The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.
V. I. Lenin

Well, folks. Due to the wonders of communication via t'interweb, I find myself needing to start this thread. As I am genuinely proletarian and not a middle-class intellectual, this may take a while and run for a while and I ask now for your understanding and/or forgiveness.

First, 'dictatorship'. So, in my view (and I think in the pre-cold war original meaning of the word) that means what 'gives sway' to our public/political life. What are we to do- to achieve- in our social life? That which can't be achieved merely by the individual? How many people does it take to make a pin?

I'm glad I don't have to explain 'the dictatorship of capital', as recent events of our epoch can do that much better than I.

First a few references....#2.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

"Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?"

Engels - 'On Authority'

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

MIA

: Marxists: Marx & Engels: Library: 1848: Manifesto of the Communist Party: Chapter 2: [German Original]

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?


The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.


They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.


They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.


The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.


The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.


The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.


The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.


They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.


All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.


The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.


The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.


In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.


We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.


Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?


But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.


To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.


Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.


Let us now take wage-labour.


The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer.
What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.


In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.


In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.


And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.


By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.


But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.


In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.


Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.


It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.


According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.


That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.


The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.


Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.


On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.


Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.


And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.


The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.


But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.


The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.


He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.


For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.


Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.


Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.


The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.


The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.


National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.


The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.


In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.


The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.


Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?


What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.


When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.


When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.


“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.”
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”


What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.


But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.


The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.


We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.


The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.


Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.


These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.


Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.





1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.



2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.



4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.



5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.



6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.



7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.



8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.



9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.



10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.


When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.


In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Dictatorship of the proletariat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




The "dictatorship of the proletariat" or workers' state is a term employed by Marxists that refers to what they see as a temporary state between the capitalist society and the classless and stateless communist society; during this transition period, "the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." The term does not refer to a concentration of power by a dictator, but to a situation where the proletariat (the working class) would hold power and replace the current political system controlled by the bourgeoisie (the propertied class). In short, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would replace the current "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". Many Marxists refer to this transitional stage as socialism or "workers' democracy".
Contents

[hide]

• 1 Marx and Engels
• 2 Lenin
• 3 Trotsky and Trotskyists
• 4 Quotations
• 5 See also
• 6 Notes
• 7 External links

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Lev Kamenev 1920
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Source: pamphlet;
Published: The Marxian Educational Society, 1920;
Online Version: Kamenev Internet Archive, February 2004;
Transcription: Ted Crawford;
HTML Markup: Mike B.
Conservatism in ideology, theories based on principles, slowness in their adaptation to rapidly-changing life, their constant lagging behind the constantly changing forms of the struggle — have frequently, been noted by Marxists. In our struggle for Communism, we constantly meet with these facts, we constantly have to remark how great is the power of the old ideology even over the best men of the present Labor movement — in so far as these men have grown up in the atmosphere of pre-war Europe.


This mental conservatism is most strikingly observed in their approach to the question of dictatorship. Six years of war and revolution (1914-1920) it would seem, should have elucidated this finally, from all points of view, by practice, by facts out of the everyday life of the masses; and yet, even among the comrades adhering to the Third International, we are often confronted with the question: “What is the dictatorship of the proletariat? ... Cannot the Labor movement attain its object without a dictatorship? ... Why is dictatorship inevitable?” I heard these questions not only from the members of the British Trade Union delegation, but even from some of the members of the delegation of Italian Socialists.


When one hears such questions one thinks involuntarily that the persons uttering them must have slept through a whole historical period, and, first of all, through the world war of 1914-18. For these years constituted a model epoch of dictatorship, and the method of carrying on the war were models of the application of dictatorial methods of ruling a country.


From the point of view of the government of a country, the imperialist war consisted in the assembling and placing under a single command of millions of men, in providing their equipment and transport, and compelling these many millions of men to carry out certain tasks. These tasks were foreign to these millions, and were accompanied for each of them separately, and for all together, with incredible sufferings, privations, and the risk of death. How did the governments of Europe, America and Asia accomplish the task? By what methods did they guarantee the assembling, equipment, transport and command of these millions? By what methods did they secure the adaptation of the whole administrative, economic and social life of the state to carry out the tasks set by the government ? Was this achieved by means of democracy? By the means of parliamentarism? By means of the realization of the sovereignty of the “people”?


