Appendix: Marx and the Problem of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

In her polemic against Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg was quite right when she wrote, “The necessity of the proletariat’s seizing power was always unquestionable for Marx and Engels.”¹ But the conditions under which this seizure of power was to be realized certainly did not appear quite the same to Marx and Engels at different periods of their lives.

“At the beginning of their activity,” writes Kautsky in his recent article Democracy and Dictatorship, “Marx and Engels were at first strongly influenced by Blanquism, although from the very beginning they treated it critically. The dictatorship of the proletariat to which they aspired, still showed many Blanquist features in their early works.”² This statement is not entirely accurate. Even if Marx—putting aside the petit-bourgeois revolutionism that in no small measure coloured both the ideology and politics of Blanquism—considered the Blanquists of 1848 to be a party representing the revolutionary French proletariat, there is insufficient evidence to show that Marx and Engels were under the ideological influence of Blanqui and his supporters. Kautsky correctly points out that Marx and Engels always had a quite critical attitude toward the Blanquists. Their initial views on the dictatorship of the proletariat were undoubtedly influenced by the Jacobin tradition of 1793, a tradition with which the Blanquists were imbued. The powerful historical example of the political dictatorship exercised during the Terror by the Parisian lower classes served Marx and Engels as a point of departure for their conception of the future conquest of political power by the proletariat.

In 1895 (in his preface to Class Struggles in France), Engels summed up the experience that he and his friend had gathered in the revolutions of 1848 and 1871: “The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past.”³ Engels acknowledged that, in the first period of their activity, he and Marx had in fact been concerned with the conquest of political power “by a small conscious minority at the head of masses lacking consciousness,” in other words the repetition, in the nineteenth century, of the experience of the Jacobin dictatorship, with the role of the Jacobins and the Cordeliers taken by the conscious revolutionary elements of the proletariat, relying on the vague social ferment of the broad masses. With skilful policies and imbued with the understanding conferred by the practise and theory of scientific socialism, the vanguard in power should, on the day after the revolution, introduce the broad proletarian masses to the historical tasks of the revolution, and educate them to be conscious subjects of historical action. Only with such a conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat could Marx and Engels expect that the revolution of 1848—which began as the final struggle between feudal and bourgeois society, and with internal conflicts between individual strata of bourgeois society—would end after a more or less prolonged interval with the historic victory of the proletariat over bourgeois society.

In 1895, Engels recognized the inconsistency of this view. “Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are coming out for. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that.”⁴

This is not to say, however, that in 1848 Marx and Engels in any way ignored the basic historical preconditions for socialist revolution. Not only did they recognize the need for capitalism to develop sufficiently to make possible a socialist transformation, but they also explicitly rejected the possibility of the proletariat retaining power in the absence of this precondition. In 1846, in his letter to Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weitling described his break with Marx in the following words: “We have come to the conclusion that there could be no question now of realizing communism in Germany; that first the bourgeoisie must seize power.”⁵ The “we” here refers specifically to Marx and Engels, for Weitling goes on to say that “on this point Marx and Engels argued very sharply with me.”⁶ In October and November of 1847, in his article “Moralizing Criticism,” directed against Herzen, Marx wrote on this question with complete certainty:

If the bourgeoisie is politically, that is, by its state power, “maintaining injustice in property relations” [Herzen’s expression—Martov], it is not creating it. The “injustice in property relations” . . . by no means arises from the political rule of the bourgeois class, but vice versa, the political rule of the bourgeois class arises from these modern relations of production. . . . If therefore the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory will only be temporary, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in the year 1794, as long as in the course of history, in its “movement,” the material conditions have not yet been created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production, and therefore also the definitive overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie.⁷

Marx, then, allowed for the possibility of a political victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie at a point in historical development when the prerequisites for a socialist revolution were not yet mature. But such a victory, he said, would prove to be fleeting, and he predicted with ingenious foresight that such a premature—from a historical viewpoint—conquest of political power by the proletariat would “only be . . . an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution.” We must conclude, therefore, that, in the case of an obviously premature conquest of power, Marx would consider it obligatory for the conscious elements of the proletariat to pursue a policy that takes account of the fact that such a conquest objectively represents “only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution” and would serve the latter by aiding its further development, a policy based on the “self-limitation” of the proletariat in defining and resolving revolutionary tasks. For the proletariat will be able to score a real victory over the bourgeoisie—instead of for the bourgeoisie—only when “in the course of history, in its ‘movement,’ the material conditions have . . . been created which make necessary [not merely objectively possible!—Martov] the elimination of the bourgeois mode of production.”

