Chapter 8: The Socio-psychological Foundations of Socialism or The Theory of The State

In the preceding chapters it has been demonstrated that socialism as a social system implying a redistribution of property titles away from user-owners and contractors to nonuser-owners and noncontractors necessarily involves a reduction in the production of wealth, since the use and contracting of resources are costly activities whose performance is made even more costly as compared with alternatives available to actors. Secondly, such a system cannot be defended as a fair or just social order from a moral point of view because to argue so, in fact to argue at all, in favor or against anything, be it a moral, nonmoral, empirical, or logico-analytical position, necessarily presupposes the validity of the first-use-first-own rule of the natural theory of property and capitalism, as otherwise no one could survive and then say, or possibly agree on, anything as an independent physical unit.

If neither an economic nor a moral case for socialism can be made, then socialism is reduced to an affair of merely social-psychological significance. What, then, are the socio-psychological foundations on which socialism rests? Or, since socialism has been defined as an institutionalized policy of redistribution of property titles away from user-owners and contractors, how is an institution that implements a more or less total expropriation of natural owners possible?

If an institution exists that is allowed to appropriate property titles other than through original appropriation or contract, it must assumedly damage some people who consider themselves to be the natural owners of these things. By securing and possibly increasing its monetary and/or non-monetary income it reduces that of other people—something categorically different from the situation that exists when there is a contractual relationship among people in which no one gains at the expense of anyone else but everyone profits, as otherwise there simply would not be any exchange. In this case one can expect resistance to the execution of such a policy. This inclination to resist can, of course, be more or less intensive, and it can change over time and become either more or less pronounced and pose a greater or smaller threat to the institution carrying out the policy of redistribution. But as long as it exists at all, the institution must reckon with it. In particular, it must reckon with it if one assumes that the people representing this institution are ordinary people who, like everyone else, have an interest not only in stabilizing their current income which they are able to secure for themselves in their roles as representatives of this institution but also in increasing this income as much as possible. How, and this is precisely the problem, can they stabilize and possibly increase their income from noncontractual exchanges, even though this necessarily creates victims—and, over time, increasing numbers of victims, or victims who are increasingly hurt?

The answer can be broken down into three parts which will be discussed in turn: (1) by aggressive violence; (2) by corrupting the public through letting them or rather parts of them share in the enjoyment of the receipts coercively extracted from natural owners of things; and (3) by corrupting the public through letting them or parts of them participate in the specific policy of expropriation to be enacted.

To assure its very existence, any institution that enforces a socialist theory of property must rely on the continual threat of violence. Any such institution threatens people who are unwilling to accept its noncontractual appropriations of their natural property with physical assault, imprisonment, enslavement, or even death, and it must carry out such threats if necessary, in order to stay ‘trust-worthy” as the kind of institution that it is. Since one is dealing with an institution—an organization, that is, which performs these actions on a regular basis—it is almost self-explanatory that it refuses to call its own practice of doing things “aggression,” and instead adopts a different name for it, with neutral or possibly even positive connotations. In fact, its representatives might not even think that they themselves are aggressors when acting in the name of this organization. However, it is not names or terms that matter here or elsewhere, but what they really mean.¹³² Regarding the content of its actions, violence is the cornerstone of socialisms existence as an institution. And to leave no room for misunderstanding here, the violence on which socialism rests is not the kind of violence that a natural owner of things would use or threaten to use against aggressive intruders of his property. It is not the defensive threat toward a prospective murderer of, let us say, subjecting him to capital punishment, should he in fact murder someone. Rather, it is aggressive violence directed at innocent victims. An institution carrying out socialism literally rests on the threat posed by a prospective murderer against innocent people (i.e., people who have not done any physical harm whatsoever to anyone) to kill them should they not comply with his demands, or even to kill them just for the “fun” of killing.