The sovereignty of the people, democracy, the State, parliamentarism, even from the point of view of their hypocritical bourgeois defenders, cannot but mean the discussion and decision, if only of the most important questions, of the state and social life by the citizens themselves, “free” and “equal” in the eyes of the law.
However, at present, even the most unenlightened peasant, in the most backward of all countries drawn into the war, knows that the government of his country in 1914-1918 was, as a whole and in every detail, a clear, simple, elementary refutation of these regulations of bourgeois democracy. Democracy, parliaments, elections, freedom of the press, remained — in so far as they did remain a mere screen; in reality all the countries drawn into the war — the whole world — were governed by the methods of dictatorship, which utilized, when it happened to be convenient and profitable, elections, parliaments and the press.


One must be a blind fool or a conscious deceiver of the masses not to see, or to conceal, this fundamental fact; at the most critical period of their history, at the moment of their struggle for existence, the bourgeois States of Europe, Asia and America defended themselves not by means of democracy and parliamentarism, but by openly passing over to the methods of dictatorship.


It was the dictatorship of the general staffs, of the officers’ corps, and of large industry, to whom belonged, not only actually, but also formally, all power both in the army and in the country; who commanded, not only lives, but also the property of the whole country and of every citizen, not only living at the time but yet to be born (the military debts of Messrs. Romanoff, Hohenzollern, Clemenceau and Lloyd George will cover the lives and work of future generations). During several years, before the eyes of the whole human race, a picture of the practice of dictatorship is unrolled — a dictatorship ruling over the whole world, determining everything, regulating everything, penetrating everything, and confirming its existence by 20,000,000 corpses on the fields of Europe and Asia. It is natural, therefore, that to the question, “What is dictatorship?” the Communists should answer: “Open your eyes, and you will see before you a splendidly elaborated system of bourgeois dictatorship, which has achieved its object: for it has given that concentration of power into the hands of small group of world imperialists which allowed them to conduct their war and attain their peace (of Versailles). Do not pretend that dictatorship — as a system of government, as a form of power — can frighten anyone except the old women of bourgeois pacifism. The dictatorship of the proletariat suppresses, not ‘equality,’ ‘liberty,’ and ‘democracy,’ but only the bourgeois dictatorship, which in 1914-18 showed itself to be the most bloody, most tyrannical, most pitiless, cynical and hypocritical of all forms of power that ever existed.”


The theorists of Communism beginning with Karl Marx, proved, however, a long while ago, that the dictatorship of the proletariat does not consist in replacing the bourgeoisie by the proletariat at the same governmental machine. The task of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to break up the machinery of government created by the bourgeoisie, and to replace it by a new one, created on a different basis and reposing on a new co-relation of the classes.


The dictatorship of the proletariat appears in the programs of the Socialist parties, not later than the seventies of the nineteenth century. However, during the whole period of the Second International, it did not once, on any occasion, become the practical duty of the day, and attracted the attention neither of the practical workers nor of the theoreticians of the Labor movement; and only when, in 1914-18, through the veil of democracy, parliamentarism, and political liberty, the unmistakable features of the bourgeois dictatorship became clearly discernible, did the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat become a real force. It became a force because, its Marx says, it took possession of the proletarian masses.


In the 1903 program of the Russian Social Democratic Party — a program which aspired to be only a precise and improved statement of the programs of the Social Democratic parties already in existence, and which at the time, in 1903, united both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks — the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was expressed as follows:


“The necessary condition for the social revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is the conquest by the proletariat of a political power that will allow it to crush all resistance on the part of the exploiters.” This definition is embodied without alteration in the program of the Russian Communist Party.


The authors of the 1903 program could not foresee the actual circumstances in which the proletariat of any country would have to take the power into its hands. They certainly did not attempt at the time to define in what measure the dictatorship of the proletariat would be connected with the formation of a proletarian (Red) army, with the practice of Terror, with the limitation of political liberties. They had to underline, and they did underline, not these changeable elements — varying in the various countries — of the proletarian dictatorship, but its fundamental and unchanging feature, inevitable for any country and any historical conditions under which the proletariat seizes power.


