In
Marxism, the
dictatorship of the
proletariat denotes the transitional
socialist State between the
capitalist class society and the classless
communist society. During the transition,
the
State can be nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat, thus the term refers to the
Classical Roman
dictatura
concept — republican and constitutional — whereby the
proletarian government would replace the
incumbent
capitalist economic system and
its socio-political supports, i.e. the “dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie”.
Marx and Engels
On 1 January 1852, the journalist
Joseph Weydemeyer published the
“Dictatorship of the Proletariat” article in
The New York
Times newspaper. In that year, Karl Marx wrote to him,
saying:“Now, as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered
either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle
between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described
the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as
had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own
contribution was (1) to show that the existence of classes is
merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development
of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the
dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship,
itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of
all classes and to a classless society”.
[10389] Marx also used the term in the
Critique of the Gotha
Program (1875).
In context,
dictatorship
denotes the political control (government) by a social class, not
by a man (
dictator rei gerendae causa); like-wise, being a
system of class rule, the
bourgeois
State is a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. When the workers (the
proletariat) assume State power, they become the (new)
ruling class, and rule in their own interests,
temporarily using the State’s institution in preventing a bourgeois
counterrevolution.
Karl Marx did not detail the implementation of the dictatorship of
the proletariat, yet indicated the
Paris
Commune (March–May 1871) as a model of the transition to
Communism:
This form of popular government, featuring revocable election of councilors and maximal public participation in governance, resembles contemporary direct democracy.
In the 1891 postscript to
The Civil War in France (1872)
pamphlet,
Friedrich Engels said:
“Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this
dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat”; to avoid bourgeois political
corruption, “the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In
this first place, it filled all posts — administrative, judicial,
and educational — by election on the basis of universal suffrage of
all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their
delegate at any time. And, in the second place, all officials, high
or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The
highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In
this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was
set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates [and] to
representative bodies, which were also added in profusion”;
moreover noting that the State is “at best, an evil inherited by
the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy,
whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot
avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such
time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions,
will be able to throw the entire lumber of the State on the
scrap-heap”. Marx’s attention to the Paris Commune placed the
commune in the centre of later
Marxism forms.
Lenin
Upon the destruction of the Paris Commune (1871), during Marx’s
lifetime, there were no other serious attempts at implementing the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the twentieth century, Vladimir Lenin developed Leninism — the adaptation of Marxism to the backward socio-economic and political
conditions of Imperial
Russia
(1721–1917); later the official ideology of some Communist states. The State and Revolution
(1917) discusses the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, and
proposes pragmatic means of effecting it. In Imperial Russia, the
Paris Commune model form of government was realised in the
soviets (councils of workers and soldiers)
established in the
Russian
Revolution of 1905, whose revolutionary task was
deposing the capitalist (monarchical)
state to establish
socialism — the
dictatorship of the proletariat — the stage preceding
communism.
To effect and realise the
communist
revolution, the urban workers and peasants require the active
leadership of a political
vanguard
party of dedicated, professional
revolutionaries to so establish the
dictatorship of the proletariat. In the Russian Imperial case, the
Bolshevik Party was the “vanguard of the
proletariat” — who launched and led the soviets to victory in the
October Revolution of 1917. Like
Marx and Engels, Lenin discounted
liberal democracy (the
Kerensky Government) as
unrepresentative of the proletariat’s interests, for being a façade
of the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. Moreover, because
trade unions inherently are political
reformers (seeking
accommodation with the capitalists to
improve the lot of the members) — therefore,
revolutionary
action in the proletariat’s behalf requires that the vanguard party
politically
educate the workers and
peasants, helping them transcend the low political expectations of
the “trade-union consciousness” and so develop the “true
revolutionary class consciousness” that would allow the vanguard
party’s assumption of State power, via the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
In the event, the proletarian
dictatura would eliminate the
intra-class social division impeding the rational development of
communism; nevertheless, despite a successful revolution, the
bourgeoisie remain stronger than the proletariat, because:
For a long time after the revolution the exploiters
inevitably continue to retain a number of great practical
advantages: they still have money (since it is impossible to
abolish money all at once); some movable property — often fairly
considerable; they still have various connections, habits of
organisation and management; knowledge of all the “secrets”
(customs, methods, means, and possibilities) of management;
superior education; close connections with the higher technical
personnel (who live and think like the bourgeoisie); incomparably
greater experience in the art of war (this is very important), and
so on and so forth.
Lenin defended his proposal against accusations of his being
undemocratic, by theoretician
Karl
Kautsky and others, by quoting Marx and Engels in establishing
the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia —
to forcefully depose and suppress the Imperial ruling class:
In principle,
soviet democracy
granted
voting rights to the majority
of the populace who elected the local soviets, who elected the
regional soviets, and so on until electing the
Supreme Soviet of the Soviet
Union. Moreover, the USSR did not claim to have achieved a
communist society; the preamble to the 1977
Constitution of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (the “Brezhnev Constitution”), stated
that the 1917 Revolution established the dictatorship of the
proletariat as “a society of true democracy”, and that “the supreme
goal of the Soviet state is the building of a classless, communist
society in which there will be public, communist self-government”.
