sourceType:: book author:: Murray Rothbard sourcePublication:: book ref:: noteTitle:: Anatomy Of The State; Murray Rothbard. (book)
Anatomy Of The State; Murray Rothbard. (book)
See also ref_the-anarchist-handbook-michael-malice
highlights
the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet
Man is born naked into the world, and needing to use his mind to learn how to take the resources given him by nature, and to transform them (for example, by investment in “capital”) into shapes and forms and places where the resources can be used for the satisfaction of his wants and the advancement of his standard of living. The only way by which man can do this is by the use of his mind and energy to transform resources (’production“) and to exchange these products for products created by others. Man has found that, through the process of voluntary, mutual exchange, the productivity and hence, the living standards of all participants in exchange may increase enormously.
German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutu ally exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the “economic means.” The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppen heimer termed “the political means” to wealth.
The “political means” siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer’s incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence.
The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.
The State provides a legal, ordicly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.’ Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.
Once a State has been established, the problem of the ruling group or “caste” is how to maintain their rule.? While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long. run problem is ideological. For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a “democratic” government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects.
Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State–the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility)-must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.
For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the “intellectuals.” For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas inde pendently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the “opinion-molders in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.
It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State. Put simply, we may state that the intellectual’s livelihood in the free market is never too secure; for the intellectual must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual matters. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and thus a secure income and the panoply of prestige.
Many and varied have been the arguments by which the State and its intellectuals have induced heir subjects to support their rule. Basically, the strands of argument may be summed up as fol-lows: (a) the State rulers are great and wise men (they “rule by divine right,” they are the “aristocracy” of men, they are the “scientific experts”), much greater and wiser than the good but rather simple subjects, and (b) rule by the extent government is inevitable, absolutely necessary, and far better, than the indescribable evils that would ensue upon its downfall.
Another successful device was to instill fear of any alternative systems of rule or nonrule. The present rulers, it was maintained, supply to the citizens an essential service for which they should be most grateful: protection against sporadic criminals and marauders.
Since the land area of the globe has been parceled out among particular States, one of the basic doctrines of the State was to identify itself with the territory it governed. Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State’s advantage.
a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rule ers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of “nationalism” has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant bat tles between various sets of nobles.
subtle means of worship of one’s ancient rulers. The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism; there is no better way to stifle that criticism than to attack iny isolated voice, any raiser of new doubts, as a profane violator of the wisdom of his ancestors. Another potent ideological force is to deprecate the individual and exalt the collectivity of society.
[any] new idea, much less the new critical idea, must needs begin as a small minority opinion; therefore, the State must nip the view in the bud by ridiculing any view that defies the opinions of the mass.
attribution of responsi blity for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane “social forces,” or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible (“We Are All Murderers,” proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on “conspiracy theories” means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the “general welfare” reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions. A “conspiracy theory” can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State’s ideological propaganda.
Another tried and true method for bending subjects to the State’s will is inducing guilt, Any increase in private well-being can be attacked as “unconscionable greed,” “materialism,” or “excessive affluence,” profit-making can be attacked as “exploitation” and “usury,” mutually beneficial exchanges denounced as “selfishness,” and somehow with the conclusion always being drawn that more resources should be siphoned from the private to the “public sector.”
But few have been as keen as Professor Charles Black to see that the State has, in the process, largely transformed judicial review itself from a limiting device to yet another instrument for furnishing ideological legitimacy to the government’s actions. For if a judicial decree of unconstitutional“ is a mighty check to govern ment power, an implicit or explicit verdict of “constitutional” is a mighty weapon for fostering public acceptance of ever greater government power.
the judiciary is part and parcel of the government apparatus and appointed by the executive and legislative branches. Black admits that this means that the State has set itself up as a judge in its own cause, thus violating a basic juridical principle for aiming at just decisions.
The prime and most necessary function of the [Supreme] Court has been that of validation, not that of invalidation. What a government of limited powers needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of satisfying the people that it has taken all steps humanly possible to stay within its powers. This is the condition of its legitimacy, and its legitimacy, in the long run, is the condition of its life. And the Court, through its history, has acted as the legitimation of the government.
Smith noted that the Constitution was designed with checks and balances to limit any one governmental power and yet had then developed a Supreme Court with the monopoly of ultimate interpreting power. If the Federal Government was created to check invasions of individual liberty by the separate states, who was to check the Federal power?
“It was assumed by the people that the new government could not be permitted to determine the limits of its own authority, since this would make it, and not the Constitution, supreme.”
