I think I can answer this question, because of an experience I had as a child, one that is not very uncommon but which in several ways determined how my life would be.
When I was in the fifth grade, all of us were given a series of little tests that involved, I think, pattern-matching, grammar, a little math, etc. I don't recall knowing what it was about, but the result was that months later my parents received a letter saying that I would be allowed to go to another school over an hour away, where I would be taught "Humanities," along with about a hundred other students from all over the county we lived in, who had been identified by the tests as specially gifted. This school operated something called a "magnet" program, which meant that children like me (i.e., almost without exception, white or Asian, bookish, and with wealthy and/or educated parents) were bused from all around to do relatively more rigorous schooling in what would otherwise have been an "underperforming" and therefore underfunded school.
That school was in a much poorer district than the one I grew up in and, as I would discover, the children who were actually from that district had very different notions of what school was for, and very different expectations as to how their lives would go. They all took their classes with beleaguered teachers of their own race, who were constantly yelling at them. Buzzers by the doors of their classrooms allowed these teachers to call security on their own students and have them removed from the classroom. I remember distinctly the sound of those buzzers, because they were constantly being pressed. Posters hung on the walls of these classrooms that made promises like, No Student Will Fail My Class, something I had never even considered before. There were metal detectors in the building, which it took me some time to realize were not intended against me at all. There were also police, with guns, I remember, who payed me no attention but were constantly on the alert for these children, who my new friends obliquely called "non-magnets."
The point of this is to say that in the classes I was taking, everyone, including me, was a model of docility. I very often took painstaking and obsessive care with my homework, only to forget it on the kitchen table. On such occasions I would actually weep - and this was not at all unusual. This was because we were all being prepared for a specific kind of destiny that included elite schooling and then some position of responsibility and authority in capitalist white society. There was not one of us who had not already decided to submit completely to the kind of discipline that requires.
Somewhere in the Genealogy of Morals, I think, Nietzsche makes this argument that the more rich and powerful a state becomes, the more it can afford to be lenient, instead of cruel. I find it completely possible to imagine that as the planetary control of capital expands and deepens, very many more of us will have lives somewhat like the docile one I have led. That is, many more people, maybe everyone, will learn to police themselves well enough that no violence has to be used against us. There are, you know, countries where the police still do not carry firearms. In Japan I read that the police will sometimes address drunken disturbances by surrounding and cocooning the perpetrator in soft mattresses.
Can the state exist without physical violence? I am not sure. Certainly I don't think it ever has. But I know that for me, and for many others, it might as well. I also know that, far from making its presence acceptable to me, this fact is a pretty weighty and annoying psychic burden.
