There are plenty of anarchists on the web and throughout history who have argued that the state needs to be eliminated. The countless number of arguments and books on the subject are extremely intriguing and compelling. But I'm already an anarchist. I know why the state should be eliminated; my next question is how? We no longer live in the year 1776. Whether we like it or not, the government overpowers us. Gun rights activists like to use this argument that we need our guns to protect ourselves from the government. However, those citizens are only under the illusion that their guns somehow protect themselves from the government. If the state wants to arrest someone, that person is either going to be arrested or killed. So how do we possibly rid the state?
To understand this, a few principles first need to be established. For one, when an anarchist says "governments should be eliminated," this may be more metaphorical than one might think. Government, as defined in this context, is an entity that has a monopoly on force which financially sustains itself by extorting funds from the masses. If an entity does not perform either of these functions, it ceases to be a "government" or a "state." Even though an entity may practice similar operations as a government (e.g., electing officials, setting down some rules, etc.), it is not a government if it does not monopolize force nor rely on theft as its income. To use an analogy, if someone were to advocate for the elimination of LLC's, this does not mean that he would want to eliminate a company such as Blockbuster, which is an LLC; rather, he would want to eliminate the ability for companies to receive limited liability and only have to pay one tax (as opposed to a corporation, which receives limited liability but is imposed with a double tax, or a sole proprietorship, which has unlimited liability but only has to pay one tax). Of course, that guy would probably recognize that Netflix is to Blockbuster as Facebook is to MySpace, but I digress. In sum, when an anarchist says that he wants to eliminate the state, what he's saying is that he wants to eliminate state power.
In order to determine how to rid a problem, it is useful to understand why the problem proceeds. If I'm a mechanic and the brakes are not working on a car, I'm going to figure out why the brakes are not working before trying to fix the problem. If my house alarm keeps sounding off every time I enter (including when I enter my code), I'm going to try to figure out why it keeps malfunctioning in order to eliminate the problem. In the context of state power, then, the question becomes: why does the government wield power?
Why does Superman wield power? It may seem like an odd comparison, but the principle can be applied universally. Superman's powers would be useless back on Krypton before it was destroyed because everyone had those powers. Superman had incredible power on Earth, however, because he was the exception. So how does the state have the power to tax, wage war, kidnap and cage peaceful people or exclude any other entity from enforcing law? It has the power because it is the exception. Google and Apple are typically overall perceived as good companies (they receive much less scrutiny than any government), but if either of these companies were to murder people by the thousands because they were brown or kidnapped and cage people because they refused to obey their diet, these companies would shortly go out of business. However, governments constantly exercise far more than merely these activities, yet they're running strong because they are the exception.
But what sort of "exception" is the government, exactly? Governments do not come down from other planets nor are they endowed with any type of supernatural abilities. The state is not Superman. No worthy human being would ever rationalize the activities that are practiced by governments on a daily basis if they were practiced by any other type of entities. Simultaneously, the vast majority of people support at least the bare minimum functionalities of government, not because of any variety of superhuman abilities, but because they believe, for whatever abstract reason, that government is a necessity. The exception, therefore, is not physical but psychological. Thus, state power is not acquired through the physical nature of government, but through people's perception of government.
In conclusion, the way to eliminate the state is to eliminate the psychological exception. The way to do this is to reach out to as many people as possible and convince them of these ideas. Talk and reason with people, write blogs, make your arguments heard. Without the exception, there is no power. Without power, there is no government. I know that the type of conversations an anarchist can have to make him think that there is no hope for the human race (I live in Vermont), but God damn it, if the Mormons and Muslims can somehow reach out and convince people of their completely irrational beliefs, we can spread the word of Logic.
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