Plunder, Lease and Inheritance

From the Megamachine series · Signpost to the Megamachine

There is no need to steal the state. It can also be leased or inherited.

I. A Word That Is Too Small

In William Gibson’s novel “The Peripheral” there is a feared power known only as “the Klept”: a network of ultra-rich dynasties, detached from states, nations and industries, a new high nobility with a great deal of money and little attachment to the law. Gibson called it a caricature, but not an unrealistic one. His models were the Russian oligarchs in London and the government that made life pleasant for them there. On 18 October 2026 Christian Stöcker turned this into a column in DER SPIEGEL: “The State as Plunder”. The Klept, he writes, is taking shape, in Moscow, in Washington, in Riyadh.

The word he uses for it is kleptocracy, the rule of thieves. It is older than one might think; it appears as early as 1819. The sociologist Stanislav Andreski made it a technical term in 1968 to describe states in Africa whose rulers treated the treasury as private property. Mobutu in the Congo, Marcos in the Philippines and Abacha in Nigeria were the textbook cases.

The word hits something. But it is too small. It directs the eye to the thief and away from the machine in which he works. Whoever looks only for thieves will find hardly any in Germany and declare the problem solved. We therefore want to distinguish three stages: plunder, lease and inheritance. The first is a crime, the second is legal, the third is even a tradition. In their result they resemble one another more than we might like.

II. The Machine and Its Masters

Lewis Mumford described the megamachine at its origin: thousands of people joined into a single machine to build pyramids. The pyramid was not a communal work. It was a king’s tomb. The megamachine was built not for those who worked in it but for those who sat on top. We traced this in “Lewis Mumford · Myth of the Machine” (German only).

How one gets to the top was described by Franz Oppenheimer in 1908 in his book “The State”, with a distinction of startling simplicity. There are only two ways of obtaining the goods of this world. One is one’s own labour and the fair exchange of its products for the products of others: the economic means. The other is the unrequited appropriation of the labour of others: the political means. For Oppenheimer the state, in its origin, is the organisation of the political means. Herding peoples fall upon farmers. At first they plunder and move on. Then they realise that it pays better to let the farmers live, to settle down and to take tribute every year. The robber becomes the lord, plunder becomes tribute, tribute becomes tax. Eighty-five years later the American economist Mancur Olson rediscovered the same thing and called it the transition from the roving to the stationary bandit.

Ludwig Erhard called Oppenheimer his teacher. The social market economy was at its core an attempt to build an order of the economic means: prosperity through work and competition, not through privilege. Democracy was meant to do the same in politics and abolish the lord, so that the ruled themselves become the owners of their state. We applied Oppenheimer’s distinction to the present in “The Political Means”.

Kleptocracy is the return of the political means into a machine that was no longer built for it. And the uncanny thing is that the machine hardly notices the difference. As we showed in “Whose Servants?”, an apparatus built on obedience serves whoever sits on top. In 1911 Robert Michels described how every organisation produces a small leadership layer that uses it for itself: “The Iron Law”. Kleptocracy is the iron law without shame.

Our three stages are therefore three forms of the political means. Plunder is its original form, the raid. Lease is its modern form, appropriation through contracts, laws and favours. Inheritance is its most durable form, the passing on of what was once appropriated to the next generation. For Oppenheimer, large landed property handed down from generation to generation was already the petrified remnant of a conquest.

III. The First Stage: Plunder

In Russia the plunder is open. A circle of men with intelligence-service pasts controls large parts of the economy. Whoever plays along may become rich. Whoever falls from favour falls from a window, or his plane explodes. This is not politics in the Western sense; it is the rules of organised crime applied to a state.

Yet this stage too has helpers in the West. The money needs banks that ask no questions, lawyers who build corporate webs, agents who sell villas and schools that take in the children. Gibson found his Klept not in Moscow but in London. The plunder is made in the East and laundered, invested and bequeathed in the West. In October 2026 the new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham became the first head of government to say openly that it is clear Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum. The thieves did not only invest their money in the West. They also tried to help shape its politics.

IV. The Second Stage: Lease

In the United States nobody falls from a window. Whoever falls from favour merely loses his place at court. Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former fiancée of the president’s son and ambassador to Greece, had to resign on 13 October 2026. According to reports in the Wall Street Journal, before her Senate hearing she had asked a donor to pay a credit card bill of 100,000 dollars and offered him access to the administration in return. She denies this. She was a small fry.

The large sums are legal. The president declared income of more than two billion dollars for 2025, more than 1.4 billion of it from his family’s crypto businesses: from sales of tokens of a family company, from licences for a joke currency bearing his name, from sales of company stakes. Whoever buys such tokens also buys proximity to the president, and nobody has to say why he buys. His son-in-law Jared Kushner travels the world as a negotiator without office or mandate and at the same time manages billions entrusted to him by Gulf states. In Albania young people are resisting a luxury resort linked to his name.

