Many political theorists say the core defining feature of the state is that it has a monopoly on legitimate, organized violence.
By this bare bones definition, can't it be said that anarchists are in favor of a state during a revolutionary period?
We agree that we need organized violence to defeat the state and fight any armed counterrevolution that might pop up afterwards.
I think we can also agree that if there are forms of organized violence outside of the revolutionary movement, this would be a threat to the revolution, illegitimate, and therefore in need of being suppressed.
Bottom line: the revolutionary movement needs to maintain a monopoly on organized violence.
So by that definition, wouldn't this be a state?
I'm not sure where I should stand on this. I still very much identify as anti-state. To me, the state is more than just a monopoly on legitimate, organized violence. It's when that organized violence serves a bureaucracy, a tiny fraction of the population which uses that organized violence to enforce its rule.
In a revolutionary period, the monopoly on organized violence should be accountable to the revolutionary movement as a whole. This movement will likely be organized in a federation of workers councils, soldiers councils, and in some countries perhaps peasant councils. And hopefully, they will be a direct democracy, so that the delegates on these councils are controlled from below. Delegates will not be "in power"; power will be spread evenly through everyone in the revolutionary movement.
So in one case, the monopoly on organized violence belong to a ruling bureaucracy. In the other, it belongs to the revolutionary masses. This is obviously a huge difference. And in my mind, this difference makes one thing a state and the other thing not.
But I'm not sure if this is accurate. Am I altering the definition of the state? Are anarchists in denial?
I could be wrong but anarchists do not want a monopoly on organised violence, anarchists will oragnise violence to the extent necessary to defend against the state's attempts to establish / re-establish a monopoly on violence.
I agree with what you say that setting up a monopoly on violence to defend the class interests of a few is part, maybe most of the definition of a state. Obviously violence to defend the masses, and from them, rather than in their name, is not the same thing. I think the danger is the leninist idea of siezing control of the state machinery in the name of the people to defend the revolution and very rapidly turning that force against proletarian enemies of the bureaucracy rather than enemies of the revolution.