What is the difference between Soceity and the State? Is there a difference?

The state is recognized as having a legitimate claim to the use of force.

Do you mean "what's the differnece between communisim and society" or do you mean the state as a governing body?

I mean what is the difference between "society" and "the state". Communism isn't mentioned anywhere.

Well the state is recognized by a society as an authoritative figure to create order in society. Society is a generalized term of a group of people. We belong to human society, to western or eastern or midestern society, to national societies, so on & so forth. The state is answerable to society if it breaks human norms. It will no longer be recognized as the state.

The state is our collective interest.

The state is the result of the social contract that we citizens enter in order to have a neutral protector of rights and property. The only reason for the state to exist in the first place, is to protect these two things and to help individuals flourish in their lives by doing so.

We entrust the state with decision making capabilities, force authority, and our tax revenue to fund it. The moment it ceases to serve us and instead seeks to serve itself is the moment it is time to seek new government.

Civil society and state is a tendentious distinction, as marx pointed out. the ruling elite are the state, as laclau and mouffe say. these sorts of distinctions between different "spheres" (ie. "political", "social", "public") are supported by hardcore republican and classical theorists like hannah arendt. not very useful for analyzing, ie. the disaggregated nature of state and the antagonistic (social) constitution of political subjectivities.