And then the men from Silicon Valley. They rail against a state that supposedly spends too much money and has too much power, and they live off it. Palantir earns a large part of its money from contracts with the military and government agencies, and so does SpaceX. By mid-October 2026 Elon Musk had put some 276 million dollars into the Republican campaign for the midterm elections, more than in the presidential campaign before.

How far this lease reaches became visible in the same week in Ukraine. Ukrainian drone units steer their devices via Starshield, the military variant of Musk’s satellite network. Suddenly their connections were throttled. According to Reuters the instruction came from the White House; Musk declared that this was decided “ultimately by POTUS”; Trump denied having ordered it himself. A day later everything worked again. It was not the first time: back in the autumn of 2022 Musk refused the Ukrainians his satellite connection when their drones were to attack the Russian fleet off Sevastopol. We described this in “COSMOS”. What remains is the image: whether a country’s drones fly in wartime depends on the infrastructure of a private individual and on a call from Washington, and nobody wants to have done it. On the same day Trump called the Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil facilities “a disgrace” because they drive up the oil price. Whether a plan lies behind this, as Stöcker suspects, or merely concern about the midterms, cannot be proven. What can be shown is how little room is left between public power and private interest.

That is lease: nobody steals the state. One leases its contracts, its laws, its attention, and the rent is paid in donations, favours and loyalty. Everything is legal, and precisely for that reason so hard to pin down.

V. The Theory of the Leaseholders

The thieves in Moscow need no theory; the heirs in Germany have none. The leaseholders from Silicon Valley have one, and that distinguishes them from all kleptocrats before them.

We traced its origins in “The Engineers of Absolutism”. It begins in the 1930s with Howard Scott and his Technocracy movement, which wanted to put a “soviet of technicians” in place of politics, and it ends for now with Curtis Yarvin, who dreams of a world without elections. In Yarvin’s design the state is a company, run by a chief executive with the power of a king, and the citizens are customers who may leave if they do not like it. That is Oppenheimer’s stationary bandit with a joint-stock company as its legal form. For the first time the state as plunder is not hidden but declared a programme. We described this in more detail in “The New Right”.

In 2009 Peter Thiel wrote that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. A little later he called competition “for losers” and praised monopoly as the goal of every entrepreneur. In Oppenheimer’s language that is the moment the economic means turns into the political: whoever has the monopoly no longer needs to exchange; he can collect. Thiel now gives lectures on the Antichrist, who will come as a world government and stifle progress, and he names the regulation of technology as its harbinger. Whoever declares oversight to be the Antichrist has made himself a saint. That is the subject of “The Katechon” and “The Stone That Looks Back”. The latter is also about Palantir, named after the seeing stones in Tolkien’s novel: whoever looks into one sees into the distance, but whoever holds the other stone sees him. A private company holds the data of intelligence services, police and military.

The historian Margaret O’Mara has supplied the sober resolution of the apparent contradiction between contempt for the state and closeness to it. Silicon Valley was never as libertarian as it pretended. It grew on public ground, with Cold War research money, and it never wanted freedom from rules, only rules of its own making. We described this in “The Built Sandbox”. That is the purest form of lease: one does not break the rules; one writes them.

And finally the leaseholders are preparing to leave the machine they have leased. Bunkers on Hawaii, estates in New Zealand, whole islands, private cities with their own law in Honduras, plans for Mars. In “End-Times Capitalism” (German only) we read this as the expectation that the order will not hold for everyone, and as provision for one’s own class alone. Here Gibson’s Klept becomes real: a layer that detaches itself from nations.

Therein lies an escalation that even Oppenheimer did not know. His herdsmen had to let the farmers live, otherwise there would be nothing left to take. The bandit depended on his prey, and that dependence was the prey’s only security. When machines take over the farmers’ work, this dependence disappears too. In “Priests Without a Congregation” we described what such rule would lack that limited every tyranny so far: borders, mortality and the need to bring at least some people along. Whether it will come to that, nobody knows. But the megamachine that no longer needs its people is no longer the invention of novelists; we described it in “From Mega- to Metamachine”. It is a business plan.

VI. The Third Stage: Inheritance

And Germany? Stöcker writes that we are “fortunately still far” from a kleptocracy. That is true if one looks for thieves. It is not true if one asks about the result.

The greatest raid on the German treasury was called Cum-Ex. Banks, lawyers and investors had taxes refunded to them for years that had never been paid. The damage, by cautious estimates, is at least ten billion euros, of which about a third has been recovered. There have been convictions, and that speaks for the rule of law. But from the head of the system, the lawyer Hanno Berger, the state has so far collected 13,200 euros and two gold coins. The prosecutor who had uncovered the scandal, Anne Brorhilker, resigned in 2024 because she considered the prosecution of financial crime in Germany inadequate. We told her story in “The Inconvenient Civil Servant”.

