HammerAlias
19th July 2010, 21:46
I am writing and compiling ideas made by other leftists to correct the terrible misconceptions that a lot of people, left and right alike, have about Karl Marx and Marxism in general. A few points to be made at first: I am not a Marxist. Nevertheless, I will be attempting to explain and defend the worthwhile contributions that Marxism made in advancing social theory. However, I will not be using this opportunity to critique Marxism: this is a primer course, and any critiques I would be making would presume a thorough understanding of Marxism.
Let's begin.
Reading The Manifesto of the Communist Party is a terrible place to start when it comes to understanding Marxism, socialism or communism.
As a manifesto, it is written to convey ideas to those who had already affiliated themselves with the socialist left circa 1848. There's more than a few problems with this. First of all, the circumstances in which we life are drastically different from 1848. The Manifesto will only begin to make sense once one is familiar with the economic, social and historical conditions of Europe in the 1840s: a world still mostly gripped in feudalism, but being torn apart by an industrial system that was alien to most people, and had unleashed horrors of misery upon mankind that had never before been seen.
Second, the Manifesto is written to preach to the choir: it assumes that the reader has familiarity and sympathy with socialist concepts and philosophical ideas. If you didn't go into reading it already understanding the Marxist notions of economic base and superstructure; of economic classes based upon their relationship to the means of production; of understanding the class dynamics of different theoretical modes of production; and finally, understanding the dialectical methodology of Marx, you are not going to understand anything about the new form of society it implicitly champions.
Forget everything you ever thought you new about socialism or communism. Even if you consider yourself sympathetic to the idea. You are attempting to understand these concepts from a fundamentally capitalist ideological framework, and thus the idea of communism you have will either be a) Informed by the mutually misleading propaganda of the Establishment and of Stalinism or b) Or you'll attempt to understand communism from a capitalist perspective, and thus conceptualize it as some strange phantasm.
Communism is not a consumerist utopia. It's not a mythical Land of Cockyagne, where unbridled consumption is the word of the day. It is not a land where everyone get's an equal share of everything. These are capitalist dreams, not communist ones.
Socialism (and by extension communism) is by its very definition not a utopia, for utopias are by their very nature post-political. All collectivist economic systems by their very nature presume the primacy of politics, not its absence from human life. Socialist socio-economic systems, as the conventional definition goes, are based on two separate by closely intertwined features. The first is some form of common ownership of the means of production; land, natural resources, mines, factories, and the means of communication between them. The second is control of the political apparatus and the economic system by its stakeholders. That means in concrete terms, that a democratic political system manages the economic affairs common to all, and the workers of each firm manage the economic affairs of that firm.
I'm fairly certain that most socialists understand this. But going into reading the Communist Manifesto without any background, you're not going to get this impression at all. You're going to be baffled. The blame get's cast twofold. Marx himself gets the lionshare of the blame, for being such a dense writer, making his writings and ideas very hard to approach and digest. The rest of blame get's cast on civics and political theory teachers and professors the world over, for not recognizing this trait in Marx and compensating for it by selecting different reading material or at least adequately preparing their students before they throw them head first into the Communist Manifesto
Back to the Basics:
Marxism is the most dominant branch of socialist political philosophy. And the influence of Marx and Marxism penetrates far beyond self-proclaimed Marxists. On the left, even those who consider themselves anti-Marxists have been profoundly influenced by much of Marxist theory, even if they disagreed with the Marxian political programme. Case in point: the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who was a bitter contemporary critic of Marx, was very conscious of how much of Marx's philosophy and economic analysis he agreed with.
The essential basics to understanding Marxism are its three main components: historical materialism and dialectical method, the critique of capitalist social relations, and the advocacy of a political programme of proletarian revolution.
Marx's theory of history
To understand historical materialism, we must at least have a passing familiarity with Marx's forebears; Hegel and Feuerbach. What's relevant here is a simple methodology that was popularized by Hegel, called dialectical method. While Hegel was far from the first, he's probably the person most often associated with dialectical methodology, and his own peculiar methodology is relevant.