The proletariat not only seizes power; in grasping it, the proletariat gives to it such a character, such a degree of concentration, energy, determination, absoluteness, infinitude, as according to the words of the program, ‘will allow it to crush all resistance on the part of the exploiters.’ That is the fundamental feature of the dictatorship of the proletariat.


The dictatorship of the proletariat is therefore an organization of the State and a form of administration of State affairs which, in the transitional stage from capitalism to Communism, will allow the proletariat, as the ruling class, to crush all resistance on the part of the exploiters to the work of Socialist reconstruction.


It is thus clear that the question itself of the necessity, the inevitability of a proletarian dictatorship for every capitalist country is connected with the question as to whether the resistance of the exploiters to their expropriation by Socialist society — or, more precisely, by society marching towards Socialism is inevitable.


In the same way, the question regarding the degree of severity of the dictatorship, the extent and conditions of the limitation of the political rights of the bourgeoisie and limitation of political liberty in general, the application of terrorist methods, etc., is indissolubly linked with the question of the degree, forms, stubbornness and organization of resistance by the exploiters.


Anyone who expresses a doubt as to the inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a necessary stage towards Socialist society, thereby expresses a doubt of the bourgeoisie showing any resistance to the proletariat at the decisive hour of the expropriation of the exploiters.


Propaganda based on this may be dictated either by individual stupidity, or the interest of a group of persons in concealing from the proletariat the circumstances of the forthcoming struggle, and in preventing it from preparing for the same.


When persons, calling themselves Socialists, declare that the course of dictatorship, admissible and explicable for Russia, is in no wise obligatory or inevitable for any other capitalist country, they proclaim a thing directly contrary to truth. The actual Russia bourgeoisie always was, and up to the October Revolution remained, the least organised, the 1east conscious in the sense of class, the least united of all bourgeois classes in the countries of the old capitalist order. The Russian peasantry had not time enough to develop that class of strong and politically united peasants, which is the basis of a series of bourgeois parties in the West. The Russian middle class of the towns, crushed and politically unenlightened, never represented anything like such groups of the population as, in the West, create and support the parties of “Christian Socialism” and anti-Semitism.


The first thunder claps of the proletarian revolution broke over this politically backward, inactive and unorganized class. “The resistance of the exploiters” to the blows of the Russian proletariat must therefore be considered as comparatively weak — weak, naturally only in comparison with the activity which the bourgeoisie of any other European country will be able to develop. The actively resisting element, which dragged on the struggle for three years, were not the unorganized forces of the Russian bourgeoisie, but, first of all, foreign interventionists, and then the bourgeoisie of the border countries (Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine), which, playing upon the century-old hatred against Tsarist Russia, managed to unite under the flag of nationalism certain organized groups for resistance against the Russian proletariat. If it were not for these external circumstances, the resistance of the Russian bourgeoisie would have been broken, not in three years, but in three months, and the proletarian apparatus of State power would naturally have directed all its energy towards other ends.


In conformity with the nature of the resistance which was to be expected from the Russian propertied classes and their organizations, the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia had its period of “rosy illusions” and “sentimental youth.”


There can be nothing more mistaken than to assume that the Russian proletariat, or even its leader, the Communist Party, came into power with recipes, prepared in advance, of practical measures for the realization of the dictatorship. Only “Socialist” ignoramuses, or charlatans, could suggest that the Russian Communists came into power with a prepared plan for a standing army, Extraordinary Commissions, and limitations of political liberty, to which the Russian proletariat was obliged to recur for self-defense after bitter experience. The cause of the proletariat was saved, because it soon profited by its acquired experience and, with unfailing energy, applied these methods of struggle when it became convinced of their inevitability.