It is not at all difficult to recognize the truth of this. In order to do so, it is only necessary to assume a boycott of any exchange-relation with the representatives of socialism because such an exchange, for whatever reasons, no longer seems profitable. It should be clear that in a social system based on the natural theory of property—under capitalism—anyone would have the right to boycott at any time, as long as he was indeed the person who appropriated the things concerned by using them before anyone else did or by acquiring them contractually from a previous owner. However much a person or institution might be affected by such a boycott, it would have to tolerate it and suffer silently, or else try to persuade the boycotter to give up his position by making a more lucrative offer to him. But it is not so with an institution that puts socialist ideas regarding property into effect. Try, for instance, to stop paying taxes or to make your future payments of taxes dependent on certain changes or improvements in the services that the institution offers in return for the taxes—it would fine, assault, imprison you, or perhaps do even worse things to you. Or to use another example, try to ignore this institution's regulations or controls imposed on your property. Try, that is to say, to make the point that you did not consent to these limitations regarding the use of your property and that you would not invade the physical integrity of anyone else’s property by ignoring such impositions, and hence, that you have the right to secede from its jurisdiction, to “cancel your membership” so to speak, and from then on deal with it on equal footing, from one privileged institution to another. Again, assumedly without having aggressed against anyone through your secession, this institution would come and invade you and your property, and it would not hesitate to end your independence. As a matter of fact, if it did not do so, it would stop being what it is. It would abdicate and become a regular private property owner or a contractual association of such owners. Only because it does not so abdicate is there socialism at all. Indeed, and this is why the title of this chapter suggested that the question regarding the socio-psychological foundations of socialism is identical to that of the foundations of a state, if there were no institution enforcing socialistic ideas of property, there would be no room for a state, as a state is nothing else than an institution built on taxation and unsolicited, noncontractual interference with the use that private people can make of their natural property. There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.¹³³

But socialism, or the state as the incorporation of socialist ideas, does not rest exclusively on aggression. The representatives of the state do not engage solely in aggressive acts in order to stabilize their incomes, though without it there would not be any state! As long as the relationship between the state and private property owners is exclusively a parasitic one, and the activities of the representatives of the state consist entirely of unsolicited interferences with other people’s property rights, designed to increase the income of the former at the expense of a corresponding reduction in income of the latter, and these agents of socialism then do nothing else with their income than consume it for their own private purposes, then the chances for the state's growth and the spread of socialism are at least very limited and narrow. Certainly, one man, or one group of men, possessed with sufficient aggressive energies can inspire enough fear in one and possibly even in a few others, or in another more numerous group of men who, for whatever reason, lack such characteristics, and can establish a stable relationship of exploitation. But it is impossible to explain the fact, characteristic of all states and each and every socialist social system, that the group of men representing the state can hold people ten, a hundred, or even a thousand times more numerous than they themselves in submission, and extract from them the incredibly large amounts of income that they in fact do, only by instilling fear in them.

It might be thought that an increase in the degree of exploitation could explain the size of income. But from the economic reasoning of previous chapters we know that a higher degree of exploitation of natural owners necessarily reduces their incentive to work and produce, and so there is a narrow limit to the degree to which one person (or group of persons) can lead a comfortable life on the income coercively extracted from another person (or a roughly equally sized group of persons) who would have to support this lifestyle through his (their) work. Hence, in order for the agents of socialism to be able to lead a comfortable life and prosper as they do, it is essential that the number of exploited subjects be considerably larger and grow over-proportionally as compared with those of the representatives of the state itself. With this, however, we are back to the question of how the few can rule the many.

There would also be no convincing way around this explanatory task by arguing that the state could simply solve this problem by improving its weaponry; by threatening with atomic bombs instead of with guns and rifles, so to speak, thereby increasing the number of its subjects. Since realistically one must assume that the technological know-how of such improved weaponry can hardly be kept secret, especially if it is in fact applied, then with the state's improved instruments for instilling fear, mutatis mutandis the victims’ ways and means of resisting improve as well, and hence, such advances can hardly be thought of as explaining what has to be explained.¹³⁴ One must conclude, then, that the problem of explaining how the few can rule the many is indeed real, and that socialism and the state as the incorporation of socialism must rest in addition to aggression on some sort of active support among the public.