Hegel's dialectic is a threefold process, which begins with the Abstract, or the thesis, as it is often rendered in English, which is beginning of the developmental process. The Abstract, for all intents and purposes, merely is. It's existence leads to the reaction, which Hegel termed the Negative. This antithesis seeks to negate the Abstract. The Abstract and the Negative exist in tension, and from this tension, a transformation that Hegel termed the Aufhebung (overcoming) occurs, leading to the synthesis of the Concrete. The Concrete retains the useful portions of the Abstract, while overcoming its limitations, developing towards a final Absolute state.
What is most important to understand is that battleground for Hegel was ideas. Hegel was an idealist in the proper philosophical sense, meaning that he attributed the march of human progress to the dialectical unfolding of more complete understandings of the Whole, in the form of the development of human understanding.
How Hegelian idealism became Marxian materialism can be accurately summed up by this humorous youtube vid. For those of you who are humorless, the development of the Hegelian dialectic was influenced by one of Hegel's students, a Young Hegelian named Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach rejected Hegel's emphasis on ideas independent from reality, and instead incorporated what would now be termed a sociological emphasis on the origin of ideas in society. Feuerbach remained stuck within Hegel's dialectical idealism, but incorporated a new respect for how empirical reality would effect the dialectical unfolding of ideas within society. This becomes that start of Marxian materialism.
Marx, in true dialectical fashion, becomes the Concrete to Feuerbach's Negative. As summed up in Marx's 1846 manuscript, The German Ideology, he criticized the Young Hegelians for being stuck within Hegel's idealist framework. Marx's response was to turn Hegel upside down and set him back upon his feet. It was not the material world that was the reflection of the dialectical unfolding of ideas; but rather it was ideology that was the reflection of the dialectical unfolding of the material world.
This becomes the foundation of Marx's historical materialism. For Marx, the primary relevant factor that determined the actions of human history was economics: how men formed societies to produce, distribute and allocate goods and services. The technology available to man would set the limits of how man could organize societies. As technology advanced, new means of organization would be possible. This advancement would be driven by class conflict.
The dominant class in society would be the Hegelian Abstract. It's existence would be predicated upon the existence of a Negation, a subject class. The two are intertwined in a master-slave dialectic of mutual dependency, and the tension between the two would create in its synthesis a new society more complete than the previous. Each new epoch would enable new technologies to be harnessed, and an increase in productivity and man's "mastery of nature".
Marx's primary discourse on this was the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. He noted that in the manorial economy (what Marx called feudalism), the dominant class of feudal landowners and serfs were locked in a stagnant relationship. Serfs labored primarily for their own subsistence, and the portion owed to the lord of the manor could not be paid in any form of hard currency, but only in goods in kind. These goods were not used to accumulate capital, but rather to defend the lord's manor. The grain collected from the serfs would feed both himself and his retainers. The goods they produced would clothe and arm the lord's private army, enabling him to squander his accumulated wealth in private warfare.
Out of this tension came both a new class and a new society. Those who became freemen could achieve much more than mere subsistence farming. In the towns they founded independent of the manorial lords, goods could be produced for trade and export instead of maintaining private armies. The new class of independent artisans, merchants and bankers would become the bourgeoisie, and they would herald a revolution that would shake the world to its foundations.
What's often lost in this is that to Marx, capitalism was progressive in its day. Progress, determined by the level of productivity of human society, is easy to quantify. Allowing the accumulation of capital, the employment of divisions of labor and new technologies dramatically increased the gross productivity of society. But it is no contradiction to say that capitalism would also be digging its own grave in the process.
The critique of capitalism
Marx's criticisms of capitalism are manifold, but they can be divided into two rough groupings: humanist and economic.
Marx's humanist criticisms of capitalism are by far less well known. They are best expressed in his earlier philosophical works, before he became too steeped in economism. The best of these is the notion of alienated labor, which Marx articulated in The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and On the Jewish Question. Marx believed that human beings had an authentic human nature, and this was best expressed by the concept called homo faber, that man, in short, is by nature an artist, in as much as man's truest expression of self is free labor. Man finds meaning by pouring his soul and his labor into what he creates, whether it is a chair or a painting.
In essence, the labor process is about putting part of one's self into the objects that one creates. And we do have an instinctual fondness and connection with things produced by our own labor, that can never be approached by something we merely buy or are given.
