The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin

From Marx to Lenin
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Contents:

  • Defending Socialism: Debunking Anti-Communist Myths (w/ Radical Reflections)
  • Navigation menu
  • Some Questions Concerning the Crisis of Marxist Theory and of the International Communist Movement
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    • The closest it came to nationalizing property was to authorize workers in enterprises that had been abandoned by their owners to take over and run them cooperatively. The political vision of the Commune, to the degree that it had time to elaborate one, was decidedly decentralist, specifically, a network of regional and local communes, down to the level of the villages, each of which was to have maximum local autonomy.

    Dictatorship of the Proletariat

    This reflected the fact that key leaders of the Commune were followers of the mutualist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and other anarchists, who advocated this type of decentralized social structure. In contrast, Marx and Engels were militant centralists, reflecting their view that the logic of capitalist development was to concentrate and centralize the means of production in ever fewer hands and eventually under the control of the state. In their writings on the Commune, Marx and Engels fudged this crucial issue.

    Second, the notion that the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat or, in fact, any other event in history is inevitable is absurd. It reflects an archaic conception of science that, in light of the development of quantum mechanics, modern genetics, and other scientific developments, can no longer be reasonably sustained. It is also as I discuss in my book, The Tyranny of Theory, A Contribution to the Anarchist Critique of Marxism one of the main sources of the authoritarianism and totalitarianism that characterizes Marxist ideology and the Marxist movement as a whole.

    Third, the conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a state that embodies the direct and democratic rule of the entire working class is a contradiction in terms. The state represents - indeed, is the very embodiment of — the existence of a political division of labor in society, that between a minority which rules and a majority which is ruled.

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    As a result, to the degree that the proletarian dictatorship is a state is the degree to which it does not and cannot embody the rule of the entire working class; and to the degree that it does embody the rule of the entire working class is the degree to which it is not a state.

    In fact, it rests on two contradictory conceptions of democracy that are never made explicit and are never clearly separated.

    Defending Socialism: Debunking Anti-Communist Myths (w/ Radical Reflections)

    On the one hand, Marx and Engels appear to accept what is perhaps the most basic notion of the term, that is, that all members of a given society have an equal right to control the political and other processes of that society. On the other hand, Marx and Engels seem to argue that, by virtue of its historic destiny the notion that the working class is ordained, by the dynamics of capitalism and, more broadly, by the laws of history, to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat , the working class is the historic embodiment of social progress, and therefore the very establishment of working-class rule, in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, necessarily establishes democracy.

    As this process develops, the two notions of democracy will tend to converge, thus eliminating, or appearing to eliminate, the contradiction between them. But this raises several questions: What happens in countries in which the majority of the people are not workers? Does the working class in such countries have the right, by virtue of its historic destiny, to establish its dictatorship over the rest the majority of the population, even if that majority does not want to be ruled by the proletariat? It has only been relatively recently that the majority of the global population has become proletarian, even in a very broad sense of the term.

    Yet, Marx and Engels called for an international socialist revolution. Does this entail the establishment of the international rule of the proletarian minority over the peasants and other members of the non-proletarian majority? And is this to be justified by the Marxian claim that Marxism is scientific, that the establishment of international communism is inevitable, and that the working class is the historical embodiment of social progress?

    Marx and Engels believed that the peasants are incapable of leading themselves and must inevitably come under the tutelage of an urban class, either the capitalists or the workers. Elsewhere, Marx and Engels argued that the workers, once in power, would lead the peasants toward socialism by demonstrating the economic advantages of modern agriculture, based on the latest agronomic techniques and machine technology, that socialism, with its large-scale collective means of production, would make possible.

    On the one hand, Marx and Engels insisted throughout their political careers that the workers have to seize political power and take control over or establish a state. This was one of the main points of contention in their disputes with Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and other anarchists that ultimately led to a split in and the eventual demise of the First International and continued beyond that. Elsewhere, their phrasing implies that they believe the state will linger on for a considerable period of time.

    But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions, and abolishes also the state as state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. It withers away. But such ambiguities serve a crucial purpose, one that has been revealed throughout the history of Marxism.

