"society" is understood as the complex, diverse total of people, communities, cultures, inherently connected to one another through overlapping relationships of both conflict and solidarity.
"democracy" is the self-governance of society through voluntary participation and collective consensus. society governs itself directly; people discuss issues and proposals directly with each other through communes, and come to collective decisions that shape their community's collective life. for larger-scale societies, democracy flows upwards from local communes to federations of communes through delegates, whose role is only to communicate the decisions of local communes, not to make decisions on their behalf. ideally, the system of federated direct democracy is built to explicitly include and facilitate the participation of women, queer people, various ethnic groups, disabled people, children and the elderly, etc. which make up society (which, again, is defined by its diversity).
states are best understood as, at their core, "economic monopol[ies] that [are] based on surplus product and value." they are centralized institutions that sit on top of society, and control what society produces (like food and other material goods).
societies can exist, thrive, and self-govern without states. but states cannot exist without societies to leech off of. the state exists in tension with society due to its extractive relationship with it. this is why states are defined by their use of "ideological tools, instruments of coercion, and the art of administration" in order to control society's worldview and justify the state's monopoly and power.
however, in practice the relationship between the state and society is complex. the pluralistic nature of society inevitably causes resistance to state oppression and these acts of resistance can force the state to make concessions in order to appease society. this is not the same as true liberation, but it is an important part of the dialectic relationship between the state and society/the commune. Ăcalan uses the narrative of "two rivers" to describe this relationship: state civilization is a force of centralization, patriarchy, exploitation, and hegemony, while democratic civilization is a force of pluralism, egalitarianism, liberation, and mutualism, and the back-and-forth conflict between these two rivers is the driving force of human history.
as a result, there can be no such thing as a "democratic state" as democracy means society governing itself, and state cannot be equated with society (equating the state with society is the basic idea of fascism). however, there can be "state plus democracy," where society has forced the state to establish some democratic structures which allows society some influence over governance. this is not truly democracy - society's self-governance is constrained institutionally, culturally, materially - but neither should we disregard them as a whole. when understood properly, in the context of the relationship between the state and democratic society, we can see these structures as hard-won sparks of democratic civilization that we need to fan into flames, rather than idealizing them as "democracy working as intended."
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