Original  Ownership 121 course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. . . . In place of the old bourgeois society,  with  its  classes  and  class  antagonisms,  we  shall  have  an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”5 The “vast association” replaces the State. This may sound as though Marx was not really in favor of the State as the owner of the tools of production. But how will the “vast association of the whole nation” allocate scarce economic resources, unless either the State or free markets order the decisions of pro- ducers? Marx’s comment in  The German Ideologv  (1845) is of little use: “Modern  universal  intercourse  can  be  controlled  by  individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all  .“G Murray Rothbard, an ad- vocate of the zero-State economy, calls attention to this confusion in Marx’s thinking:  “Rejecting private property, especially capital, the Left Socialists were then trapped in an inner contradiction: if the State is to disappear after the Revolution (immediately for Bakunin, gradually ‘withering’ for Marx), then how is the ‘collective’ to run its property without becoming an enormous State itself in fact even if not in name? This was the contradiction which neither the Marxists nor the Bakuninists were ever able to resolve .“7 The Anarchists’ Dilemma On the other hand, the libertarians, or anarcho-capitalists, argue that the individual is absolutely sovereign over property. Even the set- tlement of disputes over property rights is to be solved by private organizations. There must be no political authority – no agency possessing  a  legal  monopoly  of  violence  –  to  suppress  private violence. There must be only profit-seeking law courts, meaning courts without the legal authority to issue a subpoena to compel anyone to testify,s  plus voluntary arbitration .organizations and in- 5. Ibid., I, p. 127. 6. Karl Marx, The Gernsan Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, [1845] 1965), p. 84. 7. Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty: L@ and Right, I (1965), p. 8. For a discussion of this problem in Marxism and socialism, see my book, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: The  Doctn”ne of Creative Destruction (Nutley, New Jerse,y: Craig Press, 1968), pp. 111-17. A microfiche of this out-of-print book is available from the Institute for Christian Economics. 8. Murray N. Rothbard,  For a New Liberiy: The Libmtatian Man$esto (rev. ed.; New York: Collier, 1978). p. 87.