Bourgeois ideology, and its superficial analysis, obscures this class nature of the state, as the means of enforcing the class rule of the ruling-class, its class dictatorship. It conflates it with the purely administrative functions of the state, particularly when it conflates the state with the government/political regime. Particularly within the political regime of bourgeois-democracy, and its current manifestation as social-democracy, it presents the elected government as, thereby, the government of “the people”, and this government of the people as synonymous with “the state”, or at least in control of the state, in the form of its permanent bureaucracy, military, police, courts and so on. The government is expected to govern on behalf of the whole people.
In fact, the elected governments are never the governments of the whole people. Besides the fact that “the people” are divided into classes with antagonistic interests, which leads to the formation of parties that, in whatever way, are based on securing the votes of electors from those classes, there are numerous other cross-cutting cleavages in society, along the lines of sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and so on. Indeed, in some societies, where “the people” exists as a large undifferentiated mass, i.e. where the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry forms the overwhelming majority, these other cleavages can often predominate, resulting in parties being based on these various communalist interests.
So, the idea that a party, based on whatever sectionalism it relies on for its voter base could ever be a party and government of “the whole people”, is absurd. The trades unions split from the Liberal Party to form the Labour Party, precisely because, once workers have the vote, and begin to use it, even to appeal to those workers on the same basis of the social-democratic, bourgeois ideology, it becomes apparent that the workers need their own party, just as they needed trades unions, rather than employer run staff associations. As Starmer and Blue Labour broke that link, and saw his voter base in that reactionary petty-bourgeois mass that voted for Brexit, and at the same time, attacked workers, the trades unions are faced with the same choice.
Moreover, the elected governments rarely obtain a majority of votes, let alone a unanimity of votes of “the people”. The more parties contesting elections, the more democratic and proportional the voting system, the smaller the share of the vote does any given party tend to obtain. In Britain, the voting system amounts to ballot rigging by the main parties, so that the Blue Labour government obtained a huge majority of seats, but only a third of the votes cast, and only about a fifth of the total electorate.
But, even where a government is elected with a clear majority, the idea that it can govern on behalf of “the whole people” is facile, precisely because “the people” only exists as an abstraction, and, in reality, its main dividing lines, based on class, are ones that represent irreconcilable, antagonistic and contradictory interests, based on the ownership and control of different forms of property.
The idea that the elected government, representing “the people”, is “the state”, or controls the state, is also facile. Hobbes, in Leviathan, spoke of “the people” only being sovereign on one occasion. That is they appoint a sovereign to represent them, and having done so, they must submit to the rule of that sovereign. Moreover, that sovereign is, then, able to appoint its successors. The idea clearly appeals to Trump, and the same logic is applied by the Brexiters to claim that “the people” voted in 2016 for Brexit, and the matter can no longer be considered, even though only 37% of the electorate vote for it, and, today, a clear majority oppose it! Truly absurd.
But, the real insight of Hobbes was that the real sovereign is not “the people”, nor the monarch, nor parliament. The single act of appointing the sovereign is the act of the revolutionary class, in creating the permanent state that represents its interests. Monarchs, like parliaments, come and go, but the permanent state remains throughout and that state appoints its own replacements, on its own terms. The government, particularly in the political regime of social-democracy, plays the useful role of perpetuating the illusion that elections really mean anything substantial, a symbol that it is a democracy of the people by the people, and for the people, when, in fact, these governments are never able to overrule the interests of the ruling-class, as defended by its state. Indeed, as Lenin described, in “State and Revolution”, and Ralph Miliband also set out with specific reference to Britain, even the parliamentary system puts huge obstacles in the way of the working-class creating a party that truly represents its interests, far less that it could form a majority in parliament, and even less that it could simply legislate on behalf of workers, and against the interests of the ruling-class. Even Wilson faced the threat of a coup, all the stops were pulled out to prevent Corbyn even leading Labour to electoral victory, even though he represented little more serious threat to the ruling class than Wilson.
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