[Translated from Socialistische Gruppe]
Thesis 1: “Thank God we live in a constitutional state because here the state can’t do anything it wants to you.” This praise for the state transfigures the fact that in this country the state itself is subject to supervision by rights and laws into a protection of the citizens from the clutches of the sovereign.
The fact that the constitutional state is constrained by laws is generally thought of as a restraint on the state, because the state’s actions are subordinated to an even higher law that checks it. However, it is the state itself that guarantees the authority of the law with its power. If, however, it is the state, and only the state, that enforces the law, then the law, and thus its content, is also its work. The alleged restriction on the state by the law is thus not a restriction, because the law neither stands above the state nor is independent of it, but results from its action. Laws are not barriers to the state, but the way the state exercises its rule over the country and people.
Here the state is praised for the fact that it cannot do anything one fears it could to a person. Here, it is not something beneficial about the state that is positively emphasized, but the good thing about it is that it restricts a power that not even the state’s admirer is happy about: the power of the state to “do anything it wants” to its subjects. This praise of the constitutional state reduces to the fact that, although it could harass a person according to its whims and desires, it harasses according to certain – self-decreed! – procedures. Somewhat modest praise!
It is also suspicious that this praise of democracy comes about only by comparison with something “much more terrible,” measuring its achievement as a civilization by what it is not: the constitutional state is compared to “arbitrary government.” If – following the assertion – all state actions are not measured by laws, as in the constitutional state, the subjects are maltreated according to the whims and desires of greedy and power-hungry despots. This comparison is nonsense. Every form of rule – from the darkest barbarism through the ancien regime up to democracy – has its intentions and demands that it forces upon the ruled population; hence, these purposes of rule are therefore neither arbitrary nor do they continually change, still less are they about baseless, but for all that abysmally evil, despotism. What the constitutional state is compared to and what methods it forbids itself in the exercise of rule does not exist; it is a straw man. On the other hand, the rule of law, by an absurd comparison to its mere opposite, gets an absurd definition, i.e. only self-restraint of the state and otherwise nothing – as if in a modern democracy there are no reasons of state from which the reasons also arise for constitutional procedures.
Incidentally, in respect to praise for the rule of law, democracy differs neither from fascist nor real socialist states. Those comparisons will not help settle the case for the constitutional state. At this point, one notices that a good opinion of the state was fixed before the concern to justify it, and the praise is owed to a preconceived point of view.
Anyone who praises the state for the fact that it does not do “anything” to its citizens not only acknowledges that he is a subject of rule. He self-confidently behaves as the servant that rule makes him. The circumstance that one is subjected to rule is considered neither annoying nor criticizable, but is checked off if the only question is under which kind of authority one has to be nailed. And the appropriate answer is: the good person has found his rule; the citizen also has rights!
Rights are not a protection of the citizen from the clutches of the state, but the way the state exercises its rule. When the state obliges a country and people to obey its laws and declares that it wants to judge them only in relation to laws, it documents that it wants its exercise of rule not to serve a particular interest in the society, but to stand above all interests which have to adhere to its laws. It wants to serve the law and order established by it.
Thesis 2: “Laws, nevertheless, are necessary for living together.” This praise of the state transfigures the circumstance that the state subjects people to laws into a service for their living together.
If the people need rules for living together, the rules are also in the interest of the people: they exist in order to pursue a common purpose. Then, however, such rules are a means of the people and must not be asserted against them by force. One does not need a state, a higher authority, for such rules.
If the state organizes the living together of the people with its laws, then it enforces its rules against the people with its force apparatus (police, judiciary). Then the rules arise not from the interests of the people, but limit their interests. Such rules are not simply about “how something should be organized,” but about a force relationship in which the state subjects the interests of the people and executes its purposes as a body of higher standing.
If people need subordination under state regulations, thus restrictions by the state for living together, then the regulated thing, the living together of the people, is not their project, but that of the state. The so-called rules of the society are the state’s goals, which the people have to serve.
Thesis 3: “People need the state because people would torment each other without the constraint of law.” This praise of the state transfigures the circumstance that the state constrains people in their conflicts by subjecting them under laws into a means for civilizing them.