If, indeed, a subordinate interest should rightfully have a veto over matters concerning it, then why stop with the states? Why not place veto power in counties, cities, wards? Furthermore, interests are not only sectional, they are also occupational, social, etc. What of bakers or taxi drivers or any other occupation? Should they not be permitted a veto power over their own lives? This brings us to the important point that the nullification theory confines its checks to agencies of government itself.
Calhoun does not push his pathbreaking theory on concurrence far enough: he does not push it down to the individual himself. If the individual, after all, is the one whose rights are to be protected, then a consistent theory of concurrence would imply veto power by every individual
Thus, the State has invariably shown a striking talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be imposed upon it. Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is pro. foundly and inherently anticapitalist. In a sense, our position is the reverse of the Marxist dictum that the State is the “executive committee” of the ruling class in the present day, supposedly the capitalists. Instead, the State–the organization of the political means constitutes, and is the source of, the “ruling class” (rather, ruling caste), and is in permanent opposition to genuinely private capital.
“Only those who know nothing of any time but their own, who are completely in the dark as to the manner of Power’s behaving through thou sands of years, would regard these proceedings [nationalization, the income tax, etc.] as the fruit of a particular set of doctrines. They are in fact the normal manifestations of Power, and differ not at all in their nature from Henry VIlI’s confiscation of the monasteries. The same principle is at work; the hunger for authority, the thirst for resources; and in all of these operations the same characteristics are present, including the rapid elevation of the dividers of the spoils. Whether it is Socialist or whether it is not, Power must always be at war with the capitalist authorities and despoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth; in doing so it obeys the law of its nature.”
We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely-those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State’s openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d’etre.
Just as the two basic and mutually exclusive interrelations between men are peaceful cooperation or coercive exploitation, production or predation, so the history of mankind, particularly its economic his-tory, may be considered as a contest between these two principles. On the one hand, there is creative productivity, peaceful exchange and coop-eration; on the other, coercive dictation and predation over those social relations. Albert Jay Nock happily termed these contesting forces: “social power” and “State power.“I Social power is man’s power over nature, his cooperative transformation of nature‘s resources and insight into nature’s laws, for the benefit of all participating individuals.
Social power is the power over nature, the living standards achieved by men in mutual exchange. State power, as we have seen, is the coercive and parasitic seizure of this production - a draining of the fruits of society for the benefit of nonproductive (actually antiproductive) rulers. While social power is over nature, state power is power over man. Through history, man’s produc tive and creative forces have, time and again, carved out new ways of transforming nature for man’s bene. hit. These have been the times when social power has spurted ahead of State power, and when the degree of State encroachment over society has considerable lessened. But always, after a greater or smaller lime lag, the State has moved into these new areas, to cripple and confiscate social power once more.
Amidst the flux of expansion or contraction, the State always makes sure that it seizes and retains certain crucial “command posts” of the economy and society. Among these command posts are a monopoly of violence, monopoly of the ultimate judicial power, the channels of communication and transportation (post office, roads, rivers, air routes), irrigated water in Oriental despotisms, and education - to mold the opinions of its future citizens. In the modern economy, money is the critical command post.
The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever. Perhaps new paths of inquiry must be explored, if the successful, final solution of the State question is ever to be attained.
(Certainly, one indispensable ingredient of such a solution must be the sundering of the alliance of intellectual and State, through the creation of centers of intellectual inquiry and education, which will be independent of State power. Christopher Dawson notes that the great intellectual movements of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were achieved by working outside of, and sometimes against, the entrenched universities. These academia of the new ideas were established by independent patrons. See Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961))
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ChatGPT summary of the above:
- State’s Monopoly on Force: Rothbard describes the State as the sole organization in society that maintains a monopoly on force and violence in a specific territory, differentiating it from other institutions by its use of coercion for revenue.
- Man’s Use of Resources: He asserts that man is born needing to use his mind and energy to transform nature’s resources for his well-being and standard of living, emphasizing the importance of production and voluntary exchange.
- Economic vs. Political Means of Wealth: Rothbard references Franz Oppenheimer’s distinction between acquiring wealth through productive means (economic) versus forceful seizure (political).
- Predatory Nature of Political Means: The “political means” is depicted as parasitic and destructive, diminishing productivity and incentives for production.
- Ruling Class’s Challenges: The ruling group or caste’s primary challenge lies in maintaining their rule through force and ideological influence.
- State’s Dependence on Acceptance: He argues that the State, being a minority, requires the acceptance of the majority, which is often secured through ideological persuasion.
- Role of Intellectuals: Rothbard highlights the crucial role of intellectuals in shaping societal opinions, essential for the State’s survival.
- Alliance between State and Intellectuals: The book delves into the mutual dependency between the State and intellectuals, where the State provides security and prestige to intellectuals in exchange for their support in molding public opinion.