ABSTRACT
The weakening of the landholding class, which encourages the submission of the military elite to state control in Britain, is seen as one important factor in fostering democratization. There are the analyses that view class-elite relations as either fostering or creating a problem for democratization. Elections and other democratic arrangements have mainly symbolic value; even the tolerance they create serves as an instrument of repression; they are there to obscure vicious micromechanisms of power. Democracy, which is basically incompatible with the economic inequalities of capitalism serves mainly as a fig leaf, to cover the nakedness of that same capitalism, and of ruling class/elite power.
