I receive everything from the state. Have I anything without the state’s assent? What I have without this it takes from me as soon as it discovers the lack of a “legal title.” Do I not, therefore, have everything through its grace, its assent?
On this alone, on the legal title, the commonalty rests. The commoner is what he is through the protection of the state, through the state’s grace. He would necessarily be afraid of losing everything if the state’s power were broken.
But how is it with him who has nothing to lose, how with the proletarian? As he has nothing to lose, he does not need the protection of the state for his “nothing.” He may gain, on the contrary, if that protection of the state is withdrawn from the protégé.
Therefore the non-possessor will regard the state as a power protecting the possessor, which privileges the latter, but does nothing for him, the non-possessor, but to – suck his blood. The state is a – commoners’ state [Bürgerstaat], is the estate of the commonalty. It protects man not according to his labour, but according to his tractableness (“loyalty”) – namely, according to whether the rights entrusted to him by the state are enjoyed and managed in accordance with the will, that is, laws, of the state.
Under the regime of the commonalty the labourers always fall into the hands of the possessors, of those who have at their disposal some bit of the state domains (and everything possessible in state domain, belongs to the state, and is only a fief of the individual), especially money and land; of the capitalists, therefore. The labourer cannot realize on his labour to the extent of the value that it has for the consumer. “Labour is badly paid!” The capitalist has the greatest profit from it. – Well paid, and more than well paid, are only the labours of those who heighten the splendour and dominion of the state, the labours of high state servants. The state pays well that its “good citizens,” the possessors, may be able to pay badly without danger; it secures to itself by good payment its servants, out of whom it forms a protecting power, a “police” (to the police belong soldiers, officials of all kinds, those of justice, education, etc. – in short, the whole “machinery of the state”) for the “good citizens,” and the “good citizens” gladly pay high tax-rates to it in order to pay so much lower rates to their labourers.
But the class of labourers, because unprotected in what they essentially are (for they do not enjoy the protection of the state as labourers, but as its subjects they have a share in the enjoyment of the police, a so-called protection of the law), remains a power hostile to this state, this state of possessors, this “citizen kingship.” Its principle, labour, is not recognized as to its value; it is exploited [ausgebeutet], a spoil [Kriegsbeute] of the possessors, the enemy.
The labourers have the most enormous power in their hands, and, if they once became thoroughly conscious of it and used it, nothing would withstand them; they would only have to stop labour, regard the product of labour as theirs, and enjoy it. This is the sense of the labour disturbances which show themselves here and there.
The state rests on the – slavery of labour. If labour becomes free, the state is lost.