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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 74 – the dictatorship of the proletariat (3)

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It is ironic that Marx’s idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is held up as evidence of his authoritarian and oppressive politics when his view was advanced against such conceptions, held by many of his immediate socialist predecessors and contemporaries.  These included such figures as the utopian socialist Saint-Simon, Blanqui, Wilhelm Weitling and Ferdinand Lassalle, who are no longer so well known, but whose views are still the staple of many today who are unaware of their ancestry.

In the previous posts on the book Citizen Marx, we noted that early in his political career he was on the extreme democratic wing of republicanism, and against the constraints on democracy supported by liberalism, going much further in identifying the road to a positive conception of freedom.  The first ‘dictatorship’ championed by him was the dictatorship of democracy in 1848 during the bourgeois revolutions of that year, which the bourgeoisie betrayed.  Such a democratic “dictatorship” would energetically repress any counter-revolution to defend itself from reaction.

For Marx the dictatorship of the proletariat was synonymous with terms that now sound less jarring, such as the ‘political power of the working class’ or the ‘rule of the proletariat’, and meant nothing more nor less than these.  In his book Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold suggests that the various terms Marx used to describe the Paris Commune could also be employed – “Communal Constitution”, “Communal Republic”, “Republic of Labour” and “Social Republic”.  What this entailed was set out in the previous post, most particularly the abolition of classes leading to the abolition of the state, understood by Marx as the mechanism for imposing and defending class rule.

As Engels set out, ‘the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.’ (Engels Introduction to Karl Marx’ s The Civil War in France 1Vol 27 p 190)

Marx ventured some views on how the state would develop that history has confirmed: 

“The bourgeois state is nothing more than the mutual insurance of the bourgeois class against its individual members, as well as against the exploited class, insurance which will necessarily become increasingly expensive and to all appearances increasingly independent of bourgeois society, because the oppression of the exploited class is becoming ever more difficult.”  (Marx, Le Socialisme et l’Impôt, par Emile De Girardin, Collected Works Vol 10 p 333)

Hal Draper, in his third volume of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, entitled The Dictatorship of the Proletariat ventures that ‘Marx’s term ‘rule of the proletariat’ was reformulated as ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ when Marx had to confront the Blanquist mind. (KMTR Vol III p 293).  Draper also notes the comparatively few times – six – that Marx used the term, within two defined periods: 1850–52 and 1871–75.  What matters is that it follows from the idea of a working class political struggle, leading to a working class revolution, and new collective property relations based on the working class.

Draper further states that ‘Not before the “Critique of the Gotha Program” and not after it did Marx ever indicate that the party program should include the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, or any formulation involving the word ‘dictatorship’. (KMTR Vol III, p 305)

We have also seen in the posts on Citizen Marx that Marx and Engels believed that a democratic republic provided the best conditions in which to fight for socialism and was therefore more important to the working class than the bourgeoisie. The latter could, if it had to, have its interests defended by dictatorial political regimes that rested on capitalist property relations, while collective and cooperative property relations are inimical to such political forms.  Whether the form of the bourgeois state was a bourgeois democratic republic or an authoritarian regime, all entailed the dictatorship of the capitalist class in their understanding of the term since the property relations were capitalist and defended by the state.

As The Communist Manifesto put it “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”

“The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”

What distinguished Marx’s conception from that of others was that the “dictatorship” was to be one of the proletariat not over it.  As Engels said of one who advanced the latter view:

‘Since Blanqui regards every revolution as a coup de main by a small revolutionary minority, it automatically follows that its victory must inevitably be succeeded by the establishment of a dictatorship—not, it should be well noted, of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who accomplished the coup and who themselves are, at first, organised under the dictatorship of one or several individuals. (Engels, The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune Collected Works Vol 24 p 13)

Emancipation was to be achieved by the working class itself, counterposed to the schemes of the supporters of Blanqui:

‘Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organised men would be able at a given favourable moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by a display of great, ruthless energy, to maintain power until they succeeded in sweeping the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. This involved, above all the strictest, dictatorial centralisation of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government.’  (Engels Introduction to Karl Marx’ s The Civil War in France 1Vol 27 p 188)

This was to be true not only of the workers’ party in relation to society but within the party itself. As Engels put it in a letter in 1890 regarding the German Workers Party: “The biggest party in the empire cannot remain in existence unless every shade of opinion is allowed complete freedom of expression, while even the semblance of dictatorship à la Schweitzer must be avoided.” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works Vol 49 p 11)

Back to part 73

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 72 – the dictatorship of the proletariat (1)

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In a previous post I noted Marx’s statement that 

‘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; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.’ (Marx letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, Marx Collected Works Vol 39, p62 & 65)

If we quote Lenin on this, he puts it in his typically forthright way:

‘The question of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the fundamental question of the modern working-class movement in all capitalist countries without exception… Whoever has failed to understand that dictatorship is essential to the victory of any revolutionary class has no understanding of the history of revolutions, or else does not want to know anything in this field.’ – Lenin, “A Contribution to the History of the Question of the Dictatorship”.

‘Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie.’

‘Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested’. (Lenin, The State and Revolution.)

It is almost universal that when introducing this question, it is felt necessary to explain what is meant by the word “dictatorship”.  The feeling is justified. The history of Stalinist regimes that repudiated the common understanding of (bourgeois) democracy has made these statements appear as early political endorsement of later practice. This explanation of its meaning is ahistorical, and it is necessary to present the very different understanding of the term as it was understood by Marx.

This usually starts by noting that the word ‘dictatorship’ has a long history, going back to the ancient Roman Republic, denoting various specific political ideas that are not the same as the current conception of it – as a form of government in which absolute power is exercised by a dictator, or as signifying absolute, imperious, or overbearing power or control.  Like so many other political or philosophical thinkers, terms routinely employed by Marx often have a specific meaning which it is necessary to know to correctly understand his work.  In Marx’s case the use of the word dictatorship during his time was not confined to him and was widely understood.

For Marx it denoted not the overthrown or denial of democracy but its achievement, as put forward in The Communist Manifesto, which he generally subscribed to for the rest of his life:

“We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” In doing so “the working class can not simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery, and wield its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police bureaucracy, and judicature for its own purposes.’

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto)

The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore refers to the period after the working class achieves political power, so that this power becomes that of the majority.  At this time Marx set out that the state would lead this process, but he subsequently emphasised the working class itself carrying out this task, initially through the growth of workers cooperatives and then through their forming a national (and international) cooperative economy.  This would be distinguished not so much by its planning as by the governance and control by the working class. (See note below)

Subsequent history has demonstrated that without this working class control socialism cannot be built, which is in many ways a truism, since socialism is (loosely) the name for the working class becoming the ruling class.  History also confirms Marx’s analysis of the position of the state: ‘the government machine or the state insofar as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labour.’ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works Vol 24 p 96)

In creating this ‘dictatorship’, society is radically changed and the previous economic and political power of the capitalist class – through their ownership and control of the means of production defended by the instrument of the state – is replaced by that of cooperative ownership and a state machinery, composed of workers, and controlled by the working class as a whole.  

Note: ‘That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionise the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present cooperative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the governments or of the bourgeois’. (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works Vol 24 p 93-4)

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