The transference of power to the Soviets, and the formation of the new Workers ’ and Peasants’ Government took place on November 7th, 1917. The discomfiture and disorganization of the bourgeoisie was so great that it was unable to muster any serious forces against the workmen. The resistance of the government of Kerensky was broken after a few days. The elections to the Constituent Assembly still continued. All the political parties — up to Miliukoff’s party — continued to exist openly. All the bourgeois newspapers continued to circulate. Capital punishment was abolished. The army was being demobilized. In the hands of the government there were no other forces than the volunteer detachment of armed workmen. The Ministers of Kerensky’s government arrested, during the first days, (the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Avksentieff, Gotz, Zenzinoff, the Generals Boldareff, Krasnoff and others — later on, all of them, leaders of the armed struggle against the Soviet power and members of the rebel governments of Siberia, the Don and the South) were set free. Generals Denikin, Markoff, Erdeli and others remained in the hands of the Soviet power up to November 20th and left its limits alive.


Yes, that was the period of “rosy illusions.” It continued for a few months.
The conditions, began to change by April-May, 1918. In April, 1918, the decree regarding the formation of a standing Red Army was published. Only in April the Extraordinary Commissions acquired the right to execute robbers caught in the act and officers going off to Korniloff, according to his secret mobilization. Only on June 18th did the Revolutionary Court pass its first sentence of death on the Admiral commanding the Baltic Fleet. Only in May were measures taken to stop the publication of the bourgeois papers (at the moment of this suppression there were thirty papers against three of the Soviets in Moscow alone). Only in June, 1918, were the Mensheviks driven out of the Soviets.


Thus over six months (November, 1917-April-May, 1918) passed from the moment of the formation of the Soviet power to the practical application by the proletariat of any harsh dictatorial measures. The increased severity in the dictatorship was called forth by a series of very elementary facts. In April, the government of Skoropadsky was organized in Kieff; in May took place the rising of the Czecho-Slovaks, their seizure of the railway system and the formation of the Socialist-Revolutionary government in the East; in May, too, the Cossack counter-revolution on the Don — the Russian Vendee — acquired increased importance under the command of Greneral Krasnoff.


Parallel with this, all the attention and energy of the working class was concentrated on the tasks of the war, and the Soviet state was transformed into a camp of armed proletarians.


Such was the experience of the Russian proletariat.


We have now before us the experience of the class struggle for proletarian power in Finland, Hungary and Germany. The fundamental difference between the experience of Hungary, Finland and Germany and that of Russia consists in the fact that the bourgeoisie of those countries proved, as was to be expected, to be much more organized, united and capable of fighting than the Russian bourgeoisie. Its period of confusion was much shorter; it organized a counterattack against the proletariat much more rapidly and energetically; and by that very fact shortened the period of illusions of the proletariat itself as to the nature of its dictatorship.
The experience of the workers of Russia, Finland, Hungary and Germany allows us to establish an empiric law of the development of proletarian dictatorship, which may be expressed approximately in the following words. The fact of the conquest of the central political power by the proletariat in no wise completes the struggle for power, but only marks the beginning of a new and more determined period of warfare between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.


After the first blow of the proletarian revolution and the seizure of the central apparatus of power by the proletariat, the bourgeoisie inevitably needs a certain time for mobilization of its forces, the bringing up of reserves and their organization. Its passing to a counter attack opens up an epoch of undisguised warfare, and armed clash of the forces of both sides.


It is just during this period that the rule of the proletariat acquires the harsh features of a dictatorship: a Red Army, a terrorist suppression of the exploiters and their allies, the limitation of political liberty, becomes inevitable if the proletariat does not wish to give up without a fight the power it has won.


The dictatorship of the proletariat is consequently a form of government of the state which is most adapted to the carrying on of a war with the bourgeoisie, and to guarantee most rapidly the victory of the proletariat in such war.


Are there any grounds for presuming that such a war in Europe will be carried out in less acute forms? That the European bourgeoisie will submit with a lighter heart to the expropriation of its riches by the proletariat? Can any reasonable person build his tactics on the supposition that the European bourgeoisie will not show all the resistance of which it is capable against the proletariat which had seized power? Can one presume that, entering into the fight against the proletariat in power, the European bourgeoisie will prove to be less armed, less capable of fighting, less united and less prudent than the bourgeoisie of Russia, Finland or Hungary? Can one imagine that it will stop at any means, beginning with a far-reaching union with the betrayers of Socialism from the camp of the Second International and ending with the bombardment of the workmen’s quarters and the application of the latest technical methods for the suffocation of the enemy in war?


