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This is the third in a set of short essays about political
philosophers who have influenced the development of, and ways of thinking
about, politics in the last 500 years. I have previously discussed one of the
good guys, John Locke, and one of the bad guys, Jean Bodin. Today, I’m going to
look at another of the good guys: Franz Oppenheimer.
His life
Oppenheimer was a German Jewish sociologist. He lived from
1864 to 1943, and considered himself to be a liberal socialist. He certainly
had no time at all for capitalism, whose ultimate outcome he regarded as
slavery.
Like John Locke, Oppenheimer studied medicine, and he practised
as a doctor for a decade. He worked as a magazine editor, then studied economic
theory, and became an academic.
Late in life, in 1938, he was smuggled by friends out of
Nazi Germany. He travelled, via Tokyo and then Shanghai, to Los Angeles, where
he lived the last five years of his life.
The State
Though he wrote much, Oppenheimer is remembered mainly for
one book. He published Der Staat (The State) in German in 1908. An
English translation was made in 1922. You can find it here as a PDF [[1]],
or here in a variety of formats, including plain text: [[2]].
Despite his socialism, he was no lover of the political
state. “The State may be defined as an organisation of one class dominating
over the other classes,” he said in the introduction to his book. And “…the
State, as a class-state, can have originated in no other way than through
conquest and subjugation.” “Its basic justification, its raison d’être,
was and is the economic exploitation of those subjugated.”
Oppenheimer’s legacy and genius, in my view, lies in one
crucial distinction. Very early in his book, he pits what he calls the economic
means against what he calls the political means. “There are two fundamentally
opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the
necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one's
own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others… I propose in
the following discussion to call one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of
one's own labor for the labor of others, the ‘economic means’ for the
satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of
others will be called the ‘political means.’”
He also wrote: “All world history, from primitive times up
to our own civilization, presents a single phase, a contest namely between the
economic and the political means.” And: “The state is an organization of the
political means.”
Further: “But always, in its essence, is the ‘State’ the
same. Its purpose, in every case, is found to be the political means for the
satisfaction of needs.” Franz Oppenheimer was the first thinker to identify,
and to call out for what it is, the most egregious of all the users of this
political means: the state.
Writing in 1908, Oppenheimer had an optimistic view of the
future. “The tendency of state development unmistakably leads to one point:
seen in its essentials the state will cease to be the ‘developed political
means’ and will become ‘a freemen's citizenship.’ In other words, its outer
shell will remain in essentials the form which was developed in the
constitutional state, under which the administration will be carried on by an
officialdom. But the content of the states heretofore known will have changed
its vital element by the disappearance of the economic exploitation of one
class by another.”
Reactions to the book
“The State” was a successful book. Oppenheimer’s distinction
between the economic means and the political means has, rightly, become a
classic. However, almost 120 years later, we are still waiting for the “disappearance
of the economic exploitation of one class by another,” which he predicted.
Indeed, for the last 60 years at least, exploitation of ordinary people by the
state and its cronies has been getting steadily worse.
While he was without doubt right about the state having
arisen out of conquest, his more detailed picture of the genesis and
development of the state has not retained such a strong following. Myself, I
find more persuasive the ideas of Robert Carneiro: “A heightened incidence of
conquest warfare, due largely to an increase in population pressure, gave rise
to the formation of successively larger political units, with autonomous
villages being followed by chiefdoms, the process culminating in certain areas
with the emergence of the state.” [[3]].
Oppenheimer’s Razor
I heartily agree with Franz Oppenheimer in his
identification of the economic means versus the political means. He has led me
to make a further distinction, between users of the economic means and users
of the political means. This, I dub Oppenheimer’s Razor. It divides honest
working and business people from those, that like to use political power to
line their own nests and those of their cronies.
Users of the economic means include: honest working people
(whether manual or brain-workers), tradesmen and business people. They strive
to do their work, whatever it may be, honestly, conscientiously, and in the
interests of those who pay for it.
