Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“From the 19th century utopian socialists on, Henri de Saint-Simon’s concept of replacing ‘legislation over persons’ with the ‘administration of things’ has been reiterated in various forms by one thinker after another. In General Idea of the Revolution in the XIX Century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon described it as ‘dissolving the state in the social body.’ Marx and Engels referred to the same process as the state ‘withering away,’ and it clearly influenced Marx’s view of the Paris Commune as prefiguring the dictatorship of the proletariat. Since then, the same general principle has been restated by countless anarchists and libertarian socialists.” (04/10/26)