During the pandemic, Christian Democrat members of the Bundestag pocketed commissions in the six- and seven-figure range for brokering face masks to the state. In 2022 the Federal Court of Justice ruled that this was not punishable under the law as it stood, because they had not acted in their capacity as members of parliament. The financier of the right-wing portal “Nius” owes his fortune to software for medical practices and hospitals, ultimately to the contributions of the insured. That is legal. It merely shows from which coffers political power is paid for today.

Above all, though, there is inheritance. Large family fortunes pass to the next generation in Germany largely tax-free, on the argument that jobs depend on them. That is the logic of the fief, which we described in “Rents, Sinecures and the Highwaymen” and “We Will Keep Inheriting”. And while the state cuts its future, it builds on itself: “The State That Builds on Itself”. That is not the rule of thieves. It is the rule of heirs whom nobody elected and nobody can vote out.

VII. What the Three Stages Have in Common

Plunder, lease and inheritance differ in technique, not in principle. In all three the labour of others is appropriated without anything given in return, and in all three the state no longer serves the whole but a circle. In Russia it is a circle of henchmen, in the USA a circle of donors and family members, in Germany a circle of heirs and holders of sinecures. The boundaries between the stages are permeable. Whoever leases today wants to bequeath tomorrow. Whoever inherits can lease the day after.

And the circles know one another. Stöcker’s strongest observation is that kleptocrats can strike excellent deals with one another across all borders, because ideology and nation play no role for them. It is about money, power, technology and information. Washington, Riyadh and Moscow are not allies, but they are a club. Therein lies the real novelty: the megamachine was until now constituted nationally; its masters sat in capitals. The Klept sits everywhere and nowhere.

For the citizens Stöcker has found a bitter word from the language of con men: they are the “mark”, the victims who are fleeced while being made to believe they are participants. In “Youth Is Our Future” we described the children of these circles, the new jeunesse dorée who show on TikTok what others have paid for. The Klept is their parents’ generation.

VIII. What Must Be Said in Fairness

Not every billionaire is a kleptocrat. There are fortunes that arose from real inventions and enterprises, and there are heirs who do good with their inheritance. The difference lies not in the size of the fortune but in its source, and Oppenheimer supplied the criterion: whether it arose by the economic means, through work and exchange, or by the political means, through appropriation. Often the two are mixed. Musk built rockets that nobody could build before him; that is the economic means. That he uses hundreds of millions to help decide who will award the contracts he receives is the political means.

Stöcker exaggerates too. His chain, according to which Trump needs cheap oil, therefore negotiates with Putin, and Musk therefore drops Ukraine, is a conjecture, not an analysis. He himself writes “presumably” and “allegedly”. Whoever calls everything kleptocracy blunts the word and hands those concerned the most comfortable defence: they have not stolen anything.

And Germany is not Russia. Cum-Ex perpetrators are in prison, courts work, journalists investigate. Precisely for that reason the German form is so dangerous: it needs no breach of law. What is legal need not be prosecuted, and what is not prosecuted goes unnoticed.

IX. What Helps Against It

Here lies the dilemma we described in “The Janus Face of the State”. The state is itself the largest organisation of the political means: it compels, taxes, arrests. And it is at the same time the only protection against the political means of others. Only the political means can tame the political means. A state that the Klept has leased can no longer tame it. It must first take itself back.

The megamachine has no moral sense. It knows only feedback: signals that tell it whether it is running properly. In all three stages this feedback has been cut. Plunder is hidden behind shell companies. Lease is disguised as donation, consultancy or crypto purchase. Inheritance is justified as safeguarding jobs. The remedy therefore means above all making the signals visible again.

That means public registers showing who really owns companies, houses and foundations. It means a separation between those who receive state contracts and those who finance election campaigns. It means prosecutors equipped like the law firms they investigate, as Anne Brorhilker has demanded. And it means an inheritance tax that no longer almost completely spares large business assets, while every wage is taxed from the first euro above the allowance.

None of this is new, and all of it has been on the table for years. That it does not happen is no oversight. It is the proof that the Klept is not coming. It is already here, in each of its three forms.

And it is a chameleon. It adapts to whatever conditions it finds. As long as enough can be taken within the bounds of legality, it stays within them. If it pays better outside, it leaves them without scruple. Cum-Ex began in exactly this way: as a supposed loophole that expert opinions declared legal, until Germany’s Federal Court of Justice ruled in 2021 that it was simply tax evasion. Plunder, lease and inheritance are therefore not separate species but colours of the same animal, and it changes them according to what pays best at the moment. The only question is whether we recognise it while it still wears the colour of legality.