By this logic, the system of wage labor alienates man from his species-being, by making man no longer the master of his own labor or the products of his labor. And I really can't explain this much better than with a personal anecdote. A friend of mine worked at a food factory, and the line he was on was one that produced pre-baked pies. Now, normally pie is a wonderful thing, and from my own experience, home made apple pie is about on par with sex when it comes to the joy it produces. However, when it's put into an industrial labor regime, pie is no longer a cause for celebration. Everytime the line started, and new pies came down to be checked, my friend would mutter "Here come the little fuckers now..."
Marx's economic critiques of capitalism are a little bit more well known. The most common one was the exploitation thesis, which was reasoned from the Labor Theory of Value, which was then an accepted economic theory by bourgeois economists. In as much as Marx championed LTV, it was only because it was merely useful to him. It was not hard to demonstrate that by the very terms of LTV, the capitalist labor process was exploitive. However, this is not of much relevance, since LTV is no longer an accepted part of economic theory.
Marx's other critiques of capitalism were the immiserisation thesis, that the drive to increase profit by capitalists would lead to stagnant wages and lengthening work days, which was very much true in Marx's day. In a truly dialectical fashion, the reaction against these abuses created the trade unions and welfare states that we know today.
Marx's final criticism of capitalism was that class conflict would lead to revolution. The combination of these factors would lead to ever increasing centralization of capital. More and more people would move to the cities, and the growing factories would employ every greater armies of labor. Capitalism would dig its own grave because the subject class would, by capitalism's own dynamism, be concentrated and organized together into a cohesive class, and would thus be united against capital and able to become the dominant political power in society. The truth of this prognosis remains to be seen, though in essence, historically this has been very much the case. Marx observed it in his own day. Trade unions and mass-based labor parties became powerful in many industrialized states, though for a variety of reasons they almost always stopped short of full-scale social revolution.
Marx's political programme
One would expect this to be the biggest section of this post. And this is where I disappoint you. Marx did not spend much time articulating what socialism would be like, or about the potentials of future society. Marx was a critic of capitalism primarily, and merely provided potential forces that could destroy the capitalist system. To the extent that Marx theorized communism, he only touched on the transitional stages from capitalism.
Marx was reporting on what workers of his era were actually doing in the class struggle. For instance, trade unions and a worker's party in the parliament were not Marx's idea. Worker's were already creating labor unions, and fighting for "free labor" and the abolition of class distinctions without ever having picked up any of Marx's works. Marx's works were directly informed by the worker's he championed, and in turn many workers and communists later drew from Marx's theories a body of thought to clarify and sharpen their resolve. But the crucial fact is that at no point do ideas come from pure fantasy.
About as close as Marx ever got to a prescription for revolution was in The Civil War in France. Marx directly champions the forms of organization prioneered by the Paris Commune as the basic building block of the post-revolutionary society. In the Commune, the worker's and their allies smashed the existing state machinery in its entirety. They did away with professional police forces, standing armies and professional bureaucrats. They removed the old autocratic administrative centers, and collectivized the large enterprises under the control of the workers. They set up popular militias and community police to deal with defense and law enforcement. Administrators became elected by large popular assemblies, subject to recall at any time. Officials were paid no more than the average worker's wages. Their whole program, as Marx noted in The Critique of the Gotha Programme was based on the understanding that "Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it."
It is not the leveling of monetary inequality that was the mark of Marx's socialism. It is rather the leveling of political inequality by transferring the locus of production, distribution and allocation to the public sphere, and the control of the public sphere via participatory democracy. Beyond that, Marx has virtually nothing to say. From there, he hopes it becomes possible to realize a level of increase in material standards of living to make questions of division of the social product unnecessary, as the condition of super-abundance renders questions of animal needs moot. From the project of eudaimonia and meeting human needs becomes possible. That is the project of communism, which only comes after the project of socialism is completed.
Dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing more than the proletariat being the dominant political power in society. Just as capitalism's democratic republic was the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, socialism's participatory democracy would be the dictatorship of the proletariat. Neither has anything to do with the modern pejorative understanding of dictatorship, it's merely the social class that is made dominant by the very structure of the economic base.
Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the actual socialization of the means of production would occur. After this point, the very term starts to become irrelevant, because the socialization of the means of production under the control of the workers has made the bourgeois/proletarian class distinction essentially meaningless.