    While in theory, Marxists are against the state and call for its elimination, in practice, they are militantly pro-state.

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    Source: Chapter 1 of The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' from Marx to Lenin, by Hal . Incidentally, the ascription of the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat' to. In the 20th century, Vladimir Lenin developed Leninism—the adaptation of Marxism to the socio-economic and political.

    This is not conscious deception. Marxists truly believe that the more thoroughly they build up the state, and the sooner that state eliminates the capitalists and the other oppressing class, takes over all property, and crushes all resistance, the sooner the state will disappear. How do Marx and Engels know this? Is this, too, inevitable? Why are they obligated to be paid according to what Marx and Engels explicitly claim is a bourgeois principle? Moreover, why do they need a state to enforce this? And who is to control this state and enforce this principle?

    In this conception, even after the socialist revolution, which one would think and hope should be an act of consummate freedom, the workers are not free; they are governed by — indeed, are the mindless playthings of - historical necessity. It seems that only at the very end of this long, historically-ordained process are the workers to be free. In this conception, then, freedom is determined.

    Some Questions Concerning the Crisis of Marxist Theory and of the International Communist Movement

    But how can freedom be the result of determinism? In a world that is determined, there is not, cannot be, and never will be, true freedom. Even at their most minimal, states are ramified organizational apparatuses that are staffed by real people. Lenin, the founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party, saw himself, and always tried to present himself, as the faithful follower of Marx and Engels.

    This work was written during July and early-August of , while Lenin was in hiding after the semi-insurrectional July Days and the government repression that followed it; it was published in early , after the Bolsheviks had seized power. In other words, Lenin wrote The State and Revolution to demonstrate that the Bolshevik-led revolution was to be a true proletarian socialist revolution and, in fact, the fulfillment of Marxism.

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    Consistent with this, The State and Revolution has two interrelated polemical thrusts. Here is what Lenin wrote in in his Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat , which was presented to the founding conference of the Communist International:. The Paris Commune took the first epoch-making step along this path. The soviet system has taken the second. Genuine democracy, i. This perspective was not able to be realised because the extension of the socialist revolution, upon which it was based, did not take place.

    The old ruling classes of Europe were able to survive the post-World War I revolutionary upsurge and the working class was pushed back. Rather than beginning the process of withering away, the state assumed monstrous forms under the Stalinist bureaucracy which usurped political power in the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union there have been all manner of attempts to declare the Russian Revolution and socialism in general dead and buried.

    But all the great problems in the historical development of mankind which the revolution set out to resolve in the first decades of the 20th century—imperialist war, colonialism, economic oppression—are erupting once again at the beginning of the 21st. Not least is the question of democracy.

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    The working class cannot play its world-revolutionary role unless it wages a ruthless struggle against this renegacy. And, so it seems to me, the results of history bear out this skepticism. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? It was to provide the mass base for Stalin and his regime. The State and Revolution. Lenin, Summary of Dialectics

    More than years ago Engels explained how state power had become completely independent in relation to society even in the most democratic of democratic republics, the United States. This description has lost none of its relevance. The stealing of the US presidential election by George Bush, with the Supreme Court and the military playing key roles, and the attacks on democratic rights by the Bush administration in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, is only the most graphic expression of processes under way in all the so-called capitalist democracies.

    According to Marxist theory, the existence of any government implies the dictatorship of one social class over another. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is thus used as an antonym of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorship of the proletariat is different from the popular notion of ' dictatorship ' which is despised as the selfish , immoral , ir responsible and un constitutional political rule of one man.

    On the other hand, it implies a stage where there is complete ' socialization of the major means of production ', in other words planning of material production so as to serve social needs , provide for an effective right to work , education , health and housing for the masses , and fuller development of science and technology so as to multiply material production to achieve greater social satisfaction. However, social division into classes still exists, but the proletariat become the dominant class; oppression is still used to suppress the bourgeois counter-revolution.

    The bigger an enterprise is, the more is it forced to adjust its production to the changing whims and fancies of the masses, its masters.

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    The common man is supreme in the market economy.