It grows from the barrel of a gun
Chairman now said every communist must grasp the truth: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The power of the state is, of course, political, so Chairman Mao could have said that the power of the state grows out of the barrel of a gun. Is this rhetoric a fair representation of reality? I hope to show why it is.
A state is definitionally an entity that holds a monopoly on the right to initiate force in a given territory. The state's primary tool for controlling society is legislation. If there's a perceived problem with the way parts of society are functioning, the response tends to be to add new legislation, ostensibly to fix the problem. In a democracy, competing groups use the ballot box to fight over which items of legislation get enacted.
Legislation is toothless unless it's enforced. Enforcement means a gradation of increasingly severe punishments if the disobedient citizen does not cooperate in receiving his punishment. For instance, if he refuses to pay fines, then physical force will be used against him to impose the punishment. The agents of the state are prepared to use as much force as necessary to overpower the disobedient citizen if he does not cooperate with being punished.
It's important in assessing the opening quote in this video to recognize that this escalation of force will not end until the disobedient citizen has received the designated punishment or is dead. And this is worth emphasizing: the agents of the state will kill a citizen before they give up trying to punish him. This is really important to bear in mind.
We know this is the case because we can think about what would happen if it wasn't. If it wasn't the case, the state would quickly collapse. For instance, if the state had a policy to stop trying to extract taxes from citizens who resisted hard enough, for instance by firing warning shots in the air when there would be kidnappers trespassed on their property, then soon everyone will be firing warning shots and not paying taxes.
Since the only resources that the state has are those that it steals from productive people in the form of taxes, if it wasn't prepared to use deadly force to collect taxes, its lifeblood would quickly stop flowing, and the state's power would evaporate. In our time, a gun is an appropriate symbol for deadly force, and state power grows out of the barrel of a gun because the effectiveness of state legislation, including tax legislation, depends on the ability and willingness of the agents of the state to kill disobedient citizens.
The YouTube user Mega Yipi was having trouble seeing the violence that state power is built on. He gave education as an example of one area where the state acts in a way that he thought didn't depend on coercion. He gave the example of hiring teachers as a non-violent state intervention in this area. I tried to explain why the hiring of a teacher by the state is dependent on coercion, but for whatever reason, I couldn't make myself understood.
I hope the following explanation will clear things up. The hiring of a teacher is in itself non-violent, as long as you're not threatening the teacher. But the state's ability to hire a teacher is predicated on violence because the teacher's wages are, of course, paid for by funds that have been taken from people under the threat of physical force.
If the state was not willing and able to kill citizens who didn't pay taxes, there would be no funds from which to pay the teacher. The hiring of a teacher then is only possible because the state maintains a credible death threat against all citizens from whom it demands taxes.