ÉLAN VITAL
The mystical concept of “the life force” in idealist philosophy,
which anti-materialist philosophers once absurdly thought explained the difference between living
things and dead matter.
See also:
Henri BERGSON,
ENTELECHY,
VITALISM
“In the nineteenth century, many early biologists were convinced that life
had an essence, a vital force. The science of biology was in many times and places dedicated
to revealing the secret force that animated gross matter and made it into mayflies and
marigolds and meerkats. After a century or so of tireless dissection and analysis, though,
biologists concluded that the secret was that there was no secret; the eeriness of this
haunting was that there was no ghost to explain it. Twentieth-century biochemistry, and later
molecular biology, showed that life was made of the same stuff as non-life, and obeyed the
same rules. The processes of life did not need to take place in a tissue or a cell, they
could all be replicated in a test tube. As far as the electrons are concerned, respiration
is no different to rusting.” —Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the
Planet, (NY: Harper-Perennial, 2009), p. 156.
ELEATIC SCHOOL
A loose school of ancient Greek idealist philosophical thought which was most likely founded
by Parmenides of Elea in the 6th century BCE, and included his
followers Zeno of Elea (who was also Parmenides’s lover) and
the lesser-known Melissus of Samos. However, Xenophanes of
Collophon, who may have influenced Parmenides, is called the founder of the Eleatic School
by Plato.
The fundamental doctrine of this school was
that (despite all appearances) the world consists of one indivisible and unchanging reality.
They even thought that movement was “impossible”! Strangely, Hegel said that the origin
of dialectics was with the Eleatics, though he really just had
Zeno’s famous paradoxes in mind as he said this. In effect Zeno may have been using some early
idealist dialectical thinking to (absurdly) argue against the possibility of movement,
change or development in the physical world itself.
“The Eleatic school (end of 6th-5th century B.C.) was named after
the town of Elea in Southern Italy. In contradistinction to the natural dialectic teachings
of the Miletian [or Ionian] school, and of
Heraclitus, regarding the changeable nature of things, the
Eleatic school believed in their individisible, immovable, unchangeable, homogeneous,
continuous, eternal essence. At the same time, some of the propositions of representatives
of the Eleatic school, and particularly the proofs advanced by Zeno concerning the
contradictoriness of motion (the so-called paradoxes of Zeno), despite their metaphysical
conclusions, played a positive role in the development of ancient dialectics, having
raised the problem of expressing in logical concept the contadictory character of the
processes of motion.” —Note 77, LCW 38:572-3.
ELECTION DENIALISM
The refusal to believe the official outcome of an election, based on claims such as that the election
was rigged or phony. Of course all elections in bourgeois
democracies are actually rigged and phony, no matter how truthful and accurate the counting of
the votes may be. And this is for many important reasons, including the basic fact that the ruling
bourgeoisie owns nearly all of the media that informs people; controls the education (or indoctrination!)
of the people; has the vast majority of wealth which they use to buy the loyalty of politicians; and
on and on.
In addition some bourgeois “democracies” have many
additional anti-democratic configurations in their electoral system. The U.S., for example, has many
anti-democratic arrangements written into its Constitution, which prevent each vote from counting the
same as any other vote. Each state has two Senators, regardless of their population; so the Senate
represention from smaller, less populous, states is undemocratically exaggerated. Then too, the
Electoral College system means that quite often the Presidential candidate receiving the most votes
does not win the election! This hoaky undemocratic system meant that in the 2000 election Al Gore lost
to George W. Bush even though Gore received 2,868,686 more votes than Bush did. In the 2016 Presidential
election the Electoral College made Donald Trump the winner even though Hillary Clinton received 543,895
more votes. [For details see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote
]
On top of these Constitution-based forms of anti-democracy
there are additional ways of cheating built into the American electoral system. One very important such
method, which is used at all levels from local to national elections, is through Gerrymandering. The
party in power in a state or region adjusts the boundaries of the electoral districts (such as for
Congressional districts or state legislature districts) so that they undemocratically win more than
their fair share of districts that they would if every person’s vote counted equally. Both Republicans
and Democrats make big use of this method, though in recent years the Republicans have been most
outrageous in doing so.
However, even in a deformed bourgeois democracy such as
the United States, the population has ordinarily been conditioned to ignore all these much more profoundly
anti-democratic structures and methods! So in denying that an election is fair, the only thing that is
supposed to matter is whether the votes were correctly counted. But if the votes were not even (more or
less) correctly counted, then a question might be raised as to whether we are really talking about a
bourgeois democracy at all, or rather instead a hidden authoritarian regime making a pretense at being
a democracy. This might be a major concern for a true-believer in the bourgeois interpretation of
“democracy”. However, probably most Marxist-Leninist-Maoists would consider that one group of capitalists
stealing elections through ballot-box stuffing (or emptying)—bad as that may be—is usually much less
important in regard to viewing the regime as a bourgeois democracy than what is of most concern to us: the
continuation of relative freedoms of speech, of the press, and to assemble and organize the people around
their common interests, that are also normally a part of bourgeois democracy. After all, we are already
well aware that different sections of the bourgeoisie attempt to cheat each other in elections in many
other ways, such as by attempting to control the masses’ voting in their favor through expensive media
advertising, by spreading lies and other forms of disinformation, through Gerrymandering, etc.
However, the mere claim that the vote counting in an
election is rigged or phony does not prove it so. And in a country like the United States which—in
the recent past anyway—usually more or less correctly counts the votes in major elections, it is
interestingly the most reactionary and authoritarian-minded individuals, like Donald Trump and his
followers, who claim with no evidence that the votes are not being counted correctly. For someone of
his authoritarian mindset, the votes can only have been counted more or less correctly if he is
declared the winner.
Widespread adoption of electoral denialism within a
bourgeois democracy—as has now occurred in the U.S.—is a serious sign that the bourgeoisie may be on
the verge of transforming that nominal democracy into an authoritarian form of bourgeois rule; that is
to say, into fascism—an openly bourgeois class dictatorship.
See also:
DISINFORMATION
ELECTIONS — In a Bourgeois Democracy
Elections in a bourgeois democracy are essentially
fraudulent, as far as classes other than the capitalist ruling class are concerned. This
is because all the major parties which are promoted by the capitalist system and its
overwhelmingly dominant and smothering mass media represent the bourgeoisie; because all the
most basic and important matters are never up for discussion and decision in the first place
(since the ruling class parties already agree about them); and because the choices about
candidates and questions which are being allowed are almost exclusively about very
secondary issues on which the ruling class itself is not already in complete agreement.
However, for the different and competing
sections within the ruling class these essentially phony elections (from the point of view
of the revolutionary proletariat) can be extremely important. The right politicians can favor
the interests of one of these sections as compared to another, and enormous potential future
profits can be at stake. For this reason billions of dollars are now routinely spent in
American elections to promote the differing interests of different sections of the ruling
class.
In addition to their important purpose in
deciding intra-ruling class disputes, elections in bourgeois societies serve another—and
much more important purpose: namely, further indoctrinating the masses and getting them to
believe that they have the ultimate say about how society should be run, and that
therefore they are themselves responsible for the decisions made by the government.
It is possible for the ruling capitalist class to literally get away with mass murder (at
home and abroad) when they can convince the people that this was the people’s own
decision.
See also:
LESSER OF TWO EVILS,
MAJORITY [Hinton quote]
“Did you, too, O friend,
suppose democracy was only for
elections, for politics, and for a party name?”
—Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas” (1871)
[Real democracy is a matter of allowing
the people to control their own lives, and of allowing the majority of the people to govern
in their own interests (which the phony manipulated elections in the U.S. do not actually
permit). —Ed.]
“There are five or six people in this room tonight that could
simply make a decision—this will be the next president—and probably at least get a
nomination, if ultimately the person didn’t win. And that’s not the way things are
supposed to work.” —President Barack Obama, February 2012, hat-in-hand at a small
political fund-raising event attended by billionaires including Bill Gates, then the
richest man in America. Quoted in Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the
Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016), p. 321.
“It is well established that electoral campaigns are designed so as to
marginalize issues and focus on personalities, rhetorical style, body language, and the
like. And there are good reasons. Party managers read polls and are well aware that on
host of major issues, both parties are well to the right of the population—not
surprisingly; they are, after all, business parties. Polls show that a large majority
of voters object, but those are the only choices offered to them in the business-managed
electoral system, in which the most heavily funded candidate almost always wins.”
—Noam Chomsky, Optimism Over Despair: On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change
(2017), p. 7.
“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority
of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not
now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the
voting populace goes down.” —Paul Weyrich, a conservative political strategist, 1980.
Online at:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Interesting_ALEC_Quotes
[It is indeed in the interests
of each section of the capitalist ruling class to discourage voting by those who would
support the other sections, and to strongly encourage voting by those potential voters
who would side with them. The Democrats in the US make great efforts to get unionized
workers and minorities to vote, while the Republicans concentrate on white people, rural
areas, and the better off neighborhoods and suburbs. The Republicans often take this
further and try to outright disenfranchize people who are more likely to vote against
them. There is strong reason to believe they succeeded in electing George W. Bush
president in 2000 through preventing many African-Americans from voting (or from having
their votes counted) in Florida and elsewhere.
In the US
“two party system” the Republicans generally
take a harder line against the working class, minorities and the poor. The Democrats
approach to maintaining bourgeois rule is to pretend to be the friends of the people;
in other words they are generally more demagogic—though all bourgeois parties are
demagogic to a considerable degree. (And Donald Trump, the Republican presidential
victor in 2016 was as much of a demagogue as any Democrat.) In other words, the
Democrats and the Republicans have something like what is known as a “good cop, bad
cop” routine for fooling the people. As such, it is more important for the Republicans
to try to actually restrict voting, and much more important for the Democrats to
constantly emphasize the importance of “getting out the vote” and to fool the people
into thinking that voting is going to make an important difference in their lives. But
whichever party wins these elections, the capitalist class stays in firm control. —S.H.]
“Since January [2021], at least 22 bills that make voting more difficult
have been signed into law in 14 states.” —New York Times, “Texas Republicans
Advance Strict Voting Bill After All-Night Session”, July 12, 2021.
ELECTIONS — Foreign Imperialist Manipulation Of
Virtually all modern imperialist powers try to manipulate, and to the greatest extent possible,
to control the elections and the overall societies of other countries, including those of
their imperialist competitors. However, at least since World War II, the greatest efforts by far
to accomplish such things have been by the United States government. A major part of the work of
the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is for this purpose, though that
is only part of the story. So-called “foreign aid” and activities and agreements pushed on
other countries by the U.S. State Department are also of major significance in this regard.
And of course American imperialism by no means limits its attempts to control other countries to
mere electoral interference; on the contrary, outright violence of all kinds, including
assassinations, military interventions, and outright major wars, are also all part of the same
overall effort.
See also:
EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION (McCoy quote)
“According to a compilation at Carnegie Mellon University, between 1946
and 2000 the rival superpowers intervened in 117 elections, or 11 percent of all the
competitive national-level contests held worldwide, via campaign cash and media
disinformation. Significantly, the United States was responsible for eighty-one of these
attempts (70 percent of the total)—including eight instances in Italy, five in Japan,
and several in Chile and Nicaragua stiffened by CIA paramilitary action.” —Alfred W.
McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century (2017), p. 55.
[These were just some of the more
specific and more blatant imperialist manipulations of foreign elections. Since World
War II, agencies of US imperialism (especially the CIA)
have had in addition many general ideological (“propaganda”) operations in constant
operation all around the world, a principal purpose of which is the manipulation of
foreign elections. It is not just “the 11%” of foreign elections which are manipulated
by imperialism to one degree or another, but the great majority of them! And of course
those elections held within imperialist countries themselves are even more
determinedly “manipulated” by the local capitalist-imperialist ruling class—since they
basically control these elections, from the selection of major candidates to
almost the entire media coverage of them. It is only when some competing
imperialist power deigns to try to manipulate these elections to their own advantage
that the local imperialists start to howl so hypocritically. This is what happened in
2016 with the possibly successful efforts of the Russian imperialists to slightly tilt
the US presidential election in favor of Trump. —Ed.]
“The Long History of US Meddling in Foreign Elections”
C. J. Polychroniou: “Noam,
the US intelligence agencies have accused Russia of interference in the US presidential
election [in 2016] in order to boost Trump’s chances, and some leading Democrats have
actually gone on record saying that the Kremlin’s canny operatives changed the election
outcome. What’s your reaction to all this talk in Washington and among media pundits about
Russian cyber and propaganda efforts to influence the outcome of the presidential election
in Donald Trump’s favor?”
