The powers estranged by the producers and personified by the rulers are divided and subdivided. Specific powers are delegated to specific offices or departments. The occupants of the offices are representatives in a representative democracy; leaders, heads or chiefs elsewhere. Whether they reach the office by election, appointment or conquest, they wield the specific powers delegated to the specific office; they personify a specific fragment of the power estranged by society.
Among the personifications, embodiments, representatives of society's estranged powers, by far the most important is the hierarchy of offices collectively known as the State. The State is the personification of the power of community, the estranged power of individuals to decide collectively the methods, means and purpose of their social activity. It is the specific office of the State to use all available means to ensure that the power of community remains estranged.
Since the productive power of society is estranged by producers, appropriated by another class, and represented by "persons" who occupy the offices to which the power is delegated, it appears to the producers that it is not the producers but the personifications who produce. This is an appearance, a hallucination, but it is difficult for one to see through the hallucinations of one's own age, since one is born into them. In an earlier age, when it was said that France conquered Burgundy in a field, the real event was a military encounter between two armies recruited from among the populations of France and Burgundy, but the statement described the encounter between two individuals, the personification of France and the personification of Burgundy. In other words, it appears that the capacities, the powers, are not in the individuals who wield them, but in the personifications.
This hallucination could not arise if the assumed power of the personification rested on brute force, on coercion. If the power of the personification had rested on brute force in the case of France's conquest of Burgundy, the history of the earlier period would have been remarkable since, in order to conquer the Duke, the King would first have had to conquer France—one individual against a multitude of peasants. If this had been the case, the King's conquest of the peasants would have been so much more spectacular than his conquest of the Duke that the latter event would not have reached the history books. But in this case the King would have had to be described in terms of his own self-powers, however great these might have been, and not as a personification, as a King, as France.
The power of the personification lies precisely in the hallucination, and not in the individual who occupies the office. Certain words pronounced by a specific individual are not a statement of policy or a declaration of war unless that individual is seen as the authority who has the right to state policy and declare war; the words of this individual cannot have consequences unless other human beings submit to this authority and consider it their duty to obey. The personification is
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