You seem to be stuck in the stupid dichotomies of the boomer truth regime. You should really read either James Burnham's The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, which is a realist look at political systems and the inspiration for Emmanuel Goldstein's book within a book Theory And Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism in Orwell's 1984, or the more modern version Levithan And Its Enemies by Sam Francis, which continues the tradition of elite analysis through the fall of the Soviet Union. I personally prefer Sam Francis' book, although it was published posthumously and they didn't want to give it the good editing that it really needed without Francis' input.
You seem to be stuck in the stupid dichotomies of the boomer truth regime. You should really read either James Burnham's The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, which is a realist look at political systems and the inspiration for Emmanuel Goldstein's book within a book Theory And Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism in Orwell's 1984, or the more modern version Levithan And Its Enemies by Sam Francis, which continues the tradition of elite analysis through the fall of the Soviet Union. I personally prefer Sam Francis' book, although it was published posthumously and they didn't want to give it the good editing that it really needed without Francis' input.