The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

[Howard509]

I've been learning more about Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx wasn't referring to a vertical dictatorship, in which the people are under a supreme ruler, but a horizontal dictatorship, in which the people themselves rule. Why hasn't any communist state practiced this in real life? I think the workers' state, if practiced, would be a good idea.

[Bright Banana Beard]

http://jamie-online.com/random-jamz/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/facepalm.jpg

[scarletghoul]

^This.

To elaborate, the democratic peoples' dictatorship has been attempted in every communist country, with varying degrees of success. Its not just a question of "what a great idea why hasnt anyone done it", it's a question of how to implement such a dictatorship. Usually this is done by having a single party which is controlled by the people. Some good examples of this include the early USSR and Maoist China. Cuba is the main modern example.

[ZeroNowhere]

The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is very much a 'vertical' dictatorship. Then again, I have no idea what a 'horizontal dictatorship' means.

[Jimmie Higgins]

There are many debates on this subject on this website. My understanding is that "dictatorship of the proletariat" does not mean anything in regard to the particular form that the working class organizes itself after a revolution just that it is a dictatorship of the entire working class over society.

Personally I think the only way the entire class can rule (have dictatorship) will have to involve democracy in workplaces and communities and so on.

[Howard509]

The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is very much a 'vertical' dictatorship.

Did Marx advocate having a supreme ruler or a vanguard party to rule everyone below?


Then again, I have no idea what a 'horizontal dictatorship' means.

Are you familiar with the difference between horizontal and vertical collectivism?

[ZeroNowhere]

Did Marx advocate having a supreme ruler or a vanguard party to rule everyone below?No. He did, however, advocate the enforcement of the expropriation of the expropriators, which involves the enforcement of the will of one part of the population over another through state power. That sounds rather 'vertical'.

[Howard509]

Will it be possible to go straight to an anarchist society from capitalism?
http://infoshop.org/faq/secI2.html#seci22

Other than semantics, I don't see much of a difference between the Marxist concept of a "transitional state" and the anarchist concept of a "transitional society."

[cb9's_unity]

http://jamie-online.com/random-jamz/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/facepalm.jpg

Your an asshole. How about you let someone fucking learn instead degrading them with a old-ass internet meme.

Now to the question.

In essence the Dictatorship of the Proletariat has not worked out for two reasons.

1) There wasn't much of a proletariat in Russia (15% pre-revolution is the largest number I've seen and most of that got decimated in the civil war) and even less in China. Marx thought the dictatorship of the proletariat gained most of its power from the fact that it would be the unquestionably largest class at the time of the revolution. Leninist's seem to believe combined dictatorships of the Proletariat and Peasantry can work. While the idea has been tried on a number occasions unless you believe North Korea, China, Vietnam, or Cuba are full socialist democracies then the idea has yet to be verified and is on the edge of being completely discredited.

2) People have yet to really listen to Marx. The only people who can bring the working class to power are the workers themselves. We have had experimentation with smaller more tightly controlled 'communist' parties but without fail they have all at one point or another degenerated into un-communistic and undemocratic ruling parties (see China and Russia for the clearest examples of this).

Of course many Leninists will disagree with my post. They will either tell you that their tightly controlled parties of the past 'represented' the working class or even that the vanguard party was not a group of elite professional revolutionaries but instead just "the most class-conscious" workers. To the former I believe the time for a small controlled party is long gone and to the former I think they should remember why the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks originally split.

[robbo203]

Did Marx advocate having a supreme ruler or a vanguard party to rule everyone below?

No he didnt. Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was very different to lenin's vanguardist version of the same. But I actually think the whole idea is incoherent anyway. The proletariat is by defintion the exploited class in capitalism and the existence of a proletariat implies the existence of capitalism which, after all, can only operate in the interests of the capitalist class and not the proletariat. So the proletariat would not be "dictating" to the the capitalist class but would continue to be dictated to by the latter. The only way in which the dictatorship of the proletariat makes any sense at all is if it simultaneously signifies the abolition of all classes. In other words by becoming the ruling class the proletariat effectively abolishes itself and all other classes in one go

[Howard509]

Why not begin with gradually turning our local communities into communes? That way, the workers' state can be built from the bottom up.

I believe that the community bill of rights which I've been promoting is a step in this direction:
www.cforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/es-bill-of-rights.pdf

[Tower of Bebel]

(...) the democratic peoples' dictatorship has been attempted in every communist country (...)How do you know? And what do you mean by "peoples"?

it's a question of how to implement such a dictatorship. Usually this is done by having a single party which is controlled by the people.You're quite wrong on the question of the form it must take. Your intension is probably good, but Marx and Engels never mentioned this method. That's not because Marx didn't know of the vanguard party. Traces of it can be seen in the Communist Manifesto - however, this is debatable. But it's atually because historically one-party rule and Marx his concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat are totally different.

The problem with your examples is that they are copies of what was perceived to be a succesful "Bolshevik model". Yet this Bolshevik model was far from flawless. One mistake was its dictatorship of the party over the "peoples". All this was given a theoretical justification: "Leninism" or "Marxism-Leninism" or maybe even "Bolshevik-leninism"?

