The state under capitalism is in a codependent relationship with capital. The state under socialism ought to be similar to that of a teacher to a student.

The state is often resented by the owning class for restricting them or for not properly facilitating growth. At the same time, the state is what stops capitalism from consuming itself and blowing through its fuel too quickly. The state becomes a mediator between battling interests and a toxic caretaker to allow the growth to continue, albeit at a slower rate that won’t cause the system to collapse in on itself.

Meanwhile, a new state is vulnerable in the way the a new person is vulnerable. To teach someone a new skill requires giving them a safe environment in which failure won’t end their ability to continue practicing and in which resources are provided to them to help them progress quicker. And importantly, teachers no longer teach once the student has reached a certain level of skill. This is a bit of an oversimplication, but I think it generally holds up.

Another practical analogy I think about with the withering of the state is memory leaks. In low level computer programming, programmers need to tell the operating system things like “I need 8 bytes of memory for this object” and then later on tell it “I’m done with all these so they can be used for other things now”. And it’s a common mistake for people to write the setup code, think they’ll save time by not writing the teardown code, and then forget to do it later. So you end up with memory leaks, or dead memory that can’t be used for anything else despite having no further use. I think this is the behavior people are used to states implementing, but I don’t think that’s inherent behavior