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 other citizens whose interests are damaged by it. But actions that can’t show legal permission – regardless, apart from the right, of who or what they injure – count as an attack on the authority of the state and will be prevented by violence, 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.
The modern state is the political force of capitalist society. It does not respond to a capitalism fallen from the sky, or wrestle with the laws of anarchic market conditions about which it can do nothing, but and above all it enacts within its sphere of control the capitalist mode of economics. This is done by enacting a few basic rights. With the right to the "free development of the individual” and the material 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 well being at the expense of others and is realized by the extortionate exploitation of their dependence on what belongs only to him: The 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 position themselves towards it.
The political rule does not leave things alone within an abstract framework of regulations, but continuously intervenes in the enacted competition. With always new laws it regulates the actions of the citizens to the smallest detail, not to prevent the ruinous and self-destructive consequences of the reciprocal exploitation and damaging – but to make them functional for the greater whole and in the final instance for itself. It specifies permission for the damages to the private interests among one another and draws their limits, creates and so forms the social characters which it then protects with its law. So the class of wage laborers, alongside and long after the propertied classes, found the public recognition that they too are private owners whose property deserves public protection – even if they own nothing themselves. They get worker’s rights granted in which it is recognized that their service to the national economy also depends on certain living conditions which should be guaranteed as much as possible.
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 is a partisan of 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. Therefore, the state wants the growth of capital and the global competitive success of its national location. It provides for both in its economic policy by getting the whole society ready as a location condition (infrastructure, education, research, cheap social systems, etc.) and putting it in the service of the growth of capital. In this sense it is the "ideal collective capitalist.”
State decisions are made in the form of laws. The law is the command’s means of rule and functions even without democracy. Politics however are made in democracies, where elected representatives of the people argue about legislation, i.e. which forced orders best direct the citizens of the different classes for the promotion of the capitalistic national success. The state power allows this debate only under the condition that all classes recognize their dependence on the growth of capital as the presupposition of their private interests, thus the priority of this presupposition before their own interests. Otherwise, the capitalist state functions as a dictatorship. Then in the so-defined common good each of the in principle legitimate classes tries to accommodate their special concerns as beneficial and necessary for the whole – logically, with very different success: The entrepreneurs can rightfully refer to the fact that everything in the country depends on their success, the common good is in essence at one with their private interests. The workers in contrast must always disturb and damage the common good if they want it to be remembered 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 for how much labor, maternity and environmental protection the national capitalism needs so that it can continue, and how much it can afford without hurting its growth and competitiveness, then the concerns of the less important part of the people have found their system-appropriate place.
The "fight for rights" is allowed in democracy to deal with unsatisfied or injured interests. Grass-roots movements, labor unions, political parties all support their issues – pleading, demanding or lobbying the legislature, the big licensor, petitioning that he may ennoble their concerns in laws, i.e. lend the power of the state against the interests of other competitive citizens, finally.
Anyone who demands rights from the state holds it basically for his protector – perhaps a belated one which has lent his ear to the wrong advisors or the wrong lobby -- but still for a power that is appointed for good deeds towards those who under their regime in some strange way are always part of the weak.
Secondly, anyone who calls for protective rights has no objections against the competition that is set in motion by rights and brings about outcomes against which one needs new rights. Not even against these results of competition – rich, poor and totally poor – does someone turn who perhaps demands a right to work, to a basic income, to a minimum wage. So one requires only that impoverishment should have limits and a general minimal existence be guaranteed.
Thirdly, anyone who demands rights believes that the demand fits the general state program and can find a little place in it. This can be correct. Anyone who wants nothing other than to supplement the existing state program around areas that are in the long term interest of the state and the success of its order is on the right track when he draws the attention of the legislator to failures and warns him that they will take revenge if he does not take care of them. Indeed, it throws a light on the priorities of the ideal collective capitalist that even considerations for the natural and social living conditions of its own exploitation order had to be wrung from it only by strikes and demonstrations. Demands of the environmental movement and labor movement have become laws (the eight hour day, unemployment insurance, sick pay, the phasing out of nuclear power, etc.), but only and only so far as the legislator has recognized them as conditions for the long-term success of the national capitalism.
Anyone who has other objectives is better off not approaching them with the demand for rights in the state. Anyone who aims not at a subsistence level for the poor, but the elimination of poverty; who tries to attain not better treatment of the unemployed, but the removal of the absurdity that people fall into misery because the society no longer needs their labor; who wants not only to better the position of the human “cost factor labor,” but to abolish their role as an annoying cost factor of the real economic purpose – he does well to say goodbye to the illusion of a compatibility of his purposes with the existing state goals. He must know and make it clear to others that his case comes to fruition only if the valid state program is toppled and the political power, which establishes it in the society with its violence, is broken. He will want to be granted no rights to obtain it.