[10390]
During the
Russian Civil War
(1917–23), the Bolsheviks banned other political parties, to
preclude sabotage,
collaboration
with the deposed
monarchists, and
further assassination attempts against Lenin (twice) and other
Bolshevik leaders. Internally, Lenin’s Bolshevik critics argued
that such political suppression always was his plan; supporters
argued that the
reactionary civil war of the foreign-sponsored
White Movement required it — given
Fanya Kaplan’s unsuccessful
assassination of Lenin on 30 August 1918, and the successful
assassination of
Moisei Uritsky, the
same day.
Critics of the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” —
Anti-Communists,
Trotskyist Communists,
Libertarian Marxists,
Anarcho-Communists, and anti-
Stalinist Communists and
Socialists — propose that the Stalinist
USSR and other Stalinist countries used the “dictatorship of the
proletariat” to justify the
dictatorship of
a (new)
ruling class; cf. the
anti-bureaucratic
Workers'
Opposition (1920) and the
Kronstadt uprising (1921). Despite the
principle of
democratic
centralism in the Bolshevik Party, for organisational cohesion,
internal factions were (temporarily) banned, but not debate; the
ban remained until the USSR’s dissolution in 1991; the debates of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were published until 1923;
internal debate ended (ca. 1927) with the
Josef
Stalin’s suppression of
Leon
Trotsky and the
Left
Opposition.
Trotsky; Trotskyists
In
The Revolution
Betrayed (1937), a critical analysis of
Stalinism and the USSR’s post-Lenin development,
Leon Trotsky proposed that the
Russian Revolution of 1917,
produced a workers’ state (the USSR) that then became a
degenerated workers' state after
1923; a state based upon a recruited-
caste
bureaucracy akin to the
feudal clergy — something the soviets did not inherit from
the monarchical
ruling class. Further
illustrating the betrayal of the revolution,
Stalinism and
Bonapartism are compared as forms of
dictatorship based upon specific
social class and property relations;
thus Stalinism is to a workers’ democracy, as Bonapartism is to a
bourgeois democracy. Despite that, the
collectivized economy represented
the progressive policy to defend in the USSR, whilst,
elsewhere, supporting
political
revolution aimed to establishing workers’ democracy.
After the
Second World War (1941–45) the
Trotskyists ideologically described the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1943),
the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam
(1945), the Socialist People's
Republic of Albania (1946), the People's
Republic of China
(1949), and the Republic of Cuba
(1959) — Communist states
Stalin established with military conquest, occupation, and proxy
guerilla warfare — as degenerated workers’ states with
politically dispossessed working classes, thus never were true
workers’ states, for having been established as dictatorships.
Quotations
Karl Marx
- Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period
of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.
Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in
which the state can be nothing, but the revolutionary dictatorship
of the proletariat. — Critique of the Gotha
Program (1875)
Lenin
- The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won,
and maintained, by the use of violence, by the proletariat, against
the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.
- A state of the exploited must fundamentally differ from such a
state; it must be a democracy for the exploited, and a means of
suppressing the exploiters; and the suppression of a class means
inequality for that class, its exclusion from democracy.
- The proletariat cannot achieve victory without breaking the
resistance of the bourgeoisie, without forcibly suppressing its
adversaries, and that, where there is forcible suppression, where
there is no freedom, there is, of course, no democracy.
- And if you exploiters attempt to offer resistance to our
proletarian revolution we shall ruthlessly suppress you; we shall
deprive you of all rights; more than that, we shall not give you
any bread, for in our proletarian republic the exploiters will have
no rights, they will be deprived of fire and water, for we are
socialists in real earnest, and not in the Scheidemann or Kautsky
fashion.
- The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the organization of
the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose
of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion
of democracy. Simultaneously, with an immense expansion of
democracy, which, for the first time, becomes democracy for the
poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the
money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of
restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the
capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from
wage slavery, their resistance must be
crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no
democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence. —
The State and
Revolution
Rosa Luxemburg
- This dictatorship consists in the manner of applying
democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic,
resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic
relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist
transformation cannot be accomplished. This dictatorship must be
the work of the class, and not of a little leading minority in the
name of the class — that is, it must proceed step by step out of
the active participation of the masses; it must be under their
direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public
activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of
the mass of the people. — The Russian Revolution
Karl Kautsky
- The term, “dictatorship of the proletariat”, hence, not the
dictatorship of a single individual, but of a class, ipso
facto precludes the possibility that Marx, in this connection,
had in mind a dictatorship in the literal sense of the term. —
Dictatorship of the Proletariat
See also
Notes
- See Chapter 4 of Karl Marx's Critique of the
Gotha Programme (1875).
-
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/index.htm
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