Throughout the whole course of history, as well as in our own day, government has been, either the brutal, violent, arbitrary rule of the few over the mass, or a tool designed to guarantee the rule and the privilege of those who, on foot of force or guile or heredity, have laid claim to all of the wherewithal of existence, particularly the soil, and utilize it in order to keep the people in servitude and to have it work for them. Men are doubly oppressed: either directly, by brute force and physical violence; or indirectly, by being denied the means of subsistence, thereby reducing them to powerlessness. The former mode is the source of power, that is, political privilege; the second is the root of economic privilege.

Men can further be oppressed by working upon their intellect and their feelings, as represented by religious or "academic" power, but since the mind is mere a product of material forces, falsehood and the bodies set up in order to peddle it have no reason to exist except insofar as they are the product of economic and political privilege, a means of defending and consolidating the latter.