The following words from Marx make it clear the sense in which a temporary victory of the proletariat could prove to be a moment in the development of the bourgeois revolution:

The terror in France could thus by its mighty hammer-blows only serve to spirit away, as it were, the ruins of feudalism from French soil. The timidly considerate bourgeoisie would not have accomplished this task in decades. The bloody action of the people thus only prepared the way for it.⁸

The Reign of Terror in France was the temporary domination of the petit-bourgeois democracy and the proletariat over all the propertied classes, including the genuine bourgeoisie. Marx indicates very clearly that such temporary domination cannot serve as a starting point for a socialist transformation until the material conditions making this transformation necessary have developed. Marx seems to be writing specifically for the benefit of those people who consider the fact that the petit-bourgeois democracy and the proletariat can seize power, as proof that society is ripe for a socialist revolution. At the same time, however, he writes as if for the benefit of those socialists who see a radical contradiction between the fact of a revolution that is bourgeois in its objectives, and the fact that in the course of its very development power might escape (temporarily) from the hands of the bourgeoisie and pass into the hands of the democratic masses—or for the benefit of those socialists who consider utopian the mere idea of such a displacement of power and who do not realize that this phenomenon is “only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution,” ensuring, under certain circumstances, a more complete and more radical removal of the obstacles in its [the bourgeois revolution’s] path.

The European revolution of 1848 did not lead to the conquest of political power by the proletariat. Soon after the June Days, Marx and Engels began to realize that the historical conditions for such a conquest were not yet ripe. However, as is well known, overestimating the pace of historical development, they expected a new revolutionary upsurge in the coming years, even before the last wave of the 1848 crisis had subsided. They saw new factors that seemed to favour the possibility of political power passing into the hands of the proletariat, not only in the rich experience it had acquired in the class struggles during the “mad year”⁹ but also in the evolution experienced by the petite bourgeoisie, which—in their opinion—was being pushed irresistibly toward a lasting alliance with the proletariat.

In his Class Struggles in France and later in the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx noted the movement toward the proletariat of the urban democratic petite bourgeoisie, a movement that took definite form by 1848. And in the second of the books mentioned, he announced the probability of a similar movement on the part of the small-holding peasants, as a result of their disillusionment with the dictatorship of Napoleon III, whose principal creators and strongest support they had been. Marx wrote:

The interests of the peasants, therefore, are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but in opposition to the interests of the bourgeoisie, to capital. Hence the peasants find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order.¹⁰

The proletariat, therefore, did not have to “wait” until it became a decisive majority in order to win political power. In addition to the growth resulting from the development of capitalism, it benefitted from the disintegration of the foundations of private property, alienating the small property-holders of the city and the countryside from the capitalist bourgeoisie. When the revolutionary process—halted due to self-exhaustion—resumed twenty years later, leading to the creation of the Paris Commune, Marx saw in this new fact an opportunity favouring the completion of this uprising in the real and lasting dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx wrote in The Civil War in France:

This was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Parisian Third Estate—shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants—the wealthy capitalists alone excepted. . . . In 1848, the same portion of the Third Estate had assisted in putting down the working men’s insurrection of June 1848, then immediately was unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors by the Constituent Assembly. . . . This mass of the Third Estate felt it had to choose either the Commune or the Empire. . . . After the exodus from Paris of the high Bonapartist and capitalist Bohême, the true middle-class Party of Order came out under the name of the “Union républicaine,” enrolling themselves under the colours of the Commune and defending it against the wilful slander of Thiers.¹¹

As early as 1844, when he was still only making his way toward socialism, Marx defined, in his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, the conditions under which the revolutionary class could lay claim to a leading position in society. For that, “one estate” must be recognized by all the masses oppressed under the existing regime as “par excellence the estate of liberation.” This situation is possible when the estate against which the struggle is led becomes, in the eyes of the masses, “the obvious estate of oppression.”¹² In 1848, this situation certainly did not exist. The decomposition of small property was not yet far enough advanced.

The situation appeared substantially different in 1871. By that time, Marx and Engels had undoubtedly freed themselves from all influence of the Jacobin tradition and, therefore, from the conception of the dictatorship of a “conscious minority” acting at the head of the unconscious [i.e., simply outraged—Martov] masses. It is precisely on the phenomenon of the ruined small property-holders consciously rallying around the socialist proletariat that the two great theoreticians of scientific socialism based their forecast of the success of the Parisian insurrection, which, as we know, began against their wishes. They were undoubtedly correct concerning the urban petite bourgeoisie (at least, that of Paris). Unlike the June Days, the massacre of the Communards was not the work of the entire bourgeois society but only of its capitalist classes. The petite bourgeoisie had no part in the suppression of the Commune nor in the orgy of reaction that followed. They were, however, much less correct when assessing the situation with regard to the peasantry. In The Civil War, Marx presumed that only the isolation of Paris from the provinces and the brevity of the Commune’s existence had prevented the peasants from joining with the proletarian revolution. Pursuing a line of reasoning begun in the Eighteenth Brumaire, he said:

