t is the best agent to improve society. One doesn't need to be an anarchist to ask this question; libertarians raise it as well. A Marxist might respond thusly: First of all, the state will wither away after the proletariat succeeds in fully revolutionizing society. It is here to facilitate the transformation to self-control and not to perpetuate itself indefinitely. This step is necessary in order to acclimatize people to a new type of society, to purge them of their previous bourgeois illusions and create a new type of socialist citizen. Remove the tethers now, as the anarchist would have it, and the result would be an egoistic chaos, a Hobbessian war of all against all. How else could one expect people to act having been raised in a selfish, competitive bourgeois culture? Government controls society until it is ready to control itself. This seems a powerful response to the anarchist whose rosy picture of human nature seems implausible--the same has been said about Marxism, but we have discussed that previously. It does not, though, answer the libertarian who would decry Marx as offensively paternalistic, violating people's rights to determine their own destiny absent government coercion. Marx would respond that it is naive to think that people control their own destiny. Bourgeois freedom is not freedom; economics is destiny. Eliminating explicit government intervention in one's life does not eliminate the influence of society altogether. Influence is pervasive; communists are just putting it to good use in extricating the conditions of oppression? The libertarian might respond that while social power is pervasive, this does not mean that we should allow government intervention; we should rather work to minimize the more subtle social coercion. People possess rights not to be used for broad social ends without their consent. Even if we agree with Marx's ideal society, there is value in people's coming to such a society on their own ac...
