The People Or The State?
In June of 1989, the statist thugs in control of China sent tanks into Tiananmen Square to solidify their power against the demands of the people.
Benjamin Tucker foresaw the results of state socialism in an 1888 essay State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherin They Differ. He understood what the premises of state socialism required in practice:
The nation must be transformed into a vast bureaucracy, and every individual into a State official. Everything must be done on the cost principle, the people having no motive to make a profit out of themselves. Individuals not being allowed to own capital, no one can employ another, or even himself. Every man will be a wage-receiver, and the State the only wage-payer. He who will not work for the State must starve, or, more likely, go to prison. All freedom of trade must disappear. Competition must be utterly wiped out. All industrial and commercial activity must be centered in one vast, enormous, all-inclusive monopoly. The remedy for monopolies is monopoly.
Such is the economic programme of State Socialism as adopted from Karl Marx. The history of its growth and progress cannot be told here. In this country the parties that uphold it are known as the Socialistic Labor Party, which pretends to follow Karl Marx; the Nationalists, who follow Karl Marx filtered through Edward Bellamy; and the Christian Socialists, who follow Karl Marx filtered through Jesus Christ.
What other applications this principle of Authority, once adopted in the economic sphere, will develop is very evident. It means the absolute control by the majority of all individual conduct. The right of such control is already admitted by the State Socialists, though they maintain that, as a matter of fact, the individual would be allowed a much larger liberty than he now enjoys. But he would only be allowed it; he could not claim it as his own. There would be no foundation of society upon a guaranteed equality of the largest possible liberty.
The state exists to extract resources from one class of people for the benefit of another. When claims to these resources are disputed, it is commonly called “war”. When the people are subjugated enough through propaganda or the outright violence of the gun, gas, and chains of the state, it is commonly called “peace”. There can be no true peace under statism, as the state exists through theft and coercion, and its enforcers are permitted to throw peaceable people into cages and kill them if they resist. This is true no matter what values the state claims to protect.
The fact that some states are significantly less brutal than others provides no evidence in favor of statism. It provides evidence in favor of the radicalism and resistance that makes the difference.