Noam Chomsky: “Much of the
world must be astonished—if they are not collapsing in laughter—while watching the
performances in high places and in media concerning Russian efforts to influence an American
election, a familiar US government specialty as far back as we choose to trace the practice.
There is, however, merit in the claim that this case is different in character; by US
standards, the Russian efforts are so meager as to barely elicit notice.”
C. J. Polychroniou: “Let’s
talk about the long history of US meddling in foreign political affairs, which has always
been morally and politically justified as the spread of American-style democracy throughout
the world.”
Noam Chomsky: “The history of
US foreign policy, especially after World War II, is pretty much defined by the subversion
and overthrow of foreign regimes, including parliamentary regimes, and the resort to violence
to destroy popular organizations that might offer the majority of the population an
opportunity to enter the political arena.
“Following World War II, the United
States was committed to restoring the traditional conservative order. To achieve this aim,
it was necessary to destroy the antifascist resistance, often in favor of Nazi and fascist
collaborators, to weaken unions and other popular organizations, and to block the threat of
radical democracy and social reform, which were live options under the conditions of the
time. These policies were pursued worldwide: in Asia, including South Korea, the Philippines,
Thailand, Indochina, and, crucially, Japan; in Europe, including Greece, Italy, France, and
crucially, Germany; in Latin America, including what the CIA took to be the most severe
threats at the time, ‘radical nationalism’ in Guatemala and Bolivia.
“Sometimes the task required considerable
brutality. In South Korea, about 100,000 people were killed in the late 1940s by security
forces installed and directed by the United States. This was before the Korean War, which
Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings describe as ‘in essence’ a phase—marked by massive outside
intervention—in ‘a civil war fought between two domestic forces: a revolutionary nationalist
movement, which had its roots in tough anti-colonial struggle, and a conservative movement
tied to the status quo, especially to an unequal land system,’ restored to power under the
US occupation. In Greece in the same years, hundreds of thousands were killed, tortured,
imprisoned, or expelled in the course of a counter-insurgency operation, organized and
directed by the United States, which restored traditional elites to power, including Nazi
collaborators, and suppressed the peasant- and worker-based communist-led forces that had
fought the Nazis. In the industrial societies, the same essential goals were realized, but
by less violent means.”
—Noam Chomsky, Optimism Over Despair:
On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017), pp. 137-138.
“U.S. spending to influence the Nicaraguan elections in this period [circa
1987-1990] totaled ‘$30 million, or some $20 per voter. In contrast, George Bush spent less
than $4 per voter in his own 1988 campaign’.” —John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review,
September 1997, p. 60. This was in a book review of William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy:
U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony [1996]. The internal quote in Foster’s remark was from
page 226 of Robinson’s book.
ELECTRICITY and LIGHTING — Availability per Capita
This map is based on satellite photos of the light produced in various regions of the earth
adjusted to show how much light (and by implication how much electricity and economic
development in general) is produced per capita in different countries and areas. It
is thus one indication of the relative wealth and development in some countries and areas
compared to the relative poverty and under-development in other areas, and an indication of
the overall gross inequality of wealth and modern amenities in the world today. (Of course
some large areas like Greenland show up as “highly developed per capita” only because the
population is so extremely sparse there.)
“Satellite photos of Earth’s artificial lights at night form a
luminescent landscape. But researcher Chris Elvidge of NOAA and colleagues from the
University of Colorado and the University of Denver realized that they could also
illuminate something much darker: the magnitude of human poverty. By comparing the
amount of light in a particular area and its known population, they realized that they
could infer the percentage of people who are able to afford electricity and the level
of government spending on infrastructure development. This allowed them to extrapolate
levels of human development—a measure of well-being that includes such factors as
income, life expectancy and literacy.
“Their Night Light Development
Index (NLDI) uses a composite of cloudless night images taken by Air Force satellites.
They found that the NLDI (see map) measured human development with uncanny accuracy.
