Another important consequence of the theory is that, in principle, all government, even democratic government, is a dictatorship of the ruling class over the ruled. ‘The executive of the modern state’, says the Manifesto7, ‘is merely a committee for managing the economic affairs of the whole bourgeoisie …’ What we call a democracy is, according to this theory, nothing but that form of class dictatorship which happens to be most convenient in a certain historical situation. (This doctrine does not agree very well with the class equilibrium theory of the moderate wing mentioned above.) And just
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