Every exercise of freedom is a matter of permission. All the conflicts that people deal with in this country, the interests they pursue, are subject to approval by the authorities. Whether workers strike, globalization critics demonstrate, employers lay off part of their workforce or reduce wages, even if smokers smoke – everything is a question of law. The question is not whether someone damages someone else, but whether one has a right to. Actions that are in compliance with the statutes of state power, thus are legal, enjoy the protection of the public power against the other citizens whose interests are damaged by them. But actions that can’t show legal permission – regardless, apart from the law, of who or what they hurt – count as an attack on the authority of the state and will be prevented by force, suppressed, punished. The whole coexistence of the people - one has gotten so used to it that one does not even notice it – becomes determined by the orders of the political rule and governed by force.
1.
The modern state is the political power of capitalist society. It does not respond to a capitalism fallen from the sky, or wrestle with the laws of anarchic market conditions which it can do nothing about, but enacts the capitalist economic mode within its sphere of control. This is done by enacting a few basic rights. With the rights of the “free individual” and the real content of this freedom, the “protection of private property,” as well as the “equality of all citizens before the law,” the world of self-centered private property owners is created in which everyone searches for their own well-being at the expense of others and is realized in the exploitation of others' dependence on what belongs only to him: competition is politically created as the universal form of association of the citizens. From this war of all against all, the legal order makes the life of the society and each individual dependent on it and forces everyone to orient themselves towards it.
2.
The political power does not leave things alone within an abstract framework of regulations, but continuously intervenes into the enacted competition. With ever new laws, it regulates the actions of the citizens down to the smallest detail, not to prevent the ruinous and self-destructive consequences of the reciprocal exploitation and infliction of damages, but to make them functional for the greater whole and, in the last instance, for itself. It specifies to the private interests their permission to damage one another and draws their limits, creating and thus forming the social types who it then protects with its laws. The class of wage laborers, alongside and long after the propertied class, finds that they too are officially recognized as private owners whose property deserves official protection – even if they own nothing themselves. They are granted worker’s rights which recognize that their service to the national economy also depends on certain living conditions which are to be guaranteed as much as is feasible.
3.
Of course, the capitalist state does not limit itself to the role of neutral protector of the social classes created by it and to protecting the rights that it gives them. It supports the success of capitalistic wealth production, on which it has made all living conditions in the country, including its own financial base (tax revenue), dependent. This is why the state desires the growth of capital and the global competitive success of its national location. It provides for both with its economic policies, by making the whole society available as an investment site (infrastructure, education, research, cheap social insurances, etc.) and putting it at the service of the growth of capital. In this sense, it is the “ideal collective capitalist.”
4.
State decisions are made in the form of laws. The law is the state’s method of rule and functions even without democracy. In democracies, elected representatives of the people make policies by debating over legislation, i.e. which binding orders best lead the citizens of the different classes to promote capitalistic national success. The state power allows this debate only under the condition that the classes all recognize their dependence on the growth of capital as the precondition for their private interests, thus the priority of this precondition to their own interests. Otherwise, the capitalist state functions as a dictatorship. In the so-defined public interest, every fundamentally rightful status group tries to situate their special concerns as beneficial and necessary for the whole – of course, with very different degrees of success: the entrepreneurs can rightfully refer to the fact that everything in the country depends on their success, the common good is essentially at one with their private interests. The workers, by contrast, must always disrupt and damage the common good if they want to remind the country that their ability and willingness to do their service also has certain conditions and a price. If only representatives committed to the greater whole are free to examine the diverse issues and to decide on the exact amount of labor, maternity and environmental protection needed by the national capitalism to enable it to continue, and how much it can afford without hurting its growth and competitiveness, then the concerns of the less important part of the population have found their appropriate place in the system.
5.
The “struggle for rights” is permitted in democracy for dealing with unsatisfied or injured interests. Grass-roots movements, labor unions, political parties all promote their issues by pleading, demanding or lobbying the legislature, the big licensor, petitioning it to ennoble their concerns in laws, i.e. to at last use the power of the state to counter the interests of the other competing citizens.
Anyone who demands rights from the state basically holds it to be his protector – perhaps one late in coming, one who has lent his ear to the wrong advisors or the wrong lobby, but still a power that is appointed to do good deeds for those who, for some strange reason, are always weak under its regime.
Secondly, anyone who calls for protective rights has no objection against the competition that is set in motion by rights and leads to outcomes against which one needs new rights. Even those who might demand a right to work, a basic income, or a minimum wage do not turn against these results of competition – rich, poor and totally squalid. One requires only that this squalor should have limits and a general minimal existence be guaranteed.
Thirdly, anyone who demands rights believes that this demand fits the general state program and that it can find a little room for it. This can be correct. Anyone who wants nothing other than to supplement the existing state program in areas that are in the long term interest of the state and the success of its system is on the right track when he draws the legislators’ attention to failures and warns that there will be problems if they do not take care of them. Indeed, it is revealing of the priorities of the ideal collective capitalist that even considerations for the natural and social living conditions of its own system of exploitation can only be wrung from it by strikes and demonstrations. The environmental movement and the labor movement have seen demands become laws (the eight hour day, unemployment insurance, sick pay, the phasing out of nuclear power, etc.), but only and in so far as the legislators have recognized them as conditions for the long-term success of the nation’s capitalism.
6.
Anyone who has other objectives is better off not pursuing them by the demand for rights from the state. Anyone who does not aim for a subsistence level for the poor but for the elimination of poverty; who does not try to attain better treatment of the unemployed but the elimination of the absurdity that people fall into hardships because society no longer needs their labor; who does not only want a better position for the human “cost factor labor,” but to abolish their role as a cost factor in the way of the real economic goal – he does well to end the illusion that his objective is compatible with the existing state goals. He must know and make it clear to others that his case can be realized only if the valid state program is toppled and the political power which socially establishes it with its force is abolished. To obtain these goals, he will not want to be granted any rights.