What under these conditions can be the meaning of a doubt in the inevitability of the methods of proletarian dictatorship, or a refusal to work, day in and day out, for the preparation of the proletariat to utilize all the methods of dictatorship in the coming struggle?


To move towards a seizure of power, not hoping to hold it, and not preparing the conditions for holding it, is simply foolhardiness; to recognize the necessity for the proletariat conquering power, and to doubt the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat, to refuse to instruct the workers in this direction — means consciously to prepare the betrayal of the cause of Socialism. Whoever does not recognize the necessity for the severest proletarian dictatorship during the transitional period from capitalism to Socialism; does not prepare the necessary conditions for the proletariat, on acquiring the central apparatus of power, at once directing it to the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters; whoever does not explain to the proletariat, as a necessary condition here and now, of its victory, the inevitability of an armed struggle and harsh measures against treason and hesitation, and does not arm the proletariat with the suitable weapons — that person is preparing the ruin of the proletariat and the victory of the bourgeoisie.


But if the dictatorship of the proletariat is an organization of power, which is best adapted to the carrying on of the war against the bourgeoisie and the suppression of its resistance, then we have an answer also to the question which is generally put to the Communists by the syndicalists of various schools of thought. The latter while admitting the dictatorship of the proletariat, cannot divest themselves of their old prejudices against a political party of the proletariat. The question, consequently, is: what organization is capable of achieving a solution of the problems of dictatorship?
There can be no doubt that, at the moment of a decisive class war, the power of command and compulsion must lie in the hands of a definite organization, capable of bearing the responsibility for each step it takes and of guaranteeing the logical sequence of these steps.


The army of the proletariat, moving in battle order, must have its general staff. When leading its regiments to the attack, that general staff must be capable of surveying the sum total of the international, political and economic conditions of the struggle. It must possess equal authority over all kinds of arms at the disposition of the working class. It must be in a position to carry out its decisions through the trade unions, and the workmen’s co-operatives, through the factory committees, and through the leagues of young workers, by means of written propaganda, and through the fighting militia of armed workers.


At the moment when the old power is overthrown and the apparatus of government is seized by the revolting proletariat, that general staff has new tasks to perform. The victory of the proletariat signifies the disorganization of the old social system. The formation of a new army, the feeding of the country, the building up of industry on new principles, the organization of law courts, the establishment of relations with the peasants, the diplomatic relations with other countries — all these matters become at once the immediate tasks of the general staff of the victorious proletarian army. Any delay in the accomplishment of one of these tasks, or any hesitation in the decision, is capable of bringing greatest harm to the further victorious development of the proletarian revolution.


Consequently, this general staff must be an organized responsible, and centralized institution, prepared to deal with, and decide all political, economic, social, and diplomatic problems. An organization which would satisfy all these conditions and solve all the problems incumbent upon it may be called, of course, by any name whatsoever; but in reality — and if we do not play with words — such an organization can only, be the political party of the proletariat; i e., an organization of the most advanced, revolutionary elements of the proletariat, united by their common political program and an iron discipline.


Such an organization cannot be formed in a day or even a week; it is the result of a prolonged process of assembling and selecting experienced leaders, who have proved, by their daily work, to be capable of estimating rightly each phase of the labor struggle, and the interests of each separate group of the working class, from the higher point of view of the general interests of the entire working class as a whole.


The greatest misfortune which could befall the proletarian army after seizing the strongholds of capitalism, would be if the apparatus of leadership proved to be in the hands of men, groups, or organizations whose previous work had been carried out only in the sphere of the labor movement.