When Marx wrote of the dictatorship of the proletariat, what he had most in mind was the Paris Commune, not some authority figure to subdue the proletariat's class enemies.
Now, members of the Revolutionary Left, add onto this list of fundemental Marxist ideology.
Let's begin.
Reading The Manifesto of the Communist Party is a terrible place to start when it comes to understanding Marxism, socialism or communism.
As a manifesto, it is written to convey ideas to those who had already affiliated themselves with the socialist left circa 1848. There's more than a few problems with this. First of all, the circumstances in which we life are drastically different from 1848. The Manifesto will only begin to make sense once one is familiar with the economic, social and historical conditions of Europe in the 1840s: a world still mostly gripped in feudalism, but being torn apart by an industrial system that was alien to most people, and had unleashed horrors of misery upon mankind that had never before been seen.
Second, the Manifesto is written to preach to the choir: it assumes that the reader has familiarity and sympathy with socialist concepts and philosophical ideas. If you didn't go into reading it already understanding the Marxist notions of economic base and superstructure; of economic classes based upon their relationship to the means of production; of understanding the class dynamics of different theoretical modes of production; and finally, understanding the dialectical methodology of Marx, you are not going to understand anything about the new form of society it implicitly champions.
Forget everything you ever thought you new about socialism or communism. Even if you consider yourself sympathetic to the idea. You are attempting to understand these concepts from a fundamentally capitalist ideological framework, and thus the idea of communism you have will either be a) Informed by the mutually misleading propaganda of the Establishment and of Stalinism or b) Or you'll attempt to understand communism from a capitalist perspective, and thus conceptualize it as some strange phantasm.
Communism is not a consumerist utopia. It's not a mythical Land of Cockyagne, where unbridled consumption is the word of the day. It is not a land where everyone get's an equal share of everything. These are capitalist dreams, not communist ones.
Socialism (and by extension communism) is by its very definition not a utopia, for utopias are by their very nature post-political. All collectivist economic systems by their very nature presume the primacy of politics, not its absence from human life. Socialist socio-economic systems, as the conventional definition goes, are based on two separate by closely intertwined features. The first is some form of common ownership of the means of production; land, natural resources, mines, factories, and the means of communication between them. The second is control of the political apparatus and the economic system by its stakeholders. That means in concrete terms, that a democratic political system manages the economic affairs common to all, and the workers of each firm manage the economic affairs of that firm.
I'm fairly certain that most socialists understand this. But going into reading the Communist Manifesto without any background, you're not going to get this impression at all. You're going to be baffled. The blame get's cast twofold. Marx himself gets the lionshare of the blame, for being such a dense writer, making his writings and ideas very hard to approach and digest. The rest of blame get's cast on civics and political theory teachers and professors the world over, for not recognizing this trait in Marx and compensating for it by selecting different reading material or at least adequately preparing their students before they throw them head first into the Communist Manifesto
Back to the Basics:
Marxism is the most dominant branch of socialist political philosophy. And the influence of Marx and Marxism penetrates far beyond self-proclaimed Marxists. On the left, even those who consider themselves anti-Marxists have been profoundly influenced by much of Marxist theory, even if they disagreed with the Marxian political programme. Case in point: the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who was a bitter contemporary critic of Marx, was very conscious of how much of Marx's philosophy and economic analysis he agreed with.
The essential basics to understanding Marxism are its three main components: historical materialism and dialectical method, the critique of capitalist social relations, and the advocacy of a political programme of proletarian revolution.
Marx's theory of history
To understand historical materialism, we must at least have a passing familiarity with Marx's forebears; Hegel and Feuerbach. What's relevant here is a simple methodology that was popularized by Hegel, called dialectical method. While Hegel was far from the first, he's probably the person most often associated with dialectical methodology, and his own peculiar methodology is relevant.
Hegel's dialectic is a threefold process, which begins with the Abstract, or the thesis, as it is often rendered in English, which is beginning of the developmental process. The Abstract, for all intents and purposes, merely is. It's existence leads to the reaction, which Hegel termed the Negative. This antithesis seeks to negate the Abstract. The Abstract and the Negative exist in tension, and from this tension, a transformation that Hegel termed the Aufhebung (overcoming) occurs, leading to the synthesis of the Concrete. The Concrete retains the useful portions of the Abstract, while overcoming its limitations, developing towards a final Absolute state.
