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 ?
Understanding Marx's position on the dictatorship of the proletariat requires more than a search engine; it's necessary to grasp precisely what the proletariat had to do once it had won 'the battle of democracy'. The Paris Commune was obviously what he and Engels had in mind, but the great discovery (a discovery by the workers themselves) was the form revealed--- a democratic, decentralised state no longer standing above civil society. Here's an excerpt from Ch. 10 of my Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class.
The Commune was the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour (Marx, 1871b: 75). At last discovered!
Do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like, asked Engels on the 20th anniversary of the Commune? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Marx and Engels, 1971: 34). He made the same point elsewhere that year (1891), when he commented that our Party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French revolution has already shown (Engels, 1891). But, Engels point was not new--- Marx clearly grasped at the time that the Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat: its role was to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class-rule (Marx, 1871b: 75). Although this would involve a long process of development of new conditions, Marx noted, workers know at the same time that great strides may be [made] at once through the Communal form of political organisation (Marx, 1871a: 157).
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
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