The suppression of the resistance of the exploiters — which is the fundamental task of the dictatorship — is not only a military, or only a political, or only an economic task; it is all of them — military, political, economic. The resistance of the exploiters acquires only its most acute form during an armed conflict; but the rich peasantry, which will not give the bread for the famishing population; the engineers who sabotage industry; and the bankers who bring confusion into the mutual account of the industrial enterprises by concealing their books — are not less important factors in the resistance of the bourgeoisie. The suppression of all these various forms of resistance can be as little the work of an organization created in the narrow sphere of the trade union movement, as, say, of a workers’ co-operative organization. It can be successfully achieved only by a general organization of all the workers; in the shape of their Soviets, in which are represented all the forms of the labor movement, and which are under the guidance of a political party, concentrating in itself the whole experience of the previous struggle of the working class.


In the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Communist Party is still more necessary for the working class than in any other. It constitutes an essential condition for victory. A refusal to work for its creation and strengthening means a renunciation of the efficient carrying on of the class war; i. e., a renunciation of dictatorship, of a condition of the victory of Socialism, and may engender, although unconsciously, the most cruel betrayal of the working class cause, by depriving the proletariat, at the most critical moment, of its most important weapon. Anyone who doubts the inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a necessary stage of its victory over the bourgeoisie, facilitates the conditions for the victory of the latter; anyone who doubts or renounces the political party of the proletariat, is helping to weaken and disorganize the working class.
June, 1920.

Kamenev Archive

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Wage slavery

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The abolition of wage slavery is a stated goal of unions like the IWW


Wage slavery is a term first coined by the Lowell Mill Girls in 1836,[1] though articulated as a concept at least as early as Cicero[2] and elaborated by subsequent thinkers, particularly with the advent of the industrial revolution.[3] It refers to the similarities between owning and renting a person, and denotes a hierarchical social condition in which a person chooses a job within a coerced set of choices (primarily working for a boss under threat of starvation, poverty or status diminution),[4][5][6][7] which make that "person dependent on wages or a salary for a livelihood,"[8] "esp[ecially] with total and immediate dependency on the income derived from...[wage] labor".[9] Wage slavery, in the libertarian socialist or anarchist usage of the term, is often understood as the absence of:

1. A democratic or anti-authoritarian society, especially with nonhierarchical worker's control of the workplace and the economy as a whole,[10][11][12]
2. Unconditional access to non-exploitative property and a fair share of the basic necessities of life,[13][14] and
3. The ability of persons to have say over economic decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by those decisions.[15]

In terminology used by some critics of capitalism, statism and various authoritarian systems, wage slavery is the condition under which a person must sell his or her labor power, submitting to the authority of an employer in order to prosper or merely to subsist.[16][17][18]
Contents

[hide]

• 1 Comparison with chattel slavery
• 2 Role in the development of the modern nation-state
• 3 Treatment in various economic systems
  • 3.1 Capitalism
  • 3.2 Communism
  • 3.3 Fascism
• 4 Psychological effects
• 5 Social effects
  • 5.1 Human nature, law, and war
  • 5.2 Environmental destruction
• 6 Criticism
• 7 References
• 8 See also
• 9 External links

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Delivered: December 1847;
Source: Wage Labour and Capital, the original 1891 pamphlet;
Edited/Translated: Frederick Engels;
First Published (in German): Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 5-8 and 11, 1849;
Online Version: Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1993, 1999;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac and Brian Basgen;
Proofed: and corrected by Alek Blain, 2006.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Preliminary
What are wages?
By what is the price of a commodity determined?
By what are wages determined?
The nature and growth of capital
Relation of wage-labor to capital
The general law that determines the rise and fall of wages and profit
The interests of capital and wage-labor are diametrically opposed
Effect of capitalist competition on the capitalist class, middle class and working class

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

revolutionary socialists in the United States

What is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat?

The fundamental difference between reformists and centrists of all varieties on the one hand, and revolutionary Marxists, i.e., Bolshevik-Leninists, on the other regarding the conquest of state power, the need for a socialist revolution, the nature of the proletarian state, and the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat does not lie in defense of a multiparty system by the former and a one-party system by the latter. Nor does it lie in defense of unrestricted democratic freedoms by the former and defense of severe restriction, or even suppression, of democratic freedoms by the latter. Any attempt to identify the difference between reformists and revolutionists primarily in this way distorts the basic lessons of three~quarters of a century of historical experiences with revolutions and counterrevolutions and objectively represents a grave concession to reformism itself.

