This isn’t what is meant by the death of the state. The death of the state needs a world in which the great battles are already won, a world that is completely socialist and has rid itself of all reactionary elements, to even be imaginable. As long as there is even a speck of reactionary ideology left on the planet, there needs to be a proletarian state to mop that shit up. But once that has been dealt with and the generations go by until a time when capitalism can only be studied from a history book, the people and hence the organs of the state will be less and less influenced by the declining necessity for class struggle and resume normal life.

This will look like officers being dismissed from the people’s police and the armed forces bit by bit, or adopting a style of work that no longer involves suppression. Perhaps the most logical development would be cops joining the firefighters or medical emergency response since these institutions tend to be grouped together already, and soldiers becoming some sort of standing response force against natural disasters, as we already have seen the PLA do temporarily during floods or coronavirus outbreaks.

While these developments seem natural, it is less obvious what would happen with those who served the proletarian state in bureaucratic or managerial positions. I suppose these people would need to undergo retraining or retire early. If China’s recent interior policies are any indication, we ought to expect that there will emerge a great surge in the demand for scientific, engineering, and medical work as well as rural revitalisation, so I would expect such people to be pushed in these directions. But then again, we cannot reasonably expect to grasp the concrete policies of a world whose economic, philosophical, and political principles are bizarre and incomprehensible to the mind under capitalism.