A state is characterised as a body with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence that arises and exists where and while irreconsible class differences and antagonism exists within a given society and is a realization of the "dictatorship" of a class and the suppression of an other(s) as an attempt to stabilize, solve and mitigate that in the benifit of the rulling one. A government is a formal set of institutions and "people" to administrate and manage a state or a community and largely is limited in its scope compared to a state by having its administrative nature and not foundementaly encompassing the actions of organized institutions of force and their (millitary,police) or ideological apparatuses. Ecompassing all that and more the state is the totality apparatuses of class rule and their actions so everything constituting a goverment is a part of the state but not vice versa and without that meaning that government can only exist within a state

When existing within a state, the government and state are almost very hard if not impossible to differentiate and its set of tools,rules and functions in practice carry and are formed by the class character of the given state. They serve each other, as the government provides legitimacy for the state. However, under a DotP and later while the state withers away, the functions of government would still continue in one form or another regardless, with many tools and and functions that parallel ones of todays goverments (how couldnt they) but with form that has to be discovered and developed in practice during the transition to communism and to best serve that. The certain thing is that the government doesnt wither away in the same way as the state but transofrms and sheds its class character and remains only as the organization and administration of things on different scales. A majority of these things are obviously largely organized and administated today by governments but in a forms and ways that have been developed in various degrees inseperably from the class character of the state. A bunch of the most basic administative functions that exist and will exist in any complex modern society arent direct and important tools of class opression, probably lwill argely remain unchanged between states of different class characters and even between current bourgois state and the form of societal organization in communism. But that is discovered in practice more than anything

Also a quote from Stalin

Our state must not be confused, and, hence, identified, with our government. Our state is the organisation of the proletarian class as the state power, whose function it is to crush the resistance of the exploiters, to organise a socialist economy, to abolish classes, etc. Our government, however, is the top and leading section of this state organisation. The government may make mistakes, may commit blunders fraught with the danger of a temporary collapse of the dictatorship of the proletariat; but that would not mean that the proletarian dictatorship, as the principle of the structure of the state in the transition period, is wrong or mistaken. It would only mean that the the policy of the government, is not in conformity with the dictatorship of the proletariat and must be changed in conformity with the demands of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The state and the government are alike in their class nature, but the government is narrower dimensionally, and does not embrace the whole state. They are organically connected and interdependent, but that does not mean that they may be lumped together.

You see, then, that our state must not be confused with our government, just as the proletarian class must not be confused with the top leadership of the proletarian class.

But it is still less permissible to confuse the question of the class nature of our state and of our government with that of the day-to-day policy of our government.

the state is actually more precisely defined as the 90s sketch show that launched your favorite comedians

Are state and government even different things?

Yes because there are different forms of states and there are different forms of governance but a state refers to a specific entity whereas "government" really just means how we organize our community, it could be a tenants organization, a community garden, a city council, a mutual aid organization, a union, all of these require some sort of governance in the form of collective guiding principle and adherence to a mutually accepted set of rules or social contract.

I think that's an important distinction even if it sounds pedantic, because there's a lot of talk about "the government" in the US and more broadly the west that obfuscates critique of a specific state or policy by state actors.

It leads to a paradoxical notion that government = bad so we must entrust corporations that are in their own right governing bodies unto themselves.

Another distinctive characteristic is that the state must be upheld by violence or the threat of violence, this is important to understand when it comes to imperialism, anti-imperialism, and critical support not just for AES but states fighting against colonialism in general. As long as the struggle for liberation from the dictatorship of capital continues there will be pockets of resistance that will take shape in the form of states as a method of protecting any ground gained through revolution. Not all of them will be socialist and not all of them will be worth defending on any other front but toward the end of breaking US imperial hegemony.