David Hume is one of the classic expositors of this insight. In his essay on “The first principles of government” he argues:

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination. But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes or praetorian bands, like men, by their opinion.¹³⁵

How indeed is this support brought about? One important component in the process of generating it is ideology. The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions are positive rather than negative. Such ideologies, spread to stabilize a state’s existence and increase its income, claim that socialism offers a superior economic system or a social order that is more just than capitalism, or claim that there is no such thing as justice at all prior to the state's stepping in and simply declaring certain norms to be just.¹³⁶ And such ideologies, too, less attractive now, but once extremely powerful, are those, for example, of the state being sanctified by religion, or of the rulers not being ordinary people but instead god-like superhumans, who must be obeyed because of their natural superiority. I have gone to great lengths in previous chapters to demonstrate that such ideas are false and unjustified, and I will return to the task of analyzing and unmasking another fashionable ideology in the final chapter of this treatise. But regardless of the falsity of these ideologies, it must be recognized that they certainly do have some effect on people, and that they do contribute—some more so than others—to their submission to a policy of aggressive invasion of the property rights of natural owners.

Yet there is another more important component contributing to public support and this is not verbal propaganda, but rather actions with a clear-cut, tangible impact. Instead of being a mere parasitic consumer of goods that other people have produced, the state, in order to stabilize itself and increase its income as much as possible, adds some positive ingredients to its policy, designed to be of use to some people outside the circle of its own personnel. Either it is engaged as an agent of income transfer, i.e., as an organization that hands out monetary or nonmonetary income to B that it has previously taken away from A without A's consent—naturally after subtracting a handling charge for the never costless act of such a transfer—or it engages in the production of goods or services, using the means expropriated earlier from natural owners, and thus contributes something of value to the users/buyers/consumers of these goods. Either way, the state generates support for its role. The recipients of transferred incomes as well as the users/ consumers of state-produced goods and services become dependent to varying degrees on the continuation of a given state policy for their current incomes, and their inclination to resist the socialism embodied in state rule is reduced accordingly.

But this is only half of the picture. The positive achievements of the state are not undertaken simply to do something nice for some people, as, for instance, when someone gives somebody else a present. Nor are they done simply to gain as high an income as possible from the exchange for the organization doing them, as when an ordinary, profit-oriented institution engages in trade. Rather, they are undertaken in order to secure the existence and contribute to the growth of an institution that is built on aggressive violence. As such, the positive contributions emanating from the state must serve a strategic purpose. They must be designed to break up resistance to or add support for the continued existence of an aggressor as an aggressor. Of course, the state can err in this task, as can any ordinary business, because its decisions about what measures best serves its strategic purposes have to be made in anticipation of certain expected results. And if it errs with respect to the responses following its policy decisions, instead of rising its income can fall, jeopardizing its very existence, just as a profit-oriented institution can make losses or even go bankrupt if the public is not willing to deliberately buy what it was expected to buy. But only if the peculiar strategic purpose of state transfers and state production as compared with private transfers or production is understood does it become possible to explain typical, recurring structural patterns of a state's actions, and to explain why states generally and uniformly prefer to go into certain lines of activities rather than others.

