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Joe Corbett has been living in Shanghai and Beijing since 2001. He has taught at American and Chinese universities using the AQAL model as an analytical tool in Western Literature, Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Science, and Communications. He has a BA in Philosophy and Religion as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Social Science, and did his PhD work on modern and postmodern discourses of self-development, all at public universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at [email protected].

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The Three Dictatorships

And the Democracy that Never Was

Joe Corbett

Let's cut to the chase. The three dictatorships referred to in the title of this essay are, first, the dictatorship of the proletariat (or working class) written about by Marx and Engels and then put into practice by Lenin and Mao; second, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie written about by political philosophers of the enlightenment and put into practice by the founding fathers of America; and third, the dictatorship of the aristocrats and the oligarchs of the ancient and feudal regimes, including the neofeudal regime currently making a comeback in the global world order. Democracy has only ever existed within the parameters set by these dictatorships. The sovereignty of “the people” has always been class-based, and when I say class I mean a minority group of elites in control of the levers of the State.

The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was a regime that began as a coup and a revolution against the ancient feudal regime by a group of entrepreneurial start-ups who needed the freedom to trade and build the markets of capitalism unhindered by the rent-seeking aristocrats. In order to do this it needed a state with the ability to raise taxes (to establish a monopoly on the currency) and an army to defend and expand its interests, as well as a system of laws and governance, and eventually an internal police force to keep in place and enforce the domestic laws of “order” that primarily reflected elite interests to protect private property, not simply to uphold morality.

From the beginning, privileging landowners and white men, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie has been accomplished quite simply by making it prohibitively expensive to even run for political office in America, and this applies to both the right and the left in American politics, creating by default the so-called Washington consensus that agrees on most things economic but often with significant cultural differences. This tells us how the bourgeoisie, the managerial and financial elite, is able to be united on its class interests even though often divided by its cultural affiliations, which are always subordinate to their class solidarity. If you want to be a politician in America you have to have the financial backing of the monied interests of the bourgeoisie, and now of the billionaires too.

So you tell me, democracy for who? Is it democracy when the bourgeoisie puts forth all or most of the candidates for us to choose as our managerial overlords? And whose interests do you think they'll be promoting? That's not a democracy properly speaking, but a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and now of the oligarchic billionaires, even if an independent candidate here and there is able to slip through the cracks in the pavement that the bourgeois and billionaire classes have buried the working class under. Democracy is and always will be class based, either coming from the interests of the bourgeoisie, the oligarchs, or the working class. Take your pick.

The most recent expression of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was the neoliberal corporatist state of the Obama-Biden coalition, who infamously sidelined the populist Sanders as a threat to the bourgeois order worse than Trump. As a consequence they are now facing a coup of their own regime of values by the “preferred alternative” to left wing populism, the wrecking crew of Chump and the Dog-e pound, the neo-feudal oligarchs of the old regime dressed up for the 21st century. If your side eliminates what the populism of the people want on your side, you're going to get what the populism of the people want on the other side, and that's exactly what the Obama-Biden coalition did to themselves and to the country. Thanks, neolib bros!! Own it.

Up until the start of Trump's second term, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was fairly united, with the Dumocrat and Republicon leaders in agreement on global economic domination by Western corporations, for which Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza are only the most recent tragic consequences. Where the Dum-Cons disagree is reflected in the domestic policies and cultural coalitions they have, where the Democrat DEI crowd consist of the “educated” urban petty bourgeoisie supporting domestic programs for minorities and the inner-city poor, whereas the Republican “deplorables” consist mostly of non-university educated suburban and rural working class whites who have long been abandoned by the educated urban elites, and who support cutting domestic programs under the angry and resentful delusion that their tax money pays for these things.

The current and still emerging dictatorship of the oligarchs has disrupted and taken advantage of the divisions within the state managerial and wall street financial bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the petty cultural bourgeoisie and the deplorable working classes on the other hand. The emerging oligarchy is clearly an alliance between the anarcho-capitalist libertarians who want to eliminate state regulations and the anti-woke crowd who want to stop the grab for cultural hegemony that cultural “progressives” have been pushing for. Together they are against the neoliberal global corporatists and the DEI “joyful economy” soothsayers, who have abandoned domestic industrial monopolists and heartland American workers alike.

The coup now underway to destroy the institutions and culture of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is designed to replace it with a dictatorship of the oligarchs in the name of, and as a substitute and a mask for, a dictatorship of the working class against the managerial and financial elites, including and most of all against the oligarchs themselves if it were a true dictatorship of the proletariat. Of course, a true dictatorship of the proletariat, the revolutionary class of the base of society according to Marx, where leaders and votes would represent the interests of the people instead of the interests of the uber-wealthy political campaign donors, is the real loser in this situation. Instead of a peoples democracy represented most clearly by the populist Bernie Sanders who was rejected by the bourgeoisie, a billionaire demagogue and crime boss along with his billionaire partners in crime have hijacked the state apparatus to institutionalize their agenda of more austerity for the people and fabulous riches for the already rich.

Ultimately however, if everything goes as planned by the oligarchs, their heist of the state apparatus will backfire in their faces, as the pitchforks are already primed to be released, and the betrayal once again by false leadership (the first such betrayal being the Clinton-Obama false hope of wall street corporatism) will implode their dreams of divinely ordained kingship. Nevertheless, the tech bro faction of the oligarchs is clever enough to have anticipated such a backlash and revolt against them, and that's why they are busy constructing an AI surveillance system of total data control. We for our part must make sure that they cannot leverage the surveillance system they are building to discipline and punish political dissent, for our very lives will depend on it.