The results closely correlated with conventional indices and in some cases even
surpassed them. ‘The NLDI helps us get at the spatial patterns that you can’t see
with traditional economic indices,’ Elvidge says. ‘For instance, most nations report
their GDP at the country or province level, but the NLDI can reveal subregional
patterns, down to the one-kilometer scale.’ The index also provides information on
some countries, mostly in Northern Africa and the Middle East, for which reliable
economic data are simply unavailable.” —Joseph Stromberg,
Smithsonian magazine, March 2013, pp. 18-19.
ELECTRON
One of the primary components of atoms and matter in general.
Electrons, and their specific structure and arrangement within cloud-shells around the
nucleus of atoms, are responsible for the chemical properties of the elements.
See also:
WAVE FUNCTION
“There are whole walls in libraries covered by countless shelves
which are bending under the books on electronics and quantum electrodynamics. But in
none of those books will you find a proper definition of an electron, for the very
good reason that we haven’t the foggiest idea what an electron ‘is’.” —Vincent Icke,
The Force of Symmetry (1995), p. 300. [Icke seems to think that finding out
what an electron “is” is impossible or even meaningless. However, one way we find
out more about what things actually are is by finding out how they relate to other
things, what their internal composition and structure is, and so forth. These are
precisely the ways in which we have already deepened our knowledge of what molecules
and atoms are. —S.H.]
“The ‘essence’ of things, or ‘substance’, is also relative;
it expresses only the degree of profundity of man’s knowledge of objects; and while
yesterday the profundity of this knowledge did not go beyond the atom, and today does
not go beyond the electron and ether, dialectical materialism insists on the temporary,
relative, approximate character of all these milestones in the knowledge of
nature gained by the progressing science of man. The electron is as inexhaustible
as the atom, nature is infinite, but it infinitely exists. And it is this sole
categorical, this sole unconditional recognition of nature’s existence outside
the mind and perception of man that distinguishes dialectical materialism from
relativist agnosticism and idealism.” —Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”
(1908), LCW 14:262.
“Materialists were [once] not aware of scientific knowledge of material
structures, such as electron theory which demolished the erroneous theory of the
elimination of matter and which clearly bears out the correctness of the materialism
of dialectical materialism. Through the discoveries of modern natural science, such as
the discovery of electron theory, certain material properties which appeared in old
materialist concepts (weight, hardness, impermeability, inertia, etc.) were shown to
exist only in certain material forms and not in others. Facts like these eradicated the
one-sideness and narrowness of old materialism’s approach to material concepts and
nicely demonstrated the correctness of [dialectical] materialism’s recognition of the
world.” —Mao, “Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism” (1937), in Nick Knight, ed.,
Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism (1990), p. 102.
“We may ask ... what holds a negatively charged electron together (since
[unlike the nucleus of the atom] it has no nuclear forces [to overpower repulsive electrical
forces]). If an electron is all made of one kind of substance, each part should repel the other
parts. Why, then, doesn’t it fly apart? But does the electron have ‘parts’? Perhaps we should say
that the electron is just a point and that electrical forces only act between different
point charges, so that the electron does not act upon itself. Perhaps. All we can say is
that the question of what holds the electron together has produced many difficulties in the
attempts to form a complete theory of electromagnetism. The question has never been answered.”
—Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol.
2, (Addison-Wesley, 1964), p. 1-2.
[The notion that an electron (or any
other physical particle) may “only be a point” is actually ridiculous, as Feynman may
be hinting here. It is an attempt to reduce a part of reality to a mathematical abstraction,
and hence is a form of philosophical idealism. (See also my
essay: “The Impossibility of Infinitely Small Particles” (1989) at:
https://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/infinitely_small.htm ) In any case, the
more fundamental point here is Lenin’s: There are still a great many important things we do
not at all understand about even just this one basic component of matter, the electron. —S.H.]
ELEMENTARY PARTICLE
1. A particle in physics which is definitely
not made up of other, smaller particles and/or which therefore definitely has no internal
structure. It is not known if any such elementary or “fundamental” particles in this sense
actually exist.
Atoms were once defined as particles
which were fundamental (in the sense that they could not be cut into pieces). But much later it
was learned that atoms are composed of protons,
neutrons and electrons, which were then all
assumed to be elementary particles. More recently it was found that protons and neutrons, at
least, are themselves composite particles, each constructed of three
quarks. The further advance of physics, especially when using more and
more powerful cyclotrons and other pieces of advanced equipment, has repeatedly shown that what
were once considered to be elementary particles are actually composites. This has led many people
to wonder if truly elementary or fundamental particles exist at all! (Hence the way the term
“elementary particle” is now defined in physics in the second sense below.)