What is most important to understand is that battleground for Hegel was ideas. Hegel was an idealist in the proper philosophical sense, meaning that he attributed the march of human progress to the dialectical unfolding of more complete understandings of the Whole, in the form of the development of human understanding.
How Hegelian idealism became Marxian materialism can be accurately summed up by this humorous youtube vid. For those of you who are humorless, the development of the Hegelian dialectic was influenced by one of Hegel's students, a Young Hegelian named Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach rejected Hegel's emphasis on ideas independent from reality, and instead incorporated what would now be termed a sociological emphasis on the origin of ideas in society. Feuerbach remained stuck within Hegel's dialectical idealism, but incorporated a new respect for how empirical reality would effect the dialectical unfolding of ideas within society. This becomes that start of Marxian materialism.
Marx, in true dialectical fashion, becomes the Concrete to Feuerbach's Negative. As summed up in Marx's 1846 manuscript, The German Ideology, he criticized the Young Hegelians for being stuck within Hegel's idealist framework. Marx's response was to turn Hegel upside down and set him back upon his feet. It was not the material world that was the reflection of the dialectical unfolding of ideas; but rather it was ideology that was the reflection of the dialectical unfolding of the material world.
This becomes the foundation of Marx's historical materialism. For Marx, the primary relevant factor that determined the actions of human history was economics: how men formed societies to produce, distribute and allocate goods and services. The technology available to man would set the limits of how man could organize societies. As technology advanced, new means of organization would be possible. This advancement would be driven by class conflict.
The dominant class in society would be the Hegelian Abstract. It's existence would be predicated upon the existence of a Negation, a subject class. The two are intertwined in a master-slave dialectic of mutual dependency, and the tension between the two would create in its synthesis a new society more complete than the previous. Each new epoch would enable new technologies to be harnessed, and an increase in productivity and man's "mastery of nature".
Marx's primary discourse on this was the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. He noted that in the manorial economy (what Marx called feudalism), the dominant class of feudal landowners and serfs were locked in a stagnant relationship. Serfs labored primarily for their own subsistence, and the portion owed to the lord of the manor could not be paid in any form of hard currency, but only in goods in kind. These goods were not used to accumulate capital, but rather to defend the lord's manor. The grain collected from the serfs would feed both himself and his retainers. The goods they produced would clothe and arm the lord's private army, enabling him to squander his accumulated wealth in private warfare.
Out of this tension came both a new class and a new society. Those who became freemen could achieve much more than mere subsistence farming. In the towns they founded independent of the manorial lords, goods could be produced for trade and export instead of maintaining private armies. The new class of independent artisans, merchants and bankers would become the bourgeoisie, and they would herald a revolution that would shake the world to its foundations.
What's often lost in this is that to Marx, capitalism was progressive in its day. Progress, determined by the level of productivity of human society, is easy to quantify. Allowing the accumulation of capital, the employment of divisions of labor and new technologies dramatically increased the gross productivity of society. But it is no contradiction to say that capitalism would also be digging its own grave in the process.
The critique of capitalism
Marx's criticisms of capitalism are manifold, but they can be divided into two rough groupings: humanist and economic.
Marx's humanist criticisms of capitalism are by far less well known. They are best expressed in his earlier philosophical works, before he became too steeped in economism. The best of these is the notion of alienated labor, which Marx articulated in The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and On the Jewish Question. Marx believed that human beings had an authentic human nature, and this was best expressed by the concept called homo faber, that man, in short, is by nature an artist, in as much as man's truest expression of self is free labor. Man finds meaning by pouring his soul and his labor into what he creates, whether it is a chair or a painting.
In essence, the labor process is about putting part of one's self into the objects that one creates. And we do have an instinctual fondness and connection with things produced by our own labor, that can never be approached by something we merely buy or are given.
By this logic, the system of wage labor alienates man from his species-being, by making man no longer the master of his own labor or the products of his labor. And I really can't explain this much better than with a personal anecdote. A friend of mine worked at a food factory, and the line he was on was one that produced pre-baked pies. Now, normally pie is a wonderful thing, and from my own experience, home made apple pie is about on par with sex when it comes to the joy it produces. However, when it's put into an industrial labor regime, pie is no longer a cause for celebration. Everytime the line started, and new pies came down to be checked, my friend would mutter "Here come the little fuckers now..."