The peasant was a Bonapartist, because the great Revolution, with all its benefits to him, was in his eyes personified in Napoleon. This self-delusion had almost entirely disappeared under the Second Empire. This prejudice of the past could not withstand the appeal of the Commune, which appealed to the living interests and the urgent needs of the peasantry. The Rurals (as the agrarians, who sat on the National Assembly, were called at that time) knew too well that if Communal Paris communicated freely with the provinces, a general rising of the peasants would break out in just three months.¹³

The history of the Third Republic has shown that Marx was wrong on this point. In the 1870s, the peasantry (as well as a significant section of the urban petite bourgeoisie in the provinces) was still far from such a break with capital and the bourgeoisie. They were still far from recognizing the latter as the “oppressing class,” far from considering the proletariat as “the liberating class” and handing over to it the leadership of their movement. In 1895, in his introduction to Class Struggles, Engels had to state: “Once again it was proved how impossible even then, twenty years after the time described in our work [1848–51], this rule of the working class was,” because “France left Paris in the lurch.” (On the other hand, as a cause of the defeat, Engels pointed to the lack of internal unity in the very ranks of the insurgent proletariat, to its still insufficient revolutionary maturity, thanks to which it wasted its strength in “fruitless strife between the two parties which split it, the Blanquists (the majority) and the Proudhonists (the minority).”¹⁴)

But no matter how mistaken Marx was in his assessment of the real balance of forces, in 1871 he outlined very clearly the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat. “The Commune,” he wrote, was “the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government.”¹⁵ Therefore, according to Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat does not consist in the proletariat suppressing all non-proletarian classes in society. On the contrary, it means the proletariat rallying around itself all the “healthy elements” of society—all except the “rich capitalists,” all except the class against which the historic struggle of the proletariat is directed. Both in its composition and in its tendencies, the government of the Commune was a workers’ government. But this government was an expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat not because it was imposed by violence on the majority of non-proletarian masses. It was a proletarian dictatorship because those workers and those “acknowledged representatives of the working class” had derived their power from that majority. “The Commune,” Marx stressed, “was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town. . . .”

While the merely oppressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. . . . universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes [outside of Paris] as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.”¹⁶

The consistently democratic organization of the Commune, based on universal suffrage, the immediate recall of every elected representative by decision of the electorate, the absence of a bureaucratic caste and an armed force separated from the people, the fact that all offices were subject to election—that is what constitutes, according to Marx, the essence of the class dictatorship of the proletariat. He does not speak of any opposition between [such a] dictatorship and democracy. In 1847, in his original draft of The Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote:

In the first place, it [the proletarian revolution] will inaugurate a democratic constitution and thereby, directly or indirectly, the political rule of the proletariat. Directly in England, where the proletariat already constitutes the majority of the people. Indirectly in France and in Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians but also of small peasants and urban petit-bourgeois, who are only now being proletarianized and in all their political interests are becoming more and more dependent on the proletariat and therefore soon will have to conform to the demands of the proletariat.¹⁷

The first step in the workers’ revolution, declares the Manifesto, “is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”¹⁸

Marx and Engels equate the transformation of the proletariat into the ruling class with the achievement of democracy. It is only in the form of a consistent democracy that they envisaged the proletariat exercising its political authority.

As Marx and Engels became convinced that socialism could win only by relying on the majority of the people consciously sympathizing with the positive program of socialism, any Jacobin content was erased from their ideas of a class dictatorship. But what positive content remains in the concept of dictatorship once it has been modified in this manner? Exactly that which was formulated quite precisely in the program of our party [the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, RSDRP], a program drafted at a time when the theoretical disputes provoked by “Bernsteinism” prompted Marxists to polish and define with precision certain terms that had lost a considerable amount of concrete meaning through long, uncritical use in everyday political struggles.

The program of the RSDRP was the only official program of a workers’ party to formulate the idea of the conquest of political power by the proletariat in the terms of a “class dictatorship.” It was the persistent desire of Bernstein, Jaurès, and other critics of Marxism to attach the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” to the Blanquist meaning of power, that which is held by the violence of an organized minority and resting on violence exercised by this minority over the majority. For this reason, the authors of the Russian program had to delineate as precisely as possible the limits of this political concept. They did this by saying that the dictatorship of the proletariat is that power which is capable of crushing all resistance of the exploiting classes to revolutionary socialist transformation.

And that is all. An effective force concentrated in the state power [vlast], capable of carrying out the conscious will of the majority against the resistance of an economically powerful minority—in this way, and only in this way, does the meaning of “dictatorship of the proletariat” align with the teachings of Marx. Not only can such a dictatorship be reconciled with democratic rule, it can only exist within the framework of democracy—that is, only if complete political equality for all citizens is assured. Such a dictatorship is conceivable only insofar as the proletariat has rallied around itself “all the healthy elements of the nation”—that is, all those who cannot but benefit from the revolutionary transformation outlined in the program of the proletariat, when historical development has led all the healthy elements to a consciousness of their interests. A government embodying such a dictatorship would be, in the full sense of the word, a “national government.”