Dialectics would
seem to strongly suggest that no truly elementary particles can exist, and that there are internal
opposing forces within everything. However, it is also well to remember Engels’s comment
that the laws of dialectics are merely important generalizations derived from our overall
investigation of the world. These dialectical laws, including the fundamental law of contradiction,
do appropriately guide our thinking, but they do not absolutely dictate the way nature
always has to be.
2. [As it is now more cautiously used in particle
physics:] A particle whose substructure is unknown, and thus one which is so far not known to
be composed of other particles. At the present time the “elementary” particles in this sense
include the fundamental fermions or “matter and anti-matter particles”
(quarks, leptons, antiquarks, and antileptons), and the fundamental bosons
or “force particles” (gauge bosons including the photon and gluon, and the Higgs boson). A particle
containing two or more elementary particles is a composite particle.
See also:
STANDARD MODEL,
“THEORY OF EVERYTHING”
ELITE THEORY
The “elite theory”, or “elites theory”, is the bourgeois sociological doctrine that the
state, particular governments, and the political world in general, should be analyzed in
terms of elites, or the powerful people who run the world versus those who they
govern. This theory was consciously developed, and is most often consciously still
promoted, in opposition to the Marxist analysis of society in terms of socioeconomic
classes, and the actual dominance and rule in class society
of one or another of these social classes over all the others. Bourgeois sociologists have
not been able to deny that some people in society are in a powerful privileged position
which allows them to rule the others. So they are all the more concerned to at least hide
the fact that this ruling group of people is the capitalist class and their chosen
representatives. Thus these bourgeois ideologists are willing to talk about “ruling elites”,
but virtually never the ruling capitalist class.
The theory of “elites” was developed at
around the beginning of the 20th century in Italy by Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto.
Mosca wrote a book called The Ruling Class in 1896 (English translation 1939) in
which he championed this theory. He was careful to define what he meant by “class” in elite
power and organizational terms, as opposed to economic terms of the relationship of differing
groups of people to the means of production. He
did talk about the rulers and the ruled, and recognized that the ruling class was a rather
stable privileged group which had both wealth and power, which he attributed primarily to
their much better organization. Mosca viewed liberal democracy as basically a sham, which
it in fact is. Mosca is therefore both the founding figure and a transitional figure in the
development of the theory of “elites” away from Marxism.
Although Mosca developed this basic “elites”
theory of how a privileged powerful few rule the many, it was the bourgeois economist and
sociologist Vilfredo Pareto who apparently first used the precise term “elites” in a huge
1916 book on sociology (translated into English in 1935). Pareto switched the explanation
for how elites are able to rule from their superior organization to various psychological
factors. After World War II, liberal bourgeois sociology and “political science” around
the world quickly adopted the concept of “elites” as the basis of their thinking about
society. Strangely, they nearly always fail to draw Mosca’s own conclusion that this
clearly shows that liberal bourgeois democracy is a fraud! One prominent bourgeois
sociologist in the US who promoted the adoption of the theory of “elites” was
C. Wright Mills, with his book The Power Elite
(1956).
While bourgeois ideologists cannot deny
that powerful groups of people run society in their own interests, this admission actually
serves the interests of the ruling capitalists in one important way. They argue that this
rule by “elites” is inevitable in every society, and that no social revolution will
ever be able to institute genuine rule by the people. The message to the working class is,
“So why even try?!”
We Marxists should not only cringe when we
hear the word “elites” but also clearly recognize that the speaker is looking at society
from a bourgeois perspective which rejects any Marxist class analysis. People who talk in
terms of “elites” are distorting social reality, and—consciously or not—hiding the actual
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
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In the United States the U.S. Supreme Court has absurdly ruled that corporations have the same right
of “free speech” that people do, and that therefore corporations cannot be restricted in their massive
financial manipulation of American elections. This has led to a situation where the biggest corporations
by themselves now often strongly influence, or outright determine, the outcome of elections. Bourgeois
“democracy” in the U.S. is more and more under the direct control of giant corporations.
One of the 100+ basic types of