What did Engels have to say?
"If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown."A Critique of the Erfurt Programme (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm)

Now, of course, in theory, this does not exclude the rule of one party "controlled by the people". But the problem with the emphasis on the Bolshevik model is the implicit emphasis on terror: that of the workers' party against it's enemies. Many times the Bolsheviks looked back at the French Revolution to find something that could both serve as an example and justify their actions. That's why they thought of themselves as heirs of the "Club des Jacobins" and its state terror during the most radical phase of the French Revolution. But what did Engels mean by the French Revolution?

It went even so far that Trotsky justified Red terror by reffering to the Paris Commune. Another example used by Engels to describe the dictatorship of the proletariat:

Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. 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.The Civil War in France (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/intro.htm)

Trotsky, in his Anti-Kautsky, was extensively occupied with the Commune to prove that Red Terror was necessary if the Soviet regime was to survive. That even the Paris Commune would have had to set up such a terror if it wasn't smashed by the French army in its early days.

No doubt such a terror would have been/was an inevitable outcome of unfavourable circumstances. Even Engels showed that the state as an organ of oppression was an evil which the proletariat has to deal with:

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 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.But this historical justification which the Bolshevik party looked after made it quite hard to see what Engels actually ment by "dictatorship of the proletariat". Among some Bolsheviks the core of the DotP was sometimes forgotten in the midst of the struggle. They sometimes forgot that they were using parts of the old state machine against their enemies. The state became independent of society, through terror too, and no justification for that could be found in the Paris Commune. There is nothing socialist about the old, reactionary state aparatus. The state must not be strenghtened but weakened. That doesn't mean some sort of pacifism à la Kautsky but a durable connection with mass struggles. The masses are the state, they are not the subjects. It is the latter part (the distinction between the masses and the state) which cannot be reconciled with the account of both the Commune and the French revolution given by Marx and Engels.

This brings us back to what must have been said. This brings us back to what Engels (and Marx) actually ment by the democratic republic and the DotP. This is what Engels had to say about what truely constitutes a proletarian dictatorship:
From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself,and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.

[...]

Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society – an inevitable transformation in all previous states – 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 to representative bodies which were also added in profusion.And this is what Luxemburg wrote on the subject:

The basic error of the Lenin-Trotsky theory is that they too, just like Kautsky, oppose dictatorship to democracy. “Dictatorship or democracy” is the way the question is put by Bolsheviks and Kautsky alike. The latter naturally decides in favor of “democracy,” that is, of bourgeois democracy, precisely because he opposes it to the alternative of the socialist revolution. Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favor of dictatorship in contradistinction to democracy, and thereby, in favor of the dictatorship of a handful of persons, that is, in favor of dictatorship on the bourgeois model. [...] [The proletariat] should and must at once undertake socialist measures in the most energetic, unyielding and unhesitant fashion, in other words, exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique – dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest possible form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy.

[...]

Yes, dictatorship! But 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. But 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.
Doubtless the Bolsheviks would have proceeded in this very way were it not that they suffered under the frightful compulsion of the world war, the German occupation and all the abnormal difficulties connected therewith, things which were inevitably bound to distort any socialist policy, however imbued it might be with the best intentions and the finest principles.
A crude proof of this is provided by the use of terror to so wide an extent by the Soviet government, especially in the most recent period just before the collapse of German imperialism, and just after the attempt on the life of the German ambassador. The commonplace to the effect that revolutions are not pink teas is in itself pretty inadequate.

Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an inevitable chain of causes and effects, the starting point and end term of which are: the failure of the German proletariat and the occupation of Russia by German imperialism. It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy.

By their determined revolutionary stand, their exemplary strength in action, and their unbreakable loyalty to international socialism, they have contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions. The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics. When they get in there own light in this way, and hide their genuine, unquestionable historical service under the bushel of false steps forced on them by necessity, they render a poor service to international socialism for the sake of which they have fought and suffered; for they want to place in its storehouse as new discoveries all the distortions prescribed in Russia by necessity and compulsion – in the last analysis only by-products of the bankruptcy of international socialism in the present world war.The Russian Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch08.htm)

When Marx wrote of "despotic inroades on (the rights of) private property" he did not mean the nationalization of the means of production by a party controling the state, leave aside using the old state apparatus. No, he struggled for the conscious action of the proletariat through its own organizations. This means means democracy. It is preciely this democratic character which makes up the real dictatorship of the proletariat. Terror like the Red Terror actually means that something has gone wrong. One Party rule as had happened in the past also means problems.

Of course Luxemburg was also in her right to write that Lenin and Trotsky did what they could, even when it wasn't always what needed to be done. The Bolsheviks were conscious of what they did and they knew where the problems were comming from. But after a period of time this was fitted into a theoretical and historical justification. And at the same time a specific model was created.

But it is no use transforming their experiences into a ready-made formula. The Bolshevik Model or one-party system is not the specific form taken by the Dictatorship of the proletariat.

[The Feral Underclass]

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Please don't post these pictures in a serious discussion thread. Consider this a verbal warning.