"1. By eliminating the state privilege which makes exploitation possible. "

can you expand upon this? how does the state help for example a school yard bully to take money away from weaker children?

exploitation occurs because people are different regardless of whether there is a state or not

and funny enough a primary purpose of the state is to REDUCE exploitation... that's why we have police for example

"Sure, but not all inequalities are part of an individual's nature."

true

"Which is why I specifically spoke about norms "built into the system." "

such as?

"Who said I'd want to address that inequality. "

you speak of having workers take over businesses... the reality is that some people are just inherently better at setting up and running businesses than others that's how its relevant

"The painting contractor who works alone is not a capitalist. The mom and pop who run their cornerstore are not capitalists. They are all artisans."

the definition of capitalism : an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

according to the definition they are

"Capitalist = = "person who uses the privilege of capital to exploit the labor of others."

according to this definition everyone is a capitalist... you've used capital to furnish yourself with food, electronics, water etc gathered through the labour of others... so have i and so has everyone we know...

we call that trade

"It is divided and associated, because by dividing and associating labor productivity increases considerably. Why would I want to associate with a capitalist when I can associate with my peers  and therefore have more autonomy over my work-life?"

no one has a gun to your head... but if you want money from a business you have to offer something in return correct?

if you find that distasteful you are free to find your own way to make a living

" Ideas aren't worth much without capital. Anyone can have an idea, and many people do. The question is whether or not they are able to enact that idea."

true

" Capitalists aren't special because they have ideas, they are special because they have capital."

so... the only difference between steve jobs and you is that he has money?

never mind the fact that he didn't initially and worked his way up through building his business

"Why exactly is that? Would the demand for goods and services that I and my peers provide disappear? Plenty of people had jobs and produced things before wage labor (employment) predominated in society. "

how could you provide the goods and services from a business that does't exist? 

"Do you think people can only make profits by exploiting others? Certainly, it's possible to create more value than was inputted without exploitation. Do you deny this? "

what does this have to do with what i posted which to reiterate was that people create businesses generally to profit?

"hat when the state collapses on itself the people at the bottom are going to be the ones most burdened with the costs of the collapse. Is it not clear? "

in what way? your statement here is very vague

are you not calling for  redistribution of wealth in that you want capitalists to have their profits reduced in order to more evenly spread capital to the workers?

"Nope, it's anti-redistribution. The state, through its laws, redistributes capital to the capitalist by subsidizing the costs of property ownership. "

what subsidies are you referring to?

To understand Marx you have to read him in its time, when late feudalism turned into the early industrial revolution. Ownership of land was necessary for both agriculture and factories, which was most of the economic activity. Ownership at that time guaranteed a rent without much work.

However Marx failed to understand a market future of 'creative destruction' (Schumpeter) where static ownership and do-nothing accumulation of capital didn't work anymore. Marx also dismissed small businessmen as small bourgeois or petty capitalists, because they didn't need much capital, like service based businesses which are about 80% of our modern economy.

Largely unrelated to the argument as a whole, but past literature certainly suggests that prison sentences do deter crime, albeit only up to a point.

My criticism of the state isn't merely that it is violent, violence is necessary. My criticism is that it declares itself as the ultimate authority of what violence is and which violence is legitimate.

Now that is interesting. If you don't mind, I'm going to take this off in another direction altogether. I'm not going to debate whether or not the state should be the sole arbitrator of what violence is or is not acceptable; although it's an interesting argument, it tends to spiral out of hand very quickly and come to an impasse when perceptions differ over how fairly humans can restructure themselves. For me, the interesting question (and one I haven't gotten to debate before) here is "is it reasonable to blame the state's monopoly on legitimized violence for unequal land distribution?" I'm still going to argue no, despite the assertion that the rule and its enforcement mechanism are inextricably intertwined. Which leads me to this;

In a system where violence is not centralized into the hands of one entity, the social forces cancel out of an interest in cost-reduction. Violence is only a good solution to conflict, when the risk of it being costly are low, and by monopolizing the legitimization of violence the state is able to unilaterally set the conditions of society. 

So ideally, the capacity to induce violence would be as evenly distributed as possible, so that there be large individual costs to inducing violence on others, and so that said costs be internalized by the one inducing the violence themselves, rather than put onto others. 

I would make the case that this, in generous terms, a very idealistic concept, for a few reasons.

First, there needs to be a standard for legitimization. If the state is no longer solely in charge of determining rules of what is and what is not legitimate, those standards must be replaced. What would this be accomplished by? Who would be in charge of creating and enforcing these standards? How do we ensure that these standards do not fall under the same problems that are commonly critiqued by advocates, i.e. designed to disadvantage a minority of the population and bring us back to the same issues we have currently?