Marx's economic critiques of capitalism are a little bit more well known. The most common one was the exploitation thesis, which was reasoned from the Labor Theory of Value, which was then an accepted economic theory by bourgeois economists. In as much as Marx championed LTV, it was only because it was merely useful to him. It was not hard to demonstrate that by the very terms of LTV, the capitalist labor process was exploitive. However, this is not of much relevance, since LTV is no longer an accepted part of economic theory.
Marx's other critiques of capitalism were the immiserisation thesis, that the drive to increase profit by capitalists would lead to stagnant wages and lengthening work days, which was very much true in Marx's day. In a truly dialectical fashion, the reaction against these abuses created the trade unions and welfare states that we know today.
Marx's final criticism of capitalism was that class conflict would lead to revolution. The combination of these factors would lead to ever increasing centralization of capital. More and more people would move to the cities, and the growing factories would employ every greater armies of labor. Capitalism would dig its own grave because the subject class would, by capitalism's own dynamism, be concentrated and organized together into a cohesive class, and would thus be united against capital and able to become the dominant political power in society. The truth of this prognosis remains to be seen, though in essence, historically this has been very much the case. Marx observed it in his own day. Trade unions and mass-based labor parties became powerful in many industrialized states, though for a variety of reasons they almost always stopped short of full-scale social revolution.
Marx's political programme
One would expect this to be the biggest section of this post. And this is where I disappoint you. Marx did not spend much time articulating what socialism would be like, or about the potentials of future society. Marx was a critic of capitalism primarily, and merely provided potential forces that could destroy the capitalist system. To the extent that Marx theorized communism, he only touched on the transitional stages from capitalism.
Marx was reporting on what workers of his era were actually doing in the class struggle. For instance, trade unions and a worker's party in the parliament were not Marx's idea. Worker's were already creating labor unions, and fighting for "free labor" and the abolition of class distinctions without ever having picked up any of Marx's works. Marx's works were directly informed by the worker's he championed, and in turn many workers and communists later drew from Marx's theories a body of thought to clarify and sharpen their resolve. But the crucial fact is that at no point do ideas come from pure fantasy.
About as close as Marx ever got to a prescription for revolution was in The Civil War in France. Marx directly champions the forms of organization prioneered by the Paris Commune as the basic building block of the post-revolutionary society. In the Commune, the worker's and their allies smashed the existing state machinery in its entirety. They did away with professional police forces, standing armies and professional bureaucrats. They removed the old autocratic administrative centers, and collectivized the large enterprises under the control of the workers. They set up popular militias and community police to deal with defense and law enforcement. Administrators became elected by large popular assemblies, subject to recall at any time. Officials were paid no more than the average worker's wages. Their whole program, as Marx noted in The Critique of the Gotha Programme was based on the understanding that "Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it."
It is not the leveling of monetary inequality that was the mark of Marx's socialism. It is rather the leveling of political inequality by transferring the locus of production, distribution and allocation to the public sphere, and the control of the public sphere via participatory democracy. Beyond that, Marx has virtually nothing to say. From there, he hopes it becomes possible to realize a level of increase in material standards of living to make questions of division of the social product unnecessary, as the condition of super-abundance renders questions of animal needs moot. From the project of eudaimonia and meeting human needs becomes possible. That is the project of communism, which only comes after the project of socialism is completed.
Dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing more than the proletariat being the dominant political power in society. Just as capitalism's democratic republic was the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, socialism's participatory democracy would be the dictatorship of the proletariat. Neither has anything to do with the modern pejorative understanding of dictatorship, it's merely the social class that is made dominant by the very structure of the economic base.
Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the actual socialization of the means of production would occur. After this point, the very term starts to become irrelevant, because the socialization of the means of production under the control of the workers has made the bourgeois/proletarian class distinction essentially meaningless.
When Marx wrote of the dictatorship of the proletariat, what he had most in mind was the Paris Commune, not some authority figure to subdue the proletariat's class enemies.
Now, members of the Revolutionary Left, add onto this list of fundemental Marxist ideology.