The fundamental differences between reformists and revolutionary Marxists on the key issue of state power consist of:

a. The clear recognition by revolutionary Marxists of the class nature of all states and of the state apparatus as an instrument for maintaining class rule.

b. The illusion upheld by the reformists that "democracy" or "democratic state institutions" stand above classes and the class struggle.

c. The clear recognition by revolutionary Marxists that the state apparatus and state institutions of even the most democratic bourgeois state serve to uphold the power and rule of the capitalist class and cannot be instruments with which to overthrow that rule and transfer power from the capitalist class to the working class.

d. The clear recognition by revolutionary Marxists, flowing from these considerations, that the conquest of power by the working class requires the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus, in the first place of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie.

e. The necessary conclusion drawn by revolutionary Marxists as a consequence: that the working class can exercise state power only within the framework of state institutions of a type different from those of the bourgeois state, state institutions arising out of' sovereign and democratically elected and centralized workers councils (soviets), with the fundamental characteristics outlined by Lenin in State and Revolution - the election of all functionaries, judges, leaders of the workers or workers and peasants militias, and all delegates representing the toilers in state institutions; regular rotation of elected officials; restriction of their income to that of skilled workers; the right to recall them at any time; parallel exercise of legislative and executive power by soviet-type institutions; radical reduction of the number of permanent functionaries and greater and greater transfer of administrative functions to bodies run by the toilers.

In other words, a qualitative growth of direct democracy as contrasted to indirect, representative democracy. As Lenin said, the workers state is the first state in human history that upholds the rule of the majority of the population against exploitative and oppressed minorities. "Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfill all these functions, and the more the functions of a state power are performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for the existence of this power." ("State and Revolution," Collected Works, Vol. 25, pp. 419-420) Thus, the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing other than a workers democracy. It is in this sense that the dictatorship of the proletariat begins to wither away almost from its inception.

The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which summarizes all these points, is a basic part of the Marxist theory of the state, of the proletarian revolution, and of the process toward building a classless society. The word "dictatorship" has a concrete meaning in that context.' it is a mechanism for the disarmament and expropriation of the bourgeois class and the exercise of state power by the working class, a mechanism to prevent any reestablishment of private property in the means of production and thus any reintroduction of the exploitation of wage-earners by capitalists. But it in no way means dictatorial rule over the vast majority of people. The founding congress of the Communist International stated explicitly that "proletarian dictatorship is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, i.e., an insignificant minority of the population, the landowners and capitalists. It follows that proletarian dictatorship must inevitably entail not only a change in democratic forms and institutions, generally speaking, but precisely such a change as provides an unparalleled extension of the actual enjoyment of democracy by those oppressed by capitalism-the toiling classes. . . . all this implies and presents to the toiling classes, i.e., the vast majority of the population, greater practical opportunities for enjoying democratic rights and liberties than ever existed before, even approximately, in the best and the most democratic bourgeois republics." ("Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," Lenin, Collected Works, vol.28, pp.464.465)

Against the now avowedly programmatic revisionism of many Communist parties and centrist formations, the Fourth International defends these classical concepts of Marx and Lenin. A socialist society is not possible without the collective ownership of the means of production and the social surplus product, economic planning and administration by the working class as a whole through democratically centralized workers councils, i.e., planned self-rnanagement by the toilers. No such socialization is possible unless the capitalists are economically and politically expropriated and state power is wielded by the working class.