As regards the first problem: it does not make sense for a state to exploit every individual to the same extent, since this would bring everyone against it, strengthen the solidarity among the victims, and in any case, it would not be a policy that would find many new friends. It also does not make sense for a state to grant its favors equally and indiscriminately to everybody. For if it did, the victims would still be victims, although perhaps to a lesser degree. However, there would then be less income left to be distributed to people who would truly profiteer from state action, and whose increased support could help compensate for the lack of support from victimized persons. Rather, state policy must be and indeed is guided by the motto “divide et impera”: treat people differently, play them against each other, exploit one possibly smaller group and favor another possibly larger group at the former’s expense, and so counterbalance increased resentment or resistance of some by increased support of others. Politics, as politics of a state, is not “the art of doing the possible,” as statesmen prefer to describe their business. It is the art, building on an equilibrium of terror, of helping to stabilize state income on as high a level as possible by means of popular discrimination and a popular, discriminatory scheme of distributional favors. To be sure, a profit-oriented institution can also engage in discriminatory business policies, but to do so and to follow a discriminatory employment policy or not to sell indiscriminately to anyone who is willing to pay the price set for a given service or product is costly, and so an economic incentive to avoid such action exists. For the state, on the other hand, there is every incentive in the world to engage in such discriminatory practices.¹³⁷

Regarding the kinds of services preferably offered by the state: clearly, the state cannot produce everything, or at least not everything to the same extent, for if it tried to do so its income would actually fall—as the state can only appropriate what has in fact been produced earlier by natural owners, and the incentive to produce anything in the future would be almost completely gone in a system of all-around socialization. It is of utmost importance in trying to implement socialism, then, that a state engage in and concentrate on the production and provision of such goods and services (and, mutatis mutandis, drive private competitors out of competition in such lines of productive activities, thereby monopolizing their provision) which are strategically relevant for preventing or suppressing any actual revolt, rebellion, or revolution.¹³⁸

Thus, all states—some more extensively than others, but every state to a considerable degree—have felt the need to take the system of education, for one thing, into their own hands. It either directly operates the educational institutions, or indirectly controls such institutions by making their private operation dependent on the granting of a state license, thus insuring that they operate within a predefined framework of guidelines provided by the state. Together with a steadily extended period of compulsory schooling, this gives the state a tremendous head start in the competition among different ideologies for the minds of the people. Ideological competition which might pose a serious threat to state rule can thereby be eliminated or its impact considerably reduced, especially if the state as the incorporation of socialism succeeds in monopolizing the job market for intellectuals by making a state license the prerequisite for any sort of systematic teaching activity.¹³⁹

The direct or indirect control of traffic and communication is of similar strategic importance for a state. Indeed, all states have gone to great pains to control rivers, coasts and seaways, streets and railroads, and especially, mail, radio, television, and telecommunication systems. Every prospective dissident is decisively restrained in his means of moving around and coordinating the actions of individuals if these things are in the hand or under the supervision of the state. The fact, well known from military history, that traffic and communication systems are the very first command posts to be occupied by any state attacking another vividly underlines their central strategic significance in imposing state rule on a society.

A third central concern of strategic relevance for any state is the control and possible monopolization of money. If the state succeeds in this task and, as is the case now all over the world, supplants a system of free banking and metal-based currency—most commonly the gold standard—with a monetary system characterized by a state-operated central bank and paper-money backed by nothing but paper and ink, a great victory has indeed been reached. In its permanent struggle for higher income, the state is no longer dependent on the equally unpopular means of increased taxation or currency depreciation (coin-clipping), which at all times has been unmasked quickly as fraudulent. Rather, it can now increase its own revenue and decrease its own debt almost at will by printing more money, as long as the additional money is brought into circulation before the inflationary consequences of this practice have taken effect or have been anticipated by the market.¹⁴⁰

Fourth and last, there is the area of the production of security, of police, defense, and judicial courts.

Of all the state-provided or controlled goods or services this is certainly the area of foremost strategic importance. In fact, it is of such great significance for any state to gain control of these things, to outlaw competitors, and to monopolize these activities, that “state” and “producer of law and order” have frequently been considered synonyms. Wrongly so, of course, as the state must be correctly described as an institution of organized aggression attempting only to appear as an ordinary producer in order to continue aggressing against innocent natural owners. But the fact that this confusion exists and is widely shared can be explained with reference to the observation that all states must monopolize the production of security because of its central strategic importance, and hence, these two terms, different as they are with respect to their intentional meaning, indeed have the same extensional meaning.

