[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> I do not think that much can be read into the "dictatorship of the proletariat," and
>certainly not that it is a temporary "dictatorship" in the modern sense of
>unrestrained lawless repressive rule.
I've always thought that Marx viewed all societies as dictatorships:
dictatorships of one class over another. The dictatorship of the
proletariat just means the working class becomes a ruling class. If I
remember this is what Draper argued. Engels commented famously in 1891
"Do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks
like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the
proletariat."
There's also a 'two Lenin's' thesis too, the radical democrat of State
and Revolution: "Socialism is not created by orders from on high. Its
spirit is alien to state-bureaucratic automatism. Socialism is vital and
creative, it is the creation of the popular masses themselves." (written
in 1919 to counter the authoritarian-bureaucratic degeneration of the
war communism period) and the dictator of the Red Terror. This myth has
been
demolished in two books "Leninism Under Lenin" by Marcel Liebman and
"Lenin and the
Revolutionary Party" by Paul Leblanc, though there are residues of it in
Liebman. "Lenin's Last Struggle" by Moshe Levin is good too.
Marx and Engels' anti-utopianism was contrary to their theory of
historical development. Socialism is not an abstract ethical ideal drawn
up in someone's head then imposed onto society but is rather a product
of historical process. As Engels said "you cannot decree the development
of the masses. This is conditioned by the development of the conditions
in which the masses live and hence evolves gradually."Socialism Utopian
and Scientific, 34.
sam Pawlett
