Proletarian Dictatorship
To understand Marx’s views on the transition to socialism, it is useful to go back to his 1844 “Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform,’” where social emancipation is identified as the soul of the proletarian revolution. Marx writes, “All revolution-the overthrow of the existing ruling power and the dissolution of the old order-is a political act. But without revolution socialism cannot be made possible. It stands in need of this political act just as it stands in need of destruction and dissolution. But as soon as its organizing functions begin and its goal, its soul emerges, socialism throws its political mask aside.”22 Here we can see the emergence of a distinct conception of transition to socialism. This is developed somewhat as a distinct understanding of political power in Marx’s critique of Proudhon:
The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. . . . Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.23
Here we see the development of the concept of proletarian political power (or “state power,” as Marx sometimes referred to it): it has a social soul unlike any previous form of political power, but this class power necessarily takes a political (state) form because during the process of transition to socialism the antagonisms of civil society have not yet been completely abolished. Later Marx would label this transitional phase the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This quite simply meant the political rule of the working class. This transitional period, as Marx conceived it, did not entail the existence of a transitional form of society intervening between, and distinct from, capitalism and communism. The transitional period is essentially a period of revolutionary change. “Between capitalist and communist society,” wrote Marx, “lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.”24 The raison d’être of the proletarian state power is to bring the means of production into common ownership, to bring about the “expropriation of the expropriators,” as Marx described the aim of the Paris Commune.25
A little-known text by Marx, his 1874 “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy,” explains the concept of proletarian dictatorship more clearly than any other. In his book Bakunin ridicules Marx’s concept of the transitional state power of the proletarian dictatorship, and Marx critically responds in his “Notes.” Bakunin writes, “If there is a state, then there is domination and consequent slavery. A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is inconceivable-that is why we are enemies of the state. What does it mean, ‘the proletariat raised to a governing class?’”26 Marx responds, “It means that the proletariat, instead of fighting in individual instances against the economically privileged classes, has gained sufficient strength and organisation to use general means of coercion in its struggle against them; but it can only make use of such economic means as abolish its own character as wage labourer and hence as a class; when its victory is complete, its rule too is therefore at an end, since its class character will have disappeared.”27 The claim that through revolution the proletariat will be “raised to a governing class” thus has nothing to do with creating a dictatorship of a political sect, but is rather a claim that the proletariat will use “general means of coercion” to undercut the bourgeoisie’s power (by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, disbanding the standing army, and so forth). It is the entire proletariat that is to exercise this power. Bakunin asks, “Will all 40 million [German workers] be members of the government?”28 Marx responds, “Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities.”29 This statement is certainly striking, but there are other places in the text where Marx more subtly conveys his radical conception of proletarian democracy. When writing about proletarian power and the peasantry, Marx writes that “the proletariat . . . must, as the government, take the measures needed . . . “30, identifying the transitional government with the proletariat as a class. Another example: when quoting Bakunin’s critique, Marx inserts a revealing parenthetical comment: “The dilemma in the theory of the Marxists is easily resolved. By people’s government they (i.e. Bakunin) understand the government of the people by a small number of representatives chosen (elected) by the people.”31 Here Marx is very clearly implying that he does not understand “people’s government” or workers’ government, as the government of the people by a small number of representatives elected by the people. This is a rather clear indication that Marx is still faithful to his 1843 critique of bourgeois democracy.
Clearly, this conception of “proletarian” government is distinct from the bourgeois state, or from any previous form of state power. As Marx makes clear in the above statements, he is referring to a proletarian “government” only in the sense that the working class uses general means of coercion to enforce its aims. Proletarian government is not used by Marx to mean that some elite group (assumedly the intellectuals, as Bakunin argued) would use general means of coercion over the whole proletariat, for that would rule out working class “self-government.” Rather, the proletariat as a whole would assert its class interests over an alien class (by abolishing private property, expropriating the capitalists and socializing the means of production, disbanding the standing army, etc.). For anarchists, who often define these terms somewhat differently, much of the confusion about Marx’s claim that the proletariat must wield political power seems to be based on Marx’s frequent use of the words “state” and “government.” But as we have seen, there is nothing anti-democratic about the meaning Marx attached to these words. Most anarchists, unlike Marx, define the state in terms of minority rule. It is easy for someone who uses this sort of definition to read Marx’s mention of a proletarian “state” and immediately associate it with oppression and detachment from effective popular control. The problem is that interpreting Marx in this way creates a number of contradictions in his writings that vanish when his basic theoretical framework is better understood.32
Another example of Marx’s use of the idea of proletarian dictatorship comes in an essay on “Political Indifferentism” that criticizes both the Proudhonists and the Bakuninists. Marx recognizes that the workers must struggle against the bourgeois state, but also that a revolutionary form of state is needed before social classes as such disappear. Marx pretends to speak for his opponents:
If in the political struggle against the bourgeois state the workers succeed only in extracting concessions, then they are guilty of compromise; and this is contrary to eternal principles. . . . If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form.33
This passage illustrates fairly clearly that proletarian dictatorship is simply the political power of an armed working class. The essence of a “workers’ state,” for Marx, was workers’ power, not any particular leadership at the helm of the state.34
Furthermore, as Hal Draper has pointed out, it is a mistake to assume that the word “dictatorship” in the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” is supposed to refer to dictatorial (as distinguished from democratic) policies or forms of government. In fact, it was not until the latter part of the 19th century and more definitively after the Russian revolution that the term “dictatorship” came to have a specifically anti-democratic connotation.35 The origin of the term is the Roman dictatura, which referred to an emergency management of power. After 1848, around the time that Marx began using the term, it became relatively common for journalists to bemoan the “dictatorship” or “despotism” of the people, which posed a threat to the status quo. In 1849, a Spanish politician even made a speech in parliament declaring: “It is a question of choosing between the dictatorship from below and the dictatorship from above: I choose the dictatorship from above, since it comes from a purer and loftier realm.”36 Revolutionaries had even used the word “dictatorship” before Marx to refer to a transition to socialism. Blanqui, for example, advocated an educative dictatorship of a small group of revolutionaries. Marx’s use of the word “dictatorship” in the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” however, is original and deliberately distinct from Blanqui’s usage. Engels emphasizes this point in a passage on Blanqui: “From the fact that Blanqui conceives of every revolution as the coup de main of a small revolutionary minority, what follows of itself is the necessity of dictatorship after its success-the dictatorship, please note, not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who made the coup de main and who themselves are organized beforehand under the dictatorship of one person or a few. One can see that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the previous generation.”37 It is clear that the Leninist model of a particular sect or political party exercising political power is much closer to the Blanquist conception of “dictatorship” than to Marx’s, and Engels explicitly criticized this conception of how political power should be exercised. It is also clear that Blanqui’s model of rule by a small group of revolutionaries shares more in common with popular fantasies about Marx than with Marx’s dictatorship of the whole proletarian class.