In this praise of the state, two contradictory qualities are attributed to humans. On the one hand, a human is always driven to murder and violence. On the other hand, a human needs the protection of the state. The state should serve humans by preventing them from lashing out and attacking each other. If that is the service that the state performs for humans, then tearing themselves to pieces is also not in their interest. On the other hand, there must also be humans who do not want to murder and pillage, but call for others to be tamed. So the praised side of humans is only the transferred negative image of the other side. Therefore, the state admirer drops the further inquiry: “is the human now a beast or an anti-beast?”
In this praise for the state, the necessity of the state is justified by human nature, which demands submission under the law. However, if a human is someone who sees the need to suppress his inner beast, then he needs no force over himself to tame him. If he is the one who wants only to attack others, then he wants no force to stop him – completely apart from the fact that the law does not prevent a single act of violence. Neither in the one nor the other case is the state justified by the alleged nature of humans.
In this praise for the state, the “desire to mutually maul one another” is treated as an automatic human trait. Contrary to this tautology, which gives as a reason for specific acts and drives only that people are like that, everyone knows that if one person attacks another he already has his reasons. He sees himself denied by the other in regard to something he judges important.
In this praise for the state, this way of treating people is assumed to be a completely normal way of handling things. It refers to a “happy” situation in which people are obviously busy mutually denying each other their interests. The fact that the use of one is the damage of the other, however, can follow neither from a groundless evil nature nor from the variability of interests. Rather, people must already be set into relations in which they pursue their means in conflict with each other.
The apologists regard this conflict between everyone's interests as so natural that they see the state only as a kind of reformatory.
The state refers to the conflicting interests between people in its laws. It fixes to what extent they may deny each other their means. Besides, the restriction of opposing interests (you may deny another’s means only so far and no further) is always at the same time their permission (however, you may, so far). Both granting rights to opposing interests and restricting them is the work of the state. In addition, then, it limits the conflicts of interests so that they can continue to exist.
Thesis 4: The reason for the all-pervasive laws for social co-existence is the property principle, on which the state obligates its people.
With rights, the state does not prescribe any principle of social interconnection, as is maintained in the above ideologies, but subordinates their co-existence to private property.The state guarantee of property enjoys the reputation of being an arrangement in the interest of using useful things (e.g., a bicycle, a computer).
The fact that the property guarantee is not about protecting or enabling the use of these nice things could not be more striking than when you go to the police to report a theft, e.g., of a bicycle. No police station in the world gives you a new bicycle for further use. You can only hope for the stolen item of daily use to be returned by the local authorities. Turned around, a title to property is not necessary for the use of a thing. This is clear to every thief when he steps gleefully on the pedals and takes off. Use is only a relationship between the user and the thing that has useful qualities.
The praise of property does not simply mean use, but lives on the idea that it is not sufficient to simply use appropriate useful things. Rather, use must be secured by the express right of disposal over the useful thing. And this is amusing because the assumption is that one can use an object only if one owns it. However, property does not make possible the use of useful things, but the opposite: the right – independent of the relation to use – to exclude others who need things from using them. One must always acquire the right to a thing just so that one can use it.
Property, which is the exclusive right of disposal over things that others need, thus subordinates needs to the excluding power of property.
Private property, private individual's exclusive disposal over the wealth of society, which others are dependent on for their existence, also has to do with use, but it is not a question of bicycles or computers, although it produces effects in the realm of individual consumption too. Dependence on what belongs to others takes place in the field of production and reproduction of social wealth. With the exclusive disposal over the means of production and thus over its products, wealth obtains the power to deny others their existence.
The state orders that everything answers to the excluding power of disposal of private individuals. The people are dependent on each other, so each disposes of the means of excluding others. It is a matter of extorting the other with his dependence and of getting rich this way. Then the use of one is the damage of the other. And because this competition exists as mutual exclusion and mutual damage, it presupposes not only a force that initiates it, but daily maintains it with its legal regulations and its jurisprudence and gives procedural form to the conflicts.