Especially after the tragic Chilean experience, which confirmed so many previous lessons of history, the Kautskian reformist concept now defended by the so-called Eurocommunist parties, the Japanese CP, and several other CPs as well as centrist formations, according to which the labor movement can fully attain its goals within the framework of bourgeois-parliamentary institutions through reliance on parliamentary elections and gradual conquest of "positions of power" within these institutions, must be energetically opposed and denounced for what it is: a cover-up for abandonment of the struggle for the conquest of state power by the proletariat; a cover-up for abandonment of the struggle for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, for abandonment of a policy of consistent defense of the class interests of the working class; a substitution of ever more systematic class collaboration with the bourgeoisie for the policy of consistent class struggle, and, flowing therefrom, a growing tendency to capitulate to the class interests of the bourgeoisie at moments of decisive economic, political, and social crisis. Far from reducing the costs of "social transformation" or from ensuring a peaceful, albeit slower, transition to socialism, this policy, if it should decisively determine the political attitude of the toilers in a period of unavoidable overall class confrontation, can only lead to bloody defeats and mass slaughters of the German, Spanish, and Chilean type.

From the Fourth Interntional's 1985 resolution "Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat".

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Written: August - September, 1917
Source: Collected Works, Volume 25, p. 381-492
First Published: 1918
Transcription\Markup: Zodiac and Brian Basgen
Online Version: Lenin Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1993, 1999

Preface6 k

Chapter I: Class Society and the State39 k
The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms
Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, etc.
The State: An Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class
The "Withering Away" of the State, and Violent Revolution

Chapter II: The Experience of 1848-5130 k
The Eve of Revolution
The Revolution Summed Up
The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852

Chapter III: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx's Analysis 46 k
What Made the Communards' Attempt Heroic?
What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine?
Abolition of Parliamentarism
Organisation of National Unity
Aboloition of the Parasite State

Chapter IV: Supplementary Explanations by Engels 56 k
The Housing Question
Controversy with the Anarchists
Letter to Bebel
Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme
The 1891 Preface to Marx's "The Civil War in France"
Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy

Chapter V: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State 43 k
Presentation of the Question by Marx
The Transition from Captialism to Communism
The First Phase of Communist Society
The Higher Phase of Communist Society
Chapter VI: The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists 40 k
Plekhanov's Controversy with the Anarchists
Kautsky's Controversy with the Opportunists
Kautsky's Controversy with Pannekoek
Postscript4 k

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Endnotes

Lenin wrote The State and Revolution in August and September 1917, when he was in hiding from persecution of the Provisional Government. The need for such a theoretical work as this was mentioned by Lenin in the second half of 1916. It was then that he wrote his note on "The Youth International", in which he criticised Bukharin's position on the question of the state and promised to write a detailed article on what he thought to be the Marxist attitude to the state. In a letter to A. M. Kollontai on February 17 (N.S.), 1917, he said that he had almost got ready material on that question . This material was written in a small blue-covered notebook headed "Marxism on the State". In it Lenin had collected quotations from the works of Marx and Engels, and extracts from the books by Kautsky, Pannekoek and Bernstein with his own critical notes, conclusions and generalisations.
When Lenin left Switzerland for Russia in April 1917, he feared arrest by the Provisional Government and left the manuscript of "Marxism on the State" behind — as it would have been destroyed had he been caught. When in hiding after the July events, Lenin wrote in a note:
"Entre nous, if I am knocked off, I ask you to publish my notebook 'Marxism on the State' (it got held up in Stockholm). It is bound in a blue cover. All the quotations from Marx and Engels are collected there, also those from Kautsky against Pannekoek. There are a number of remarks, notes and formulas. I think a week's work would be enough to publish it. I consider it important because not only Plekhanov, but Kautsky, too, is confused...." When Lenin received his notebook from Stockholm, he used the material he had collected as a basis for his book The State and Revolution.
According to Lenin's plan, The State and Revolution was to have consisted of seven chapters, but he did not write the seventh, "The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917", and only a detailed plan has remained. In a note to the publisher Lenin wrote that if he "was too slow in competing this, the seventh chapter, or should it turn out to be too bulky, the first six chapters should be published separately as Book One."
Originally, the name F.F. Ivanovsky is shown on the first page of the notebook manuscript as that of the author. Lenin intended to publish the book under that pseudonym, otherwise the Provisional Government would have confiscated it for his name alone. The book, however, was not printed until 1918, when there was no longer any need for the pseudonym. The second edition appeared in 1919; in this revision Lenin added to Chapter II a new section "The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852".

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That is a lot of information to process. Do you ever sleep? Just wanted you to know I was here.