Yes, you help Lou Pro out there. He referred Yoshie to _The Civil War in
France_ ,but it's Engels elsewhere ,not Marx in _The Civil War in France_
who says the Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat.
So, was the Soviet gulag an example of an aspect of a dictatorship of the
proletariat or not ( imperfect no doubt), in your opinion ? "Dictatorship"
seems to imply socialist state repression of reactionary forces of a
society. How does a socialist state deal with the mass of people who ,
really through no fault of their own ,just continue to think and act as they
have been raised in the old society, as in Russia where there were millions
with "feudalistic" ideas still after the insurrection of 1917 ? I'm not
saying it's a happy thing. What is to be done with respect to people like
Solzhenitzyn who are just going to oppose socialism ?
Look at Cuba and the exiling of millions to the U.S.,and elsewhere. Not much
else could be done, otherwise the anti-socialist elements would thwart the
rev.
How about Venezuela today ? Is it a dictatorship of the proletariat like the
Commune , as Engels and Marx understood it ?
Even if it is, the term