Users of the political means, on the other hand, include:
almost all politicians, many government officials, bureaucrats and jobsworths, advisors
and influencers, technocrats and “experts,” financial and big-business élites, many
academics, and drivers of and activists for political agendas. They take their
rewards, regardless of whether the benefit they provide to those who pay for
their “services” is commensurate to what they receive. And, in many cases, they
provide no such benefit at all, or even have nett negative effects on the lives
of those who pay for their “services.”
Thus, I have come to see Oppenheimer’s Razor as the dividing
line between two radically different groups. The members of one group naturally
use the economic means. The members of the other naturally use the political
means.
And access to the ear of the state, and access in whatever
degree to state power, seems to bias those who have them towards using the
political means rather than the economic. Perhaps this may be a demonstration
of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that “power tends to corrupt?”
The state’s exploitations are more than just economic
I am a little surprised, though, that Franz Oppenheimer did seem
to miss one trick. He saw the state as being by its nature a system of economic
exploitation. It is, indeed, that; but the state exploits its victims in other
ways, too. He did identify slavery as one consequence of the political
means. But he did not seem to understand the full scope of what the state does.
Many users of the political means, and those that hang on to
their coat-tails, seek to impose on others policies, that harm the victims in
ways beyond simply taking away their money or wealth. For example, impoverishing
them by taking away their access to the market, or by making basic needs such
as energy or food unnecessarily expensive. Or violating their human rights, for
example privacy, freedom of movement or freedom of speech. Or inverting the
burden of proof, so denying them their right to the presumption of innocence.
Or by controlling them, or persecuting them. Sometimes in ways, that could go
as far as genocide.
If Oppenheimer, a German Jew, had been writing his book in
1938 rather than 1908, I think he would surely have taken into account this use
of state power to victimize innocents.
Parasites and pests
Myself, I identify, among the users of the political means,
two overlapping tendencies. Which I label parasites and pests.
Parasites use the resources they appropriate to enrich
themselves and their cronies, or to rake in money in order to implement their
pet schemes. They are bad enough.
But pests go further. Pests (or, otherwise put, vermin) want
power for the sake of what they can do with it. Pests want to control people,
to persecute, and to screw up people’s lives. They seek to influence, or even
to control, governments. They use political power to hurt people they don’t
like. Often, they seek to impose on people a particular agenda of how the world
or some aspect of it should be, regardless of whether or not those people want
it.
The users of the political means have been able to extend
their influence, and to corrupt people who were not originally either parasites
or pests, by a variety of means. By carrots – also known as crossing palms with
silver, that silver having been taken from taxpayers. By sticks – by
threatening people with bad consequences if they fail to fall in line with the
goals of the politicals. And by propaganda – by overwhelming the minds of those
who are not mentally strong enough to resist corruption. As a result, there is a
far higher proportion of parasites and pests among the political élites, and among
those that associate with them, than there are in the population as a whole.
On top of all these, there is the globalist or
internationalist wing of the users of the political means. You will find many
parasites and pests in the United Nations and its agencies, including the World
Health Organization. You will find them in the European Union and its
hangers-on. In the World Bank, World Economic Forum and International Monetary
Fund. And in other globalist and internationalist organizations, too. Such as
the World Wildlife Fund, World Business Council for Sustainable Development,
World Meteorological Organization, and many more.
But in reality, neither parasites nor pests are fit to be
invited into any society or even community of human beings worth the name. They
are traitors to human civilization, and enemies of humanity. They deserve to be
kicked out of our civilization, and denied all its benefits. While, at the same
time, being both required to pay full compensation to all those they unjustly
harmed, and chastised with suitably demeaning punishments.
To sum up
Franz Oppenheimer did humanity a huge service, by
identifying the economic means and the political means, and the divide between
them. I have now followed up his work, by highlighting the divide between the users
of the economic means and the users of the political means. A divide, to
which I have given the name of Oppenheimer’s Razor.
It is now up to us to take up the moral cudgels which Oppenheimer left for us, and to use them. First, to defend ourselves. And eventually, to fight back against our enemies, the users of the political means.
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