religious creeds and so on all stem from the material conditions of life, and are
not independent causative factors in society. The dialectic, as a mode of
argument, used by Greek philosophers such as Socrates andPlato, claims that
change in the world comes about through a process of conflict between
opposed movements. For example, there is a particular mode of production
which is dominant in an economy. This might be peasant agriculture. A new
mode begins to develop, urban industrial manufacture, which is contradictory
in needs and demands to the earlier mode. The clash between these produces a
new third mode, in this case a revolution which results in the abolition of
private property, which in turn becomes dominant. This tripartite process
consists of a ‘thesis’, contrasted to a rival ‘antithesis’, with the two submerged
in the resulting ‘synthesis’, and is the form that all historical progression, in
ideas, the economy, the class struggle, world power relations and so on takes.
For Hegel, the modern initiator of the form of argument, the dialectic took
place in the realm of ideas and spirit, whereas for Marx, who claimed to have
‘stood Hegel on his head’, the real progress takes place at the material or
physical level, and ideas grow out of this ‘substructural’ dialectic process. The
material level is the economy, characterized at any one time by a particular set
of modes and means of production.
Dictatorship
Dictatorship is a form of government in which one person has sole and
complete political power. In antiquity, a temporary dictator was often
appointed as an emergency measure by states which were normally organized
in some other fashion. The Roman Republic appointed dictators during
military crises (the term actually originates from this practice), and the ancient
Greek city states sometimes gave supreme law-making powers to individuals,
for example Solon in 594–93BC, when civic unity was seriously threatened.
In the modern world many dictators have come to power as leaders of mass
movements, and have ruled through their control of such movements or
through political parties that have acquired a monopoly of power. Dictators
also frequently emerge from the armed forces when a militaryjuntatakes over
after acoup d’e ́tat. An important distinction should be made between the
dictator who exercises personal power based on their own popularity or
control of coercive institutions, and the apparently dictatorial leader who is
in reality largely a figure-head or no more than the ‘first among equals’ within a
ruling clique. Often the term is used in a debased way to describe someone
who does have enormous personal influence, even though they are acting
within the legal restrictions of a democracy.Hitler,MussoliniandStalin
were real dictators, whereas more recent leaders of the Soviet Union, who have
owed their eminence to their position within the party hierarchy and have had
Dictatorship