36 SOCIAL SCIENTIST ever since its inception. He defended the idea against the attacks of Kautsky and his followers, and took it a step further on the new historical experience, thereby enriching the democratic traditions of Marxism. The bourgeois critics do not, and mostly will not, understand how it is possible to support proletarian dictatorship and democratic ideals at one and the same time. The root cause of the lack of understanding, as Lenin shows, is their ridiculous counterposing of dictatorship in general to democracy in general, without any specific examination of what class or classes the dictatorship refers to, or without a comprehension of the class meaning of democracy. In their haste to discredit the very concept of proletarian dictatorship, Western social scientists identify it with totalitarianism, as Brinton makes painfully obvious in his book The Anatomy of Revolution'. "The dictatorship of the extremists is embodied in governmental forms as a rough-and-ready centralization'93. It signifies coercion and suppression of liberty, it is "their extraordinary mixture of spiritual fury, of exaltation, of devotion and self-sacrifice, of cruelty, madness, and high-grade humbug554. Dictatorship, Brinton continues, is needed by 'extremists9 to build their new Utopia, their heaven on earth, in a brief span of time. To these ends, they wage a savage campaign against all human vices and foibles. Even sloth is adjudged criminal; all emotional enjoyments are proscribed and officially-prescribed asceticism becomes the rule. The man-in-the-street finds himself bound by rules and regulations that he cannot stand for long; eventually dictatorship gives way to terror as the rulers try to compel him to bow to the new regime. That is how Brinton gloomily depicts dictatorship by the revolutionary classes. Dictatorship of Monopolist Oligarchy Dictatorship is synonymous with terror in Brinton's mind. It would be idle to pretend that dictatorship is not associated with coercion. Is not the dictatorship by monopoly capital connected with coercion of the majority of the populace in the capitalist world, even in the most bourgeois democratic states? Those who doubt this may ponder on the following facts and figures. The share of the wealthiest American families, who make up only one per cent of the US adult population, accounted for no less than 40 per cent of the total personal wealth in the early 1970s. A small number of finance-oligarchical groups in the United States are able to wield their wealth and government ties to dominate the country's economy and direct it towards an even greater enrichment and consolidation of their tutelage. One might justly ask if it is not violently flouting the will of the majority when a few monopolies control and use the economy of the entire nation. The monopoly bourgeoisie extends their control of the economy to that of politics, here too flouting the popular .will. That is especially apparent in countries like Spain where blatantly dictatorial regimes prevail. But even where democratic standards of politics are formally