Dictatorship of the proletariat

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The "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a term employed by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program that refers to a temporary transition period between the capitalist society and the classless and stateless communist society; during this transition period, "the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat". The term does not refer to a concentration of power by a dictator, but to a situation where the proletariat (working class) would hold power and replace the current political system controlled by the bourgeoisie (propertied class).

1 Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat"
2 The "dictatorship of the proletariat" since Lenin
3 Quotations
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat"

The term dictatorship was first used in the Roman Republic to refer to an emergency situation in which the Senate could delegate all power to a single ruler for a limited period of time. Roman dictatorship still had limits placed upon it even as it temporarily exercised absolute power. Some Marxists claim that Marx's vision is vastly more accountable than the Roman institution, and that he wished the working class to use it to create a democratic "social republic" where the masses are in control, no longer being ruled by an exploitative or oppressive elite. While workers can easily place power in the hands of one or a few "dictators," and still feel secure they they will retain control over the economy and society, the dictatorship of the proletariat, having a democratic social goal, must itself be democratic.

However, different Marxist currents interpret this concept in different ways. Leninists believe it to be exercised through elected representatives from workers' parties instead of directly by the working class itself. This echoes Lenin's emphasis on centralization which implies a state run from a center through a chain of command.

Before 1875, Marx said little about what in practice would characterize a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” believing that planning in advance the details of a future socialist system constituted the fallacy of "utopian socialism." Thus, Marx used the term very infrequently.

When he did use it, the term "dictatorship" describes control by an entire class, rather than a single individual (dictator rei gerendae causa). According to Marx, the bourgeois state, being a system of class rule, amounts to a 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.' When workers take state power into their hands, they become the new ruling class and rule in their own interest, using State machinery to prevent the bourgeoisie mounting a counterrevolution.

Marx viewed the dictatorship of the proletariat as an intermediate stage, believing that the need for workers to use state power would disappear once a classless society had emerged.

Although Marx did not plan out the details of how such a dictatorship would be implemented, he pointed to the Paris Commune as a model of transition to communism.

Later, Friedrich Engels, in his 1891 postscript to the Civil War in France stressed the dismantling of the state apparatus, the decentralization of power and popular democratic control over and management of civil society. The pamphlet praised the democratic features of the Paris Commune, arguing that the working class, once in power, had to "do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself," and that it must "safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment." [1] The 1891 postscript qualified the 1871 Commune as the first "dictatorship of the proletariat".

[edit] The "dictatorship of the proletariat" since Lenin

The Paris Commune was short-lived, and no other serious attempt at implementing Marx's ideas was made during his lifetime. After Marx, Vladimir Lenin discussed the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in The State and Revolution (1917), elaborating his proposals for putting it into practice. Lenin believed that the political form of the Paris Commune was revived in the councils of workers and soldiers that appeared after the 1905 Russian Revolution that called themselves soviets. Their task, according to Lenin, was to overthrow the capitalist state and establish socialism, the stage preceding communism.

Meanwhile, the role of the revolutionary party, in his case the Bolsheviks, was to serve as a "vanguard of the proletariat," which would start the revolution when the time was right and lead the soviets to victory. Like Marx and Engels, Lenin did not think that a liberal democracy could represent the interests of the proletariat because it would inevitably lead to the aforementioned "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." Lenin argued that since trade unions are inevitably reformist, seeking only an accommodation with capitalists to improve the lot of their members, revolutionary activity on behalf of the proletariat requires the vanguard of a revolutionary party. The party will then impose a "dictatorship of the proletariat," assisting the workers to transcend their "trade-union consciousness" by developing a "true revolutionary class consciousness", and thus eliminate the intra-class divisions that impede the development of communism. Lenin believed that, even after a successful proletarian revolution overthrows capitalism in one country, the bourgeoisie still remains 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. [2]

For these reasons, Lenin argued that a "class dictatorship" was necessary in Russia. Lenin advocated the use of force to suppress the former ruling class and the removal of their voting rights, while quoting statements by Marx and Engels to support his policies against the criticism of other Marxists (such as Karl Kautsky), who argued that Lenin was being overly undemocratic. At the same time, however, Lenin stated that the system of soviet democracy did guarantee voting rights to the majority of the population. The principle of soviet democracy was that the local workers' soviets would elect representatives that would go on to form regional soviets, which would in turn elect representatives that would form higher soviets, and so on up to a Supreme Soviet, the highest legislative body of the entire country.

Later, during the Russian Civil War, non-Bolshevik political parties - including socialist ones - were banned one by one on charges of sabotage, attempted assassination of Bolshevik leaders and cooperation with the enemy. Critics of Lenin argue that he intended to ban opposition parties all along and was merely looking for excuses to do so, while supporters argue that this measure was made necessary by wartime conditions and that the charges brought against the various opposition parties were genuine (citing, for example, the attempt on Lenin's life by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918, and the successful assassination of Moisei Uritsky the same day). What is certain is that the Bolsheviks were the only political party left standing by the end of the Civil War, and Lenin died shortly thereafter.

In accordance with the principle of democratic centralism, the Communist (Bolshevik) Party contained numerous factions with significant differences of opinion at the time of Lenin's death, and this continued for a few years afterwards. However, following the ascension of Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s, dissent was gradually suppressed and freedom of speech was abolished.

Critics, including anti-communists but also Trotskyist communists (which defend the historical need for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat), Marxists, anarcho-communists, and virtually all communists and socialists who were/are anti-Stalinist contend that Stalin's Soviet Union and the countries that followed its Stalinist model used the notion of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" to justify what was in effect a dictatorship of a new ruling elite, although of a different nature than the previous ruling elite. Some also say that the degeneration of the Russian revolution began before Lenin's death, and that he and Trotsky played a crucial role in it (for example, by crushing the Kronstadt uprising and eliminating opposing factions like the Workers' Opposition).

[edit] Quotations

"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." - Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program
Marx: “...When the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary dictatorship ... to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie ... the workers invest the state with a revolutionary and transitional form ...[3]
Engels: “...And the victorious party” (in a revolution) “must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?...[4]
Engels: “As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist ....[5]
Lenn: 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.[6]
Lenin: 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”[7]
Lenin: 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[8]
Lenin: 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.[9]
"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." - V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution
"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." - Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution