available for three thousand years. Unlike the Pharaonic dynasties, the ruling classes of the period of Capital accumulation sit on a dynamo which their own historical activity brought into being. This dynamo constantly threatens to cut short their period of decline. The dynamo consists of individuals who are in daily contact with the constantly changing productive forces; individuals who are expected to be simultaneously automatic and imaginative, simultaneously obedient and creative. Unlike aspiring Pharaohs, aspiring modern leaders cannot count on these workers to continue to alienate their productive powers to Capital and their power of community to the State for the next 3000 years. The duration of the Egyptian decline is only one historical instance; it does not provide a basis for certainty. Frozen history, death in life, may only be the mask of modern society, and not its real face. The mask is all that is visible because the vision of the ruling class is in every epoch the ruling vision. But there are unmistakable signs of ferment and agitation just below the still mask. Unlike the peasants of ancient Egypt, modern workers have much to gain from the appropriation of society's productive forces.
The historical consequences of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat can only be realized in conditions where these consequences have not yet been realized. This is why the seizure of State power has succeeded mainly among people who had been deprived of the dominant historical reality of the capitalist epoch. This is why the ideology of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, of growth rates of national income, of the new Socialist Man, has appealed only to people in countries oppressed by imperialism.' The ideology was accepted because it was understood to refer to the modern State, commodity production and the division of labor. The rule of the vanguard party was not understood as an end in itself but as a means toward the full realization of the dominant historical reality of the capitalist epoch. The revolutionary organization offered people deprived of the amenities of modern social life the prospect of becoming professors, factory managers and policemen.
However, in conditions where the material consequences of capitalist social relations have already been realized, revolutionary leaders with portfolios to State offices have been hard put to point to any material consequences of their victory other than their rule. The less people need social relations instrumental to the accumulation of Capital, the more must leaders create a consciousness which regards the seizure of State power by revolutionary leaders as a good in itself. In such conditions it becomes a major feat for revolutionary leaders to maintain the conviction that the conscious vanguard of the proletariat performs a critical service for the proletariat. This conviction can no longer be implanted in the proletariat itself, because of the erosive effects of the law of diminishing consciousness. This
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