And crucially, we won't know what things will look like when capitalism is defeated. Whether or not we have a state, what it looks like, who leads or doesn't lead it, how people are organized, everything will depend on how the revolution goes. The USSR had such a strong state to start with because it had to: It had a massive army composed largely even of foreign invaders attempting to stop their revolution immediately upon the removal of the government. On the other hand, the Zapatistas were allowed to negotiate with the Mexican government, which was interested in avoiding long-term conflict; and besides that, isn't an effort to bring socialism to the whole nation, so it can be smaller, more directly democratic, with a negligible state.

Will our revolution be a huge bloody conflict with Musk and his cronies, bolstered by the TERF army of the UK and Putin's funding? Or will we suddenly have an awakening in the working class that they aren't expecting, and take over through means of noncompliance, networking, and communications technology? If the impossible happens and the American fascist regime crumbles, and our alliance stands poised to create something new, will the world be excited to follow, or will instead the continent face invasion from capitalists outside with intent to stop us? What infrastructure will be damaged and destroyed, and what will remain? All of this will determine whether our alliance will go more in the direction of a state or statelessness, and I hope we can be informed directly by a common sense of materialism, and understand that such things exist on a spectrum in response to conditions.

And when I talk to anarchists about this, they tend to understand: They admit that, if the new nation is under enormous threat, you may need to make hard decisions and have some level of unifying authority to combat that threat, so long as the intention is to remove the threat and dissolve the state as soon as possible. That is, after all, a revolutionary movement: As Engels said, there is nothing more authoritarian than a revolution, which is the imposition of the will of one group directly over another through force. And the revolution isn't over until it's over.

As both communists and anarchists, we all fight for the ultimate end of the state. The main difference is when we think that fight ends. Anarchists, perhaps, think that it ends as soon as one state does, whereas communists understand the revolution as ongoing until the enemies of the revolution are defeated, and not only the state that they opposed first. Maybe when we get there, there can be an understanding of the necessity for the revolution to continue, but as we've said, we're nowhere close to being there yet — and it may well be that the conditions are such that the revolution does actually end with the death of the American oligarchy that rules the world.