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The pandemic shows that the state is already withering away, just not in the cool way Marx and Engels predicted

Consider the U.S. response to the pandemic. It has been utterly and completely abhorrent. Insofar as there has been any attempt at mitigation by the state, it has been in the form of pharmaceutical and medical intervention (vaccines, masks, medicines, etc.), but largely lacking anything that could be called public health intervention (lockdowns, business shutdowns, work restrictions, cash subsidies, etc.). Yes, early on back in the ancient days of 2020, there were short and poorly planed lockdowns and a couple small handouts in the form of cash and unemployment increases. But these are all long gone and aren't even being considered at the current moment, when infections are the worst they've even been by a factor of about two.

What is interesting about this? The acceptable interventions all center around the flow of *commodities*, physical objects for sale. Unacceptable interventions are all *behavioral* and based on adjusting human relationships. If the solution involves buying and selling things, then it's considered politically reasonable by the "adults in the room". If it involves even the slightest change in the relationship between boss and worker or the behavior between neighbor and neighbor, then it's considered politically impossible.

This is downright crazy on multiple levels. Most obviously, the current U.S. strategy is basically to just let people die. Vaccines and masks cannot end the pandemic, as the last month has demonstrated. Doubling down on these "solutions" without also enforcing public health measures was an absolutely cynical strategy. Existing vaccines aren't effective enough and they don't confer lasting immunity; also, the unvaccinated have been so thoroughly and purposefully villainized (there are all kinds of reasons for this, it's not just a spontaneous thing) that it will be functionally impossible to ever get everyone to accept one, and this villainization will be the cause of generalized vaccine hesitancy for at least another generation.

But it's also crazy for another reason, which is where Marx and Engels and the "withering away of the state" comes in. The whole fucking point of having a state is to be able to force people to do things, even and especially things they don't want to do. You have a state so you can force people to fight wars for you that they don't want to fight. You have a state so you can force people to stay in one place when they don't want to (the Great Wall and even city walls are just as much about keeping subjects in as keeping invaders out). You have a state to force people to behave in specific ways that are advantageous to whatever group is in control of that state at a given time. The whole point is to use violence or the threat of violence to get people to *behave*.

The U.S. response to the pandemic is basically just a giant shoulder shrug to all of this. The government has effectively acknowledged that it's incapable doing the one thing it is supposed to be able to do, which is force people to comply with whatever demand it puts out there, including demands to lock down, close businesses, take vaccines, wear masks. It's not only that the state doesn't care if everyone dies of COVID, it's that *it does not have the power to do anything that would save them*. It has ceded a large part of its power to — surprise, surprise — capital and capitalists. Not indirectly as in the earlier stages of capitalism, but *directly* to capital and capitalists. Business people have essentially dictated coronavirus strategy from the beginning. In fact, they dictate most strategy of all kinds in the U.S., it's just that the pandemic response has made this especially clear and striking.

In other words, the pandemic has shown just how weak and fragile the modern nation state is becoming in the face of globalized capitalism, and the U.S. is the case in point.

You might argue that the government is forcing us to comply with the demand to get back to work, but that's not exactly true. The state does not have to force us to do this because universal wage labor already forces us to do this. If we don't work, we stave. The monopoly capitalists now also have a monopoly on this particular form of violence — work or die. You can see this in the way that the U.S. has responded to recent strikes as well, i.e., they do nothing at all. They can't really do anything for either side, and neither do they need to.

Of course, I'm exaggerating, but only a little. Clearly it's more complicated and nuanced, and the state still does have a lot of power and it will continue to have a lot of power for a long time to come. But we are seeing the beginnings of the state withering away and being replaced by non-state institutions like private enterprise and NGOs. And it's terrible. Even if you're someone like me who *wants* to see the state eliminated, having it replaced by something even worse is not at all the goal.

If you want to get rid of a bomb, you can either diffuse it or just let it explode. In either case the bomb no longer exists, but one option is much preferable to the other.