The "pragmatic" argument, that totalitarianism is desirable as some sort expedient or temporary remedy, irrespective of its hypothetical merits also runs into ethical objections: It presupposes the existence of an authority (usually imagined as a ruling cast of intellectuals--perhaps appointed through a "democratic process") who by virtue of God know better the most of the rest of the population. That is to say, "No state, however democratic not even the reddest republic -- can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People's State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves...." "But the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled `the people's stick' " (Statism and Anarchy [1873], in Dolgoff, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 338) -- "the people's stick" being the democratic Republic.
I think that intellectually Marx's theory is totally incredible and probably more explicable if regarded as a novel rationalization of the Christian morality he was taught as a child (with some Hegel thrown in for good measure) than a substantive work of science. At any rate much of Christian metaphysics is preserved: the millennium, good and evil, the free will/determinism dualism etc. But, more importantly, when put into practice Marx's proposals lead to the result Bakunin predicted: tyranny under a new name.
*I have defined totalitarianism somewhat widely. But I think it is legitimate to describe many currents in our society as totalitarian, and that it is more than fair to say that the intellectual left, large sectors of it at any rate, are closet Platonists--i.e., imagining themselves as (exclusively) having the wisdom and learning to run society; regardless of what society at large thinks of this (as proof: why are libertarian or anarchist thinkers so consistently ignored, even despised? while preferred are those who flatter authority, or can at least be read that way, as in Marx.). Nowadays there is a lot more hypocrisy, of course; since totalitarianism is sort of a dirty word people do not praise it out loud. It goes by different names. For example, to the right it is know as "market forces" to either "the war on drugs" and to the left "new humanism"; pretty soon environmental legislation will become the bludgeon of choice used to keep the restless masses disciplined.
Peter Ward Crank Brooklyn, NY