the fragmentation, the depravity, and the slavery of civil society is the natural foundation of the modern state, just as the civil society of slavery was the natural foundation of the state in antiquity. The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery. The state and slavery in antiquity — frank and open classical antitheses — were not more closely welded together than the modern state and the cut-throat world of modern business…

—Karl Marx,

Critical Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian”

(1844)