For Beginners

This thread is for those who do not understand what the DOTP is and want to understand it better.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is understood best in terms of class struggle. The state is an organ of class rule. That means, as long as classes exist then the state will exist. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a transition stage in which classes and the state will exist, but will be systematically abolished by the proletariat dictatorship. The proletariat will destroy the bourgeois dictatorship and establish its own dictatorship to suppress the bourgeoisie, suppress violent counter-revolutionaries, and eventually abolish classes.

How would the dictatorship of the proletariat work? We do not know. We can look at the examples of history (I would argue that Stalinist Russia, China, Vietnam, etc. were not dictatorships of the proletariat. Think the Paris Commune, Russia in 1917, 1918, 1919, etc.) but overall we will not know how the dictatorship of the proletariat will work until such material conditions present themselves. We can speculate on what it might look like. Most argue that the proletariat would actively participate through organs such as the soviets in the administration of the state, some (such as me) see the party as a centralizing force in such a society, etc. Again, this is all just speculation though.

Engels claimed that the Paris Commune was the closest thing to an example of the DOTP. The workers and people there had great control over their destinies, yet had not reached socialism.

For some reading on the DOTP:

A Letter from Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemer. In this, Marx says this...

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; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

Note that there are different views as to the dotp -> socialism -> communism view as separate phases. This article might help shed some light on this issue. It essentially argues that such separate phases really don't exist. A quote:

The conclusion from these points is that, assuming the proletariat takes political power in the next 40-50 years, there will still be a substantial period of transition which falls between the complete overthrow of the global capitalist state system and the fully collective appropriation of the means of production (communism). This period of transition is properly the dictatorship of the proletariat, the class rule of the proletariat over the surviving petty bourgeoisie and small capital, in a contradictory economic order in which those means of production which the capitalists have already ‘socialised’ are collectively appropriated, but the participants in this collective appropriation have to trade with substantial groups of petty bourgeois and some small capitalists, who are politically subordinated to the proletarian majority.

The period can also be called for short-hand ‘socialism’, as we do in the CPGB Draft programme, provided it is clear that by ‘socialism’ we mean this transitional period of working class rule over other subsisting classes, and not a separate stage standing between the dictatorship of the proletariat and communism. ‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’ is in my opinion scientifically superior because it expresses the fact that the petty bourgeoisie and small capital continue to exist in this period, but are institutionally subordinated to the proletariat as a class.

(italic by author. bold by me).

I recommend the reading whole article.

The broader context was CPGB comrade Mike Macnair engaging in polemics with comrade Paul Cockshott.

Economically speaking, though, they do seem to be three or even four separate phases, especially if one were to distinguish between the lower phase of the communist mode of production and "socialism" on the basis of the existence in the latter of generalized commodity production or even outright "state-capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people" (Lenin). Cockshott addressed this in the Czech preface to his "socialism" book.

This is also a good article for beginners.
http://www.isreview.org/issues/81/cr...ernative.shtml

Note: Since the CPGB updated their website, the old link of my post in April is broken and will refer to the homepage. This is the new link.