the State) that reproduces both of them.
Even on a theoretical level, even in the world of State and Revolution, where every state employee is paid a worker's salary and nothing more, the State would still produce classes and with it reproduce itself. The only solution to this is to destroy the State entirely and let the class as a whole form the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is Anarchism. The propertiless masses rule themselves directly and destroy the property relations and the State institutions that comprise the conditions of their own existence as a class, thus ending at long last the nightmare of the class system with the new and radiant dawn of the classless society of communism."
