Dictatorship Of The Proletariat Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The dictatorship of the proletariat is a key concept in Marxist political theory, in which the state is seen as an institution for class rule, a “dictatorship” of one social class over another. In the course of fighting for socialism, the working class must overthrow and destroy the existing capitalist state and replace it with an instrument for working-class rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat—organized on a radically different basis.

At an early stage in their thinking, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formulated the view that the working class would be driven by capitalist exploitation to take state power and implement communist measures: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class . . .” (The Communist Manifesto).

This idea became refined during their observation of the revolutions of 1848, especially in France. Marx developed a highly critical view of the French state, which he saw as a parasitic, military-bureaucratic force, drawing the conclusion that the working class would have to destroy the existing state and create a wholly new form of state structure. His first use of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” came in 1850 in The Class Struggles in France, when he referred to “the class dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary intermediate point on the path towards the abolition of class differences in general.”(Marx 1973, 122) Marx elaborated on this idea after witnessing the Paris Commune of 1871, which he described as “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor” (Marx 1992). For Marx, the key institutional innovations of the Paris Commune were its abolition of the standing army and its replacement by a popular militia, the assumption of strict control over the police and state officials, and its adoption of measures designed to ensure a close connection between elected representatives and their constituents. Marx’s vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat was thus of a state that was a genuine “servant of the people,” minimizing repression and bureaucracy, and preparing for the eventual “withering away of the state.”

The concept receded into the background in the latter part of the nineteenth century as socialist organizations like the German Social Democratic Party pursued power through electoral means. Those on the right of the movement, like Eduard Bernstein, advocated abandoning it; while those in the center, like Karl Kautsky, sought to redefine it in a way that made it compatible with a parliamentary discourse. However as political differences within European socialism exploded with the unfolding of World War I (1914–1918), the Russian socialist leader Lenin raised the dictatorship of the proletariat as a point of differentiation between revolutionary socialists and “opportunists,” and as a central focus for revolutionary strategy in Russia.

In State and Revolution, written on the eve of the Bolshevikled revolution of October 1917, Lenin emphasized the need to smash the existing state apparatus and replace it with “a state of the Commune type,” identifying the soviets (workers’ and soldiers’ councils) with such a state. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin used this argument to justify the dismissal of the elected Constituent Assembly, in favor of rule by the soviets. The first Soviet Constitution of 1918 defined the state as “the dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorest peasantry,” and gave this practical effect by providing for a soviet form of government (with an indirectly elected legislature) and by excluding from the electorate those not engaged in “socially useful labor.” The notion of a proletarian “dictatorship” was invoked by the Bolsheviks to legitimate authoritarian treatment of their opponents, and later it provided Stalin with an ideological framework for constructing a permanent regime of repression.

In a sharp exchange with Lenin in 1918, Kautsky argued that the concept should be seen as referring not to a form of government but merely “a condition which necessarily arose in a real democracy, because of the overwhelming numbers of the proletariat.”

After World War II (1939–1945), the concept became increasingly marginalized within communist discourse. The Eastern European states created under the influence of the Soviet Union were defined as “people’s democracies,” most Western communist parties quietly dropped the term, and the Soviet Union redefined itself as a “socialist state of the whole people” in 1977.

Bibliography:

Balibar, Etienne. On The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. London: New Left Books, 1977.
Barany, Zoltan. “The ‘Volatile’ Marxian Concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Studies in East European Thought 49 (1977): 1–21.
Draper, Hal. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat,Volume 3 of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986.
Hunt, Richard N. The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vols. 1 and 2. London: Macmillan, 1975 and 1984.
Kautsky, Karl. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918. www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/dictprole/index.htm
Lenin,V. I. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Renegade Kautsky. Moscow: Progress, 1970.
State and Revolution. London: Penguin Books, 2009.
Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France in The First International and After. Political Writings Volume 3. London: Penguin Books, 1992.
The Class Struggles in France in Surveys from Exile. Political Writings Volume 2. London: Penguin Books, 1973.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto, 1848. London: Penguin Books, 2005.