It is not difficult to see why in order to stabilize its existence, a state cannot, under any circumstances, leave the production of security in the hands of a market of private property owners.¹⁴¹ Since the state ultimately rests on coercion, it requires armed forces. Unfortunately (for any given state, that is), other armed states exist which implies that there is a check on a state's desire to expend its reign over other people and thereby increase its revenue appropriated through exploitation. It is unfortunate for a given state, too, that such a system of competing states also implies that each individual state is somewhat limited regarding the degree to which it can exploit its own subjects, as their support might dwindle if its own rule is perceived as more oppressive than that of competing states. For then the likelihood of a state’s subjects collaborating with a competitor in its desire to ‘take over,” or that of voting with their feet (leaving one’s own country and going to a different one) might increase.¹⁴² It is even more important, then, for each individual state to avoid any such unpleasant competition from other potentially dangerous armed organizations at least within the very territory it happens to control. The mere existence of a private protection agency, armed as it would have to be to do its job of protecting people from aggression and employing people trained in the use of such arms, would constitute a potential threat to a state’s ongoing policy of invading private people’s property rights. Hence, such organizations, which would surely spring upon the market as the desire to be protected against aggressors is a genuine one, are eagerly outlawed, and the state arrogates this job to itself and its monopolistic control. As a matter of fact, states everywhere are highly intent on outlawing or at least controlling even the mere possession of arms by private citizens—and most states have indeed succeeded in this task—as an armed man is clearly more of a threat to any aggressor than an unarmed man. It bears much less risk for the state to keep things peaceful while its own aggression continues, if rifles with which the taxman could be shot are out of the reach of everyone except the taxman himself!

With respect to the judicial system matters are quite similar. If the state did not monopolize the provision of judicial services, it would be unavoidable that, sooner or later (and most likely sooner), the state would come to be regarded as the unjust institution it in fact is. Yet no unjust organization has any interest in being recognized as such. For one thing, if the state did not see to it that only judges appointed and employed by the state itself administered the law, it is evident that public law (those norms regulating the relationship between the state and private individuals or associations of such individuals) would have no chance of being accepted by the public, but instead would be unveiled immediately as a system of legalized aggression, existing in violation of almost everyone’s sense of justice. And secondly, if the state did not also monopolize the administration of private law (those norms regulating the relationships among private citizens) but left this task to competing courts and judges, dependent on the public’s deliberate financial support, it is doubtful that norms implying an asymmetrical distribution of rights or obligations between different persons or classes of persons would have even the slightest chance of becoming generally accepted as valid laws. Courts and judges who laid down such rules would immediately go bankrupt due to a lack of continued financial assistance.¹⁴³ However, since the state is dependent on a policy of divide et impera to maintain its power, it must stop the emergence of a competitive system of private law courts at all costs.

Without a doubt, all of these state-provided services—education, traffic and communication, money and banking, and, most importantly, security and the administration of justice—are of vital importance to any society whatsoever. All of them would certainly have to be provided, and would, in fact, be produced by the market if the state did not take these things into its own hands. But this does not mean that the state is simply a substitute for the market. The state engages in these activities for an entirely different reason than any private business would—not simply because there is a demand for them, but rather because these areas of activities are of essential strategic importance in assuring the state's continued existence as a privileged institution built on aggressive violence. And this different strategic intent is responsible for a peculiar kind of product. Since the educators, employees of traffic and communication systems, those of central banks, the police and judges, are all paid by taxes, the kind of products or services provided by a state, though certainly of some positive value to some people, can never be of such quality that everyone would deliberately spend his own money on them. Rather, these services all share the characteristic that they contribute to letting the state increase its own coercively extracted income by means of benefiting some while harming others.¹⁴⁴

But there is even more to the socio-psychological foundations of the state as an institution of continued aggression against natural owners than the popular redistribution of strategically important goods and services. Equally important for the state's stability and growth is the decision-making structure which it adopts for itself: its constitution. An ordinary profit-oriented business would try to adopt a decision-making structure best suited to its goal of maximizing income through the perception and implementation of entrepreneurial opportunities, i.e., differences in production costs and anticipated product demand. The state, in comparison, faces the entirely different task of adopting a decision-making structure which allows it to increase maximally its coercively appropriated income—given its power to threaten and bribe persons into supporting it by granting them special favors.

I submit that the best decision-making structure for doing so is a democratic constitution, i.e., the adoption of majority rule. In order to realize the validity of this thesis, only the following assumption need be made. Not only the persons actually representing the state have the desire (which they, incidentally, are always permitted to satisfy) to increase their income at the expense of a corresponding income reduction of natural owners, producers, and contractors; this lust for power and the desire to rule others also exists among the people governed. Not everyone has this desire to the same extent; indeed some people might never have it. But most people have it quite normally on recurring occasions. If this is so (and experience informs us that this is indeed the case), then the state must reckon with resistance from two analytically distinct sources. On the one hand there is resistance by the victims which any state policy creates. The state can try to break this up by making supportive friends; and indeed it will succeed in doing so to the extent that people can be corrupted through bribery. On the other hand, if lust for power exists among the victims and/or the persons favored by a given state policy, then there must also be resistance or at least discontent originating from the fact that any given policy of expropriation and discriminatory distribution automatically excludes any other such policy with its advocates in the state-ruled population, and hence must frustrate their particular plan of how power should be used. By definition, no change in the expropriation-redistribution policy of the state can eliminate this sort of discontent, as any change would necessarily exclude a different policy. Thus, if the state wants to do something to reduce the resistance (stemming from the frustration of one’s lust for power) that any one particular policy implies, it can only do so by adopting a decision-making structure which minimizes the disappointment of potential power wielders: by opening up a popular scheme of participation in decision making, so that everyone lusting for his particular power policy can hope to have a shot at it in the future.

This, precisely, is the function of a democracy. Since it is based on a respect for the majority, it is by definition a popular constitution for decision making. And as it indeed opens up the chance for everyone to lobby for his own specific plan of wielding power at regular intervals, it maximally reduces current frustrated lust for power through the prospect of a better future. Contrary to popular myth, the adoption of a democratic constitution has nothing to do with freedom or justice.¹⁴⁵ Certainly, as the state restrains itself in its use of aggressive violence when engaging in the provision of some positively valued goods and services, so it accepts additional constraints when the incumbent rulers subject themselves to the control of the majority of those being ruled. Despite the fact, though, that this constraint fulfills the positive function of satisfying certain desires of certain people by reducing the intensity of the frustrated lust for power, it by no means implies the state's forsaking its privileged position as an institution of legalized aggression. Rather, democratizing the state is an organizational measure undertaken for the strategic purpose of rationalizing the execution of power, thereby increasing the amount of income to be aggressively appropriated from natural owners. The form of power is changed, but majority rule is aggression, too. In a system based on the natural theory of property—under capitalism—majority rule does not and cannot play any role (apart from the fact, of course, that if accepted, anyone could join an association adopting majority rule, such as a sports club or an association of animal lovers, whose jurisdiction is deliberately accepted by members as binding for the duration of one’s membership). In such a system, only the rules of original appropriation of goods through use or contractual acquisition from previous owners are valid. Appropriation by decree or without a previous user-owner’s consent regardless of whether it was carried out by an autocrat, a minority, against a majority, or by a majority against a minority is without exception an act of aggressive violence. What distinguishes a democracy from an autocracy, monarchy, or oligarchy is not that the former means freedom, whereas the others mean aggression. The difference between them lies solely in the techniques used to manage, transform, and channel popular resistance fed by the frustrated lust for power. The autocrat does not allow the population to influence policy in any regular, formalized way, even though he, too, must pay close attention to public opinion in order to stabilize his existence. Thus, an autocracy is characterized by the lack of an institutionalized outlet for potential power wielders. A democracy, on the other hand, has precisely such an institution. It allows majorities, formed according to certain formalized rules, to influence policy changes regularly. Accordingly, if disappointed lust for power becomes more tolerable when there is a regular outlet for it, then there must be less resistance to democratic rule than to autocratic power. This important socio-psychological difference between autocratic and democratic regimes has been described masterfully by B. de Jouvenel:

From the twelfth to the eighteenth century governmental authority grew continuously. The process was understood by all who saw it happening; it stirred them to incessant protest and to violent reaction.—In later times its growth has continued at an accelerated pace, and its extension has brought a corresponding extension of war. And now we no longer understand the process, we no longer protest, we no longer react. This quiescence of ours is a new thing, for which Power has to thank the smoke-screen in which it has wrapped itself. Formerly it could be seen, manifest in the person of the king, who did not disclaim being the master he was, and in whom human passions were discernible. Now, masked in anonymity, it claims to have no existence of its own, and to be but the impersonal and passionless instrument of the general will.—But that is clearly a fiction.—... Today as always Power is in the hands of a group of men who control the power house ... . All that has changed is that it has now been made easy for the ruled to change the personnel of the leading wielders of Power. Viewed from one angle, this weakens Power, because the wills which control a society’s life can, at the society’s pleasure, be replaced by other wills, in which it feels more confidence.—But by opening the prospect of Power to all the ambitious talents, this arrangement makes the extension of Power much easier. Under the “ancien regime,” society’s moving spirits, who had, as they knew, no chance of a share in Power, were quick to denounce its smallest encroachment. Now, on the other hand, when everyone is potentially a minister, no one is concerned to cut down an office to which he aspires one day himself, or to put sand in a machine which he means to use himself when his turn comes. Hence, it is that there is in the political circles of a modern society a wide complicity in the extension of Power.¹⁴⁶

Given an identical population and an identical state policy of the discriminatory provision of goods and services, a democratic state has more opportunities for increasing its own aggressively appropriated income. And mutatis mutandis, an autocracy must settle for a relative lower income. In terms of the classics of political thought, it must rule more wisely, i.e., rule less. Since it does not allow any will other than that of the autocrat, and perhaps his immediate advisors, to gain power or influence policy on a regular basis, its execution of power appears less tolerable to those ruled. Thus, its stability can only be secured if the overall degree of exploitation enacted by the state is relatively reduced.

The situation over the last two centuries vividly illustrates the validity of this thesis. During this time we have experienced an almost universal substitution of relatively democratic regimes for relatively autocratic-monarchical systems.¹⁴⁷ (Even Soviet Russia is notably more democratic than czarist Russia ever was.) Hand in hand with this change has gone a process never experienced before regarding its speed and extent: a permanent and seemingly uncontrollable growth of the state. In the competition of different states for exploitable populations, and in these states’ attempts to come to grips with internal resistance, the democratic state has tended to win outright over the autocratic one as the superior power-variant. Ceteris paribus, it is the democratic state—and the democratic socialism incorporated in it—which commands the higher income and so proves to be superior in wars with other states. And ceteris paribus, it is this state, too, that succeeds better in the management of internal resistance: it is, and historically this has been shown repeatedly, easier to save the power of a state by democratizing it than by doing the opposite and autocratizing its decision-making structure.

Here, then, we have the socio-psychological foundations of the state as the very institution enacting socialism. Any state rests on the monopolization or the monopolistic control of strategically important goods and services which it discriminately provides to favored groups of people, thereby breaking down resistance to a policy of aggression against natural owners. Furthermore, it rests on a policy of reducing the frustrated lust for power by creating outlets for public participation in future changes in a policy of exploration. Naturally, every historical description of a state and its specific socialist policy and policy changes will have to give a more detailed account of what made it possible for socialism to become established and to grow. But if any such description is supposedly complete and is not to fall prey to ideological deception, then all measures taken by the state must be described as embedded in this very institutional framework of violence, divide et impera, and democratization.

