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 ?
I am not sure what you are driving at. It is Lenin who tried to
generalize from Marx's "Civil Wars in France":
>>We are not utopians, we do not "dream" of dispensing at once with
all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams,
based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian
dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact,
serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are
different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they
are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control,
and "foremen and accountants".<<
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.
I am opposed to jailing people for their ideas, period. In Cuba they
jail people not because of their ideas but because they are on the
payroll of the NED. In any case, the brunt of the repression in the
1930s was against socialists, not reactionaries like Solzhenitsyn.
Bukharin was the deepest Marxist thinker in the USSR who was executed
for his ideas. Trotsky was the deepest thinker outside the USSR and
got killed for criticizing Stalin from the left.
