What is socialism? (Dictatorship of the Proletariat)
Richard Carnes
>In response to Rich Carnes, I can't see how dictatorship of the proletariat
>could ever be a "fundamentally democratic concept", unless one means
>democracy as it is interpreted in the socialist world, as rule by the
>working class, so that dictatorship of the proletariat and democracy
>are the same by definition.
>
>Power to the working class, esp. in the context of DotP, means democracy
>for the working class and dictatorship for everybody else.
The basic point to be made here is that by "dictatorship" Marx was
*not* speaking of a monopoly of political power, whether of an
individual, a party, or a class. In using the word "dictatorship,"
he was referring to the *class domination* that characterizes, in
Marx's view, both bourgeois society and the society that will
immediately succeed it. This means that the property relations
(property rights) in both types of society systematically favor one
class. This has nothing to do with any suspension of civil or
political liberties. Marx would have considered the contemporary US
a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." Obviously this does not mean
that only capitalists possess political power. It means that the
structure of American society systematically favors the capitalist
class at the expense of other classes. It means that for the
majority of citizens, other people "dictate" the main conditions of
their lives. This is not contradicted by the fact that the US is a
political democracy with extensive suffrage and constitutional
guarantees of civil liberties.
Thus I see no reason to believe that by "dictatorship of the
proletariat" Marx meant anything less democratic and civil
libertarian than the US and the England of his day. The Paris
Commune, which Marx and Engels considered an example of the DotP, was
characterized by universal suffrage, immediate recallability of all
public officials by the same voters, and the same wages for both
working class and public officials. This hardly sounds like a model
for the Soviet Union. It is a great misunderstanding of Marx, in my
opinion, to think that he advocated a political dictatorship,
oligarchy, or tyranny in any shape or form. The closest he came to
it, which was not very close, was during the years 1848-50, after
which he reverted to being a staunch democrat. I believe that the
evidence is compelling that, for Marx, democracy was not a frill but
of the very essence of socialism, and that this was recognized even
by Lenin himself.
>Marx always recognized the existence of substantial classes other than the
>proletariat; I think he meant the DotP to extend over the interregnum after
>a revolution when the new government based on the proletariat has to
>consolidate its authority against counterrevolutionaries. If the
>revolution was violent (and Marx expected it would be), then that violence
>would take some time to cool down. Hence the DotP, an explicitly
>transitional, and hopefully short, phase.
Marx increasingly came to believe in the possibility of a peaceful,
democratic revolution. He detested the idea of a "revolution from
above," in which a small cadre of socialists would seize power by
coup d'etat. Marx was considerably more politically moderate than a
great many radicals of the 19th century. Let me repeat for emphasis
that by "DotP" Marx was not referring to dictatorship in the
political sense, i.e., in any sense in which the term is commonly
used.
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes