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Comment on W.Toomey: What is a dictatorship? by Peter Brooke, 2/10/04

I have no quarrel with what I take to be the centre of Wendy's argument - that the state, whether it appears as a dictatorship or a democracy - is always the instrument of rule by minorities over majorities. I only question whether things can ever be otherwise.

Given a choice between the left wing view of human nature and the right wing view as summarised by Talmon, I would incline to the right wing view. Talmon argues that since Rousseau's optimistic view of human nature does not in fact correspond to reality his followers - Robespierre is the obvious example - have to resort to totalitarian means to bang it into shape.

What the 'left wing' (in this case, Rousseavian) view lacks (this is me speaking, not Talmon) is consciousness of the fundamental fact of human nature, namely hereditary or ancestral Sin. The Uniate philosopher Vladimir Soloviev - probably the model for Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov - argues that Sin is the basis for the necessity of the state. It doesn't disappear with the triumph of the working class.

The Marxist idea of the 'withering way of the state' derives, I think, from the view of the English utilitarian liberal economists - major influences on Marx - that the iron laws of economics would be sufficient to regulate human relations in a society of free traders. This view was strong among the theorists of the Thatcherite revolution who are probably feeling as disillusioned twenty five years later as many Marxists when they contemplated the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Curiously, Smith's own view, enormously influential in the Anglo Saxon world, amounted to saying that Sin itself (economic self interest) created the dynamic for the economic law that would be sufficient to regulate social relations. Marxism too sees economic self interest as the basic motor of substantial social movements and this may explain why, despite everything, it had a better grasp of reality that most of its rivals in the field of Socialist theory.

Traditional Marxism (which in the confrontation between Lenin and Kautsky was represented by Kautsky - Engels' literary executor if I am not mistaken) thought that where the working class was a majority then 'democracy' would mean rule by the majority. This was, he argued, the necessary condition for what Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, had called the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. In the Russian Empire, however, the working class was a small minority of the population. He accused Lenin of using the phrase to mean dictatorial rule by a party which claimed to embody the interests of a barely existent working class - a minority of a minority, which could only hold power through an alliance with the peasantry, an alliance that would strengthen the peasantry and eventually result either in a complete surrender to it or in a very bloody war - which is of course what occurred in 1929 with the 'liquidation of the kulaks'.

Even Kautsky's view, however, implies that the working class has a unitary conception of its own interests. Such a unitary view could certainly be held by a highly disciplined party but not by a class, least of all a class that was a majority of the society. I would maintain that neither 'the bourgeoisie' nor 'the aristocracy' ever had such a unitary view of their own interests. Disagreements within these classes - and alliances across them - are the normal stuff of politics and are far from being merely decorative. They have on occasion reached near or actual civil war. The schema of dictatorship by a unitary class is a very crude Cinderella's slipper of a thing.

We happen to be living in a period in which Cinderella's slipper seems to be fitting rather well. What we might call the managerial class has a virtual monopoly of power on the basis of an almost unitary idea of where its interest lies (privatisation and 'choice'); and the working class appears to have virtually no political representation whatsoever. This, however, was not the case in the 1970s when the working class through its institutions - the trade unions - was so powerful it had a Conservative Prime Minister (Heath) offering it a share in the direct government of the country. The left's insistence on forcing the 1970s into the slipper, however, is one of the factors that has brought us to an age that fits it very elegantly.

What remains a constant and, I believe, unavoidable reality is the existence of a state and rule by minorities. Like Wendy I take the view that the minorities rule behind the scenes, ie they are not to be confused with 'the government'. Less like Wendy I think there are a lot of them and they jostle for power. They also exercise it to a great extent independently of the state - eg in the management of multinational companies able to play one national state off against another (this is what is called 'globalisation', but it is nothing new. Lenin, rather confusingly at a time when the political Empires were still in existence, called it 'Imperialism'). The apparent inability of working class interests (since I have questioned the usefulness of thinking in terms of a unitary working class interest) to insinuate themselves into the jostling process is surely, after all these years, something of a puzzle, leaving us wondering if the class will ever possess the competence to become a ruling class.

There is another way of looking at it which is that the working class - in the sense of those who sell their labour for wages as opposed to those who own the means of production - IS the ruling class at the present time and has chosen to give management a free hand regulated by the market as against either state control of industry or (my own favoured policy in the 1970s) industrial democracy - both of them problematical policies in their own right.

On this reading we are at present living under something that could be called a dictatorship of the proletariat, a class largely brutalised by its position in the production process, hence the vulgarity of the culture with which we old Socialists are surrounded. On this reading the class is not so much blinded by The Sun - it has, rather, chosen The Sun in preference to Socialism and the transition to Communism. 'It' sees the prevention of immigration and the extraction of raw materials from the rest of the world at the cheapest price as being in 'its' own interest. We, of course, may argue that the working class is wrong but we are caught in a cleft stick. Because if we argue that it is hopelessly mistaken to quite the extent that it appears to be then we come back to the view that it is not fit to be a ruling class.

Which leaves a question as to why Wendy or myself should care. Why, for example, do we care about the war in Iraq? What is our class interest? In what way is our own personal economic interest vitally affected? So far as I can see my own purely material interest is to be able to fill up my car when I roll into a petrol station. I could work out an argument suggesting that massacring the population of Fallujah might eventually make that more difficult but I am not sure that the argument would be convincing, and it is certainly rather far from the motives I am conscious of. Which are more to with ethics and aesthetics, with the realm of the spirit. And I think this is true of most of the people I know who are involved in these things. All superstructure and very little base. Perhaps that is why we seem to be doomed to failure.