C4SS | February 1 2013
“Power is not to be conquered, it is to be destroyed. It is tyrannical by nature, whether exercised by a king, a dictator or an elected president. The only difference with the parliamentarian ‘democracy’ is that the modern slave has the illusion of choosing the master he will obey. The vote has made him an accomplice to the tyranny that oppresses him. He is not a slave because masters exist; masters exist because he elects to remain a slave.” – Jean-François Brient
The state is that entity which claims a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence in a given territory, according to Max Weber. The Hobbesian, Rousseauvian, Lockean perspectives are that the state arose from a world of chaos by social contract that vested a ruling class with a monopoly on violence (for the good of the people, of course).
The funny thing is, nobody can point to a point when the modern state arose. Perhaps it was a place like Çatalhöyük (ca. 7500 BC) or Sumer (ca. 2900 BC)—where a stratified society was structured on the basis of might. The earliest monarchies, empires, and republics—they are all essentially based in violence. Inalienable rights were unheard of – if you blasphemed God (or one of his temporal bureaucrats in the Vatican) within the Holy Roman Empire, you could be excommunicated and anyone could kill you without reprisal. Government is rule by some men [sic] over others, nothing more. So is ours—which, let the record show, was built out of slave labor. In some sense, it still is.
Voters place their hope in God-Kings called Presidents, expecting sociopaths to lift them out of servitude.
One feature unique to states is taxation, or the forcible extraction of property to be used in a way that the victim would not use themselves. It is the only entity that does this. Taxation is theft, everywhere and always. Goods and services like roads, schools and medical care can be and are best provided by the market. The state has no incentive to provide a quality product because it has no competitors. Capital intensive projects are not better handled by the state due to diffusion of responsibility and bureaucratic opacity. Taxation is extortion at gunpoint, a vestige of tribute paid by a subservient group to conquering armies, according to David Graeber, in his 2011 treatise Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
The only way we justify taxation is to use it to claw back the monopoly profits “earned” (stolen) by the class that has taken control of the machinery of the state (capitalists). But redistribution does not address the root of the problem: state-secured privilege conferred to the politically connected capital class. Capitalism is not to be conflated with free markets, which are wonderful institutions that have existed throughout human history.
Although controversial, the present scheme, Capitalism, has only been around since the Early Modern Period. Capitalism is defined by Gary Chartier in Markets Not Capitalism as “a symbiosis between big business and government, where the workplace is ruled by an individual called a boss.” It is not inevitable that we should live in a system where there are more empty houses than homeless people, or that there can be such a thing as a permanently impoverished working class. Voters place their hope in God-Kings called Presidents, expecting them to lift them out of servitude. The funny thing is, the rulers are drawn from the same elite class that holds essentially the same ideology as the prior masters. There are exceptions – Presidents who grew up poor, but they became wealthy prior to their inauguration and executed policies that favor the elite. One cannot become president without selling out to corporate interests because of campaign financing. Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.