Whatever any given state does in terms of positively evaluated contributions to society, and however great or small the extent of such contributions might be; whether the state provides help for working mothers with dependent children or gives medical care, engages in road or airport construction; whether it grants favors to farmers or students, devotes itself to the production of educational services, society’s infrastructure, money, steel or peace; or even if it does all of these things and more, it would be completely fallacious to enumerate all of this and leave it at that. What must be said in addition is that the state can do nothing without the previous noncontractual expropriation of natural owners. Its contributions to welfare are never an ordinary present, even if they are given away free of charge, because something is handed out that the state does not rightfully own in the first place. If it sells its services at cost, or even at a profit, the means of production employed in providing them still must have been appropriated by force. And if it sells them at a subsidized price, aggression must continue in order to uphold the current level of production.

The situation is similar with respect to a state’s decision-making structure. Whether a state is organized autocratically or democratically, has a centralized or decentralized decision-making structure, a single or multi stage representational structure; whether it is organized as a system of parties or as a corporate state, it would be delusory to describe it in these terms and leave it at that. In order to be exhaustive, what must be added is that first and foremost, the constitution of a state is an organizational device for promoting its existence as an institution of aggression. And insofar as its stability rests on constitutionally guaranteed rights to participate in the inauguration of policy changes, it must be stressed that the state rests on an institutionalized appeal to motivational energies that people in their private lives would regard as criminal and accordingly would do everything to suppress. An ordinary business enterprise has a decision-making structure that must adapt to the purpose of enabling it to secure as high a profit as possible from sales to deliberately supportive customers. A state's constitution has nothing in common with this, and only superficial sociological “studies in organization” would engage in investigations of structural similarities or differences between the two.¹⁴⁸

Only if this is thoroughly understood can the nature of the state and socialism be fully grasped. And only then can there be a complete understanding of the other side of the same problem: what it takes to overcome socialism. The state cannot be fought by simply boycotting it, as a private business could, because an aggressor does not respect the negative judgment revealed by boycotts. But it also cannot simply be fought by countering its aggression with defensive violence, because the state's aggression is supported by public opinion.¹⁴⁹ Thus, everything depends on a change in public opinion. More specifically, everything depends on two assumptions and the change that can be achieved regarding their status as realistic or unrealistic. One such assumption was implied when it was argued above that the state can generate support for its role by providing certain goods and services to favored groups of people. There, evidently, the assumption involved was that people can be corrupted into supporting an aggressor if they receive a share, however small, of the benefits. And, since states exist everywhere, this assumption, happily for the state, must indeed be said to be realistic everywhere, today. But then, there is no such thing as a law of nature stating that this must be so forever. In order for the state to fail in reaching its objective, no more and no less than a change in general public opinion must take place: state-supportive action must come to be regarded and branded as immoral because it is support given to an organization of institutionalized crime. Socialism would be at its end if only people stopped letting themselves be corrupted by the state's bribes, but would, let us say, if offered, take their share of the wealth in order to reduce the state's bribing power, while continuing to regard and treat it as an aggressor to be resisted, ignored, and ridiculed, at any time and in any place.

The second assumption involved was that people indeed lust for power and hence can be corrupted into state-supportive action if given a chance to satisfy this lust. Looking at the facts, there can hardly be any doubt that today this assumption, too, is realistic. But once again, it is not realistic because of natural laws, for at least in principle, it can deliberately be made unrealistic.¹⁵⁰ In order to bring about the end of statism and socialism, no more and no less must be accomplished than a change in public opinion which would lead people away from using the institutional outlets for policy participation for the satisfaction of power lust, but instead make them suppress any such desire and turn this very organizational weapon of the state against it and push uncompromisingly for an end to taxation and regulation of natural owners wherever and whenever there is a chance of influencing policy.¹⁵¹