Lou Pro: "You don't seem to understand what the reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat means. This is not about throwing dissidents in Gulags. It is a technical term for a kind of state as exemplified by the Paris Commune."
and "Have you read "State and Revolution"? It is online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm. I also recommend Karl Marx's "The Civil War in France", which can be read at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm. " ^^^^^^ CB: You will note that it is _not_ in the discussion of the Paris Commune (Chapter III) that Lenin quotes Marx on the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. That's in a letter to Weydemeyer ( remember him ?) from Marx (Chapter II). See below. Skimming "The Third Address May, 1871 [The Paris Commune]" I find no mention of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Would you point it out to me , please ? Anyway, don't be so sure that the socalled "gulags" ( a term derived from a reactionary Russian feudalist, novelist, whose philosophy makes Lula or Ahmadinejad look pretty good in comparison) were not an actual expression of the revolutionary dicatatorship of the proletariat exactly as Marx meant it. Solzhenitzyn and those like him had to be put into some kind of "exile" or reeducation camp; or what would you have done with them ? He seems like a devotee of Rasputin. What do you think was to be done with that "backward" , feudalistic, _gigantic_ social mass of which he was a part that everybody seems to agree constituted much of Russia ? "Backward Russia, backward Russia, backward Russia "- the phrase rolls off of everybody's tongues without considering what that means in terms of the thinking, politics and activity of millions of actual Russian people even after the insurrection. Do you really think all those actually existing reactionaries of the ordinary population of old Russia were not an aggressive (and passive) force against socialism ? Why exactly did Marx say there would have to be a "dictatorship" ? Do you think he was joking ? Russia was "backward" , but there weren't really many incorrigibly politically backward people, like Solzhenitzyn ,in it,right ? They weren't actively, aggressively trying to retain Russia as backward, since in Great October (old calendar) of 1917 they all magically got communist religion, right, and it was one big happy Commune ? Preface Chapter I: Class Society and the State 39 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 1848-51 30 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 3. The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852 In 1907, Mehring, in the magazine Neue Zeit[4] (Vol.XXV, 2, p.164), published extracts from Marx's letter to Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852. This letter, among other things, contains the following remarkable observation: "And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Produktion), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."[5]
