The State: Its History and Development Viewed SociologicallyOppenheimer, Franz
History
The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically
Oppenheimer, Franz
State, The
Furthermore, on no horizon can be seen any force now capable of
resisting effectively this heretofore efficient tendency. On the
contrary, the interference of the past, which temporarily blocked the
process, is obviously becoming weaker and weaker. The international
relations of commerce and trade acquired among the nations a
preponderating importance over the diminishing warlike and political
relations; and in the intra-national sphere, by reason of the same
process of economic development, movable capital, the creation of the
right to peace, preponderates in ever increasing measure over landed
property rights, the creation of the right of war. At the same time
superstition more and more loses its influence. And therefore one is
justified in concluding that the tendency so marked will work out to
its logical end, excluding the political means and all its works, until
the complete victory of the economic means is attained.
But it may be objected that in the modern constitutional state all the
more prominent remnants of the antique law of war have already been
chiseled out.
On the contrary, there survives a considerable remnant of these
institutions, masked it is true in economic garb, and apparently no
longer a legal privilege but only economic right, _the ownership of
large estates--the first creation and the last stronghold of the
political means_. Its mask has preserved it from undergoing the fate of
all other feudal creations. And yet this last remnant of the right of
war is doubtless the last unique obstacle in the pathway of humanity;
and doubtless the _development of economics_ is on its way to destroy
it.
To substantiate these remarks I must refer the reader to other books,
wherein I have given the detailed evidence of the above and can not in
the space allotted here repeat it at large.[143] I can only re-state
the principal points made in these books.
There is no difference in principle between the distribution of the
total products of the economic means among the separate classes of a
constitutional state, the so-called “capitalistic distribution,” from
that prevailing in the feudal state.
All the more important economic schools coincide in finding the cause
in this, that the supply of “free” laborers (i. e., according to Karl
Marx politically free and economically without capital) perpetually
exceeds the demand, and that hence there exists “the social relation of
capital.” There “are constantly two laborers running after one master
for work, and lowering, for one another, the wages”; and therefore the
“surplus value” remains with the capitalist class, while the laborer
never gets a chance to form capital for himself and to become an
employer.
Whence comes this surplus supply of free laborers?
The explanation of the “bourgeois” theory, according to which this
surplus supply is caused by the overproduction of children by
proletarian parents, is based on a logical fallacy, and is contradicted
by all known facts?[144]
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