Second, as you mention, there needs to be a mechanism for ensuring that inducing violence on others comes at a cost. What is that mechanism, and who is in charge of enforcing it? Do we just implement a system where if society feels it was uncalled for, they can retaliate? Or does there have to be more than that? How do we decide what an appropriate cost is for illegitimate forms of violence?

Finally, how do we ensure that the most powerful and capable of enacting violence do not begin to cooperate with each other and simply use their advantage in strength to enforce their will? 

I bring all these questions up because, at least to me upon considering it initially, the issue of an unfair placement of so called "legitimized violence" is non-unique. Human beings are corrupt to the point where there is no structure that will prevent the subsumption of more power and authority than intended. Even if you design a system around the failings that have led to the issues within current governmental structures around the world (and it actually initially works), you will soon find that system itself being exploited for the advantage and profit of whoever can. In other words, regardless of what system you attempt to implement, the threat of violence will wind up being used to oppress people for the benefit of others.

1. Rather than write a whole novel, I will link an influential text which describes quite a bit about the means by which the state systematically enables exploitation where it would've been stampered out in its absence. It also happens to be a text which explains the differences and similarities between state-socialism and libertarian socialism. It was written by the 19th century individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker. It's not too long. 

State Socialism and Anarchism: How far they agree and wherein they differ. 

Sure, exploitation can happen in the absence of the state in local contexts, such as your bully example, but the more an individual attempts to exploit others the more likely others will react in kind. The state allows people to exploit others with no fear of a reaction in kind. 

2. For a starter the four class monopolies: money, land, tariffs, and patents are created and reinforced by the state to benefit the bargaining power of capital over labor. Adam Smith also describes how the state helped reinforce inequalities in bargaining power in his day. 

From his Wealth of Nations. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_of_bargaining_power

3. Do you have evidence of an inherent superiority in managing a business, with all else equal? I can accept that some people might have a better education, or they might enjoy finding new ways of making a business more efficient, but I don't think people are inherently born to manage others. That is pretty contrary to enlightenment principles, is it not? Actually, how does one define " better at setting up and running businesses" .

Is it not conditional to the intended goal of the business? Furthermore, even if it is true that some individuals are better at "setting up and running businesses" is it necessarily true that said persons can manage and run a business better than multiple people with multiple inputs of knowledge? It seems to me as if the economic calculation problem which is used to criticize central-planning can also be used to criticize large hierarchical corporations. No individual can calculate what many individuals can, because no individual has enough inputs, and hence it is ideal to have planning as decentralized as possible with respect to minimized transaction costs. 

4. Dictionary definitions for complex political concepts are pretty crappy. I am sure you'd agree, for example, that the dictionary definition of feminism "people who believe in the equality of men and women" lacks nuance and context. 

The way socialists used (and use the word capitalist) referred to a specific group of persons. 

5. In a sense you are correct, we are all complicit to exploitation under capitalism and participate in the system. But it's very much like saying that a person who receives a stolen good is complicit to robbery. Are they the robber? 

Ultimately we don't have much of a choice but to work within capitalism. It's a social structure which no individual can really escape without social change. That is the entire point of socialism as an idea, that capitalism isn't voluntary and if we were given the choice we probably wouldn't be able to exploit others without feeling the consequences (costs) of exploitation. 

6. Well you know, except for the state, with its laws and regulations which if I refuse to comply with will mean I'd have a gun to my head. 

7. The difference between Steve Jobs and his investors is that his investors had the capital whereas he had the idea. Why did he have to go to investors though? Why was he employed? Why couldn't he had just used his ideas and savviness with a bunch of like-minded persons and create an Apple without investors? Because he didn't have access to the requisite capital. Steve Jobs was dependent on investors (owners of capital) to effectuate his ideas. The investors then profited off of Steve Jobs' talents without doing the work that Jobs did. In a socialist system Jobs would be able to innovate without selling himself to capitalists.

8. The market demand still exists. The productive capital still exists. The natural resources still exist. The labor-force still exists. The only thing that doesn't exist is the capitalist. If I have the capital and peers to work it with me what use do I have for the capitalist though? 

9. Because profits (in the strict sense of producing more value than what was inputted) can still exist without exploitation (albeit with lower margins), and therefore businesses will still exist. Your entire premise was to equivocate value production/wealth creation and exploitation, when the two aren't one in the same.

10. Those on top are much more elastic to changes and therefore can avoid costs. Furthermore, since they disproportionately control the state, they can exploit the rest of society to unstable levels if they know that the state is going to collapse anyway. This is what happened when colonies collapsed, the colonizers used the colonial governments to exploit the local population and then fled when SHTF. 

Yes, it's idealistic, I recognized it with "so ideally." There is nothing wrong though with using ideals as ultimate goals. By getting closer to said goal one benefits. 

1. Sure, but must this standard be universal? For example, in our current world with multiple states very few people argue that we should have one super-state that acts as the final arbiter of all global affairs. The plurality of nation-states is recognized as something of value. Within this plurality we have the United Nations which acts as a sort of dispute resolution organization to prevent war. One also recognizes that the ability to induce violence (through nuclear weapons for example) is a huge deterrent because the costs of doing such are so relatively high. Does this mean that there is no war? Nope, but the probability of war has decreased significantly. The anarchist suggests that such mechanisms of dispute-resolution be replicated at the individual and community levels. That each person (and union of persons) is treated as an autonomous moral agent, and it is through compromise and the fear of the costs of war that people reconcile their differences. All of this can be done without an ultimate and universal arbitrator. This is why I suggest that the capacity to induce violence be at a minimum level. When there is an inequality in weapons, for example, one group can impose themselves on another. One could look at examples like feudal Japan where there wasn't necessarily an absolute authority, and those with weapons (Samurai) called the shots. Since I don't want society to revert back to feudalism, a relative equality in access to the means an legitimization of violence is necessary. 

2. So there are two types of costs: 1. social reputation and 2. violence. If I act violently toward others, they are likely to act violently back. Furthermore, since there is value in social cooperation and cohesion, if I act violently to others they might choose to ostracize me in non-violent ways. So out of fear for my own life and also out of my material interests (which are bolstered by social cooperation) I am very likely to act social rather than anti-social toward others, unless I have a particular advantage over them. 

3. In the same way that hierarchy is reinforcing, so is anarchy. People when living in a free society will be especially attuned to anti-social, hierarchical, and oppressive behavior and therefore wary of it. It's not in most people's interests to be ruled by others, and therefore there would be strong opposition to anybody who tried to declare authority over other people. 

It's possible that in local contexts, and situations, certain authoritarian relationships might come to exist, but if the greater society is anarchic then it is unlikely that it'd gain momentum. 

That brings me to my next point. Anarchism isn't something that happens over-night. It requires a lot of social reformation and evolution alongside the political reformation and evolution. It seems unlikely that liberal democracy would've come to exist without the enlightenment, and it's just as unlikely that we disentangle authority without a second enlightenment, which changes how common people think about their relationships with one another. 

I don't think there would be decent results if the state disappeared tomorrow without all of the pre-requisite social evolution, but that social evolution won't come about until people criticize the fundamental basis of authoritarian and hierarchical relationships, including those pertaining to the state. 

"Even if you design a system around the failings that have led to the issues within current governmental structures around the world (and it actually initially works), you will soon find that system itself being exploited for the advantage and profit of whoever can. In other words, regardless of what system you attempt to implement, the threat of violence will wind up being used to oppress people for the benefit of others."

The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon spoke of "anti-absolutism". It's basically the idea that one shouldn't hold anything to be absolutely desirable. This was the basis of his criticism of utopianism (which isn't the same thing as idealism), capitalism, property, communism (communists of his time were very dogmatic), religion, etc. Another anarchist, Max Stirner had a similar concept of "fixed-ideas" or "spooks" where he believed that we shouldn't put ideas above our individual interests, and in so much as we have an ideology it is to aid the pursuit of our interests. Again he criticized all of these things that Proudhon had. 

From these perspectives, anarchism isn't necessarily a system. It is more a method of criticizing hierarchies and ruler-ships. Over time, human society has become increasingly anti-absolutist, and it is through this process that the conditions of exploitation are absent. 

I think you're right in that any system of organization if taken to be a fixed good will end with exploitation as people wish to move away from it, but in the absence of rulers people will have the freedom to change organizations to accommodate for rising exploitation. The necessary pre-requisite is that a sizable portion of the population rejects spooks/fixed ideas/absolute ideas. By constantly disrupting the means of exploitation (whatever they might be) we keep exploitation at a minimal and localized (in time and space) level. 

As Stirner said, 

“Not against love, but against sacred love, not against thought, but against sacred thought, not against socialists, but against sacred socialists, etc.”

I have to say by the way, this conversation has been pretty fruitful! 

I am calling for whatever distribution occurs in the absence of the state, and I predict that said distribution (due to the actions of the state) would be more beneficial to workers than our current one. In other-words, the state shouldn't redistribute anything.

I'll start with the big subsidy, does the proprietor pay for his own police force and property protection of every factory, apartment complex, hospital, or any other institution he or she owns or does the state through taxation? There are also direct subsidies (the state directly gives money), bailouts, regulatory capture to prevent competition, and a multitude of other state privileges which capitalists enjoy. 

pure forms of economic policy can never exist... there must be a balance and it's time we had it

a path to self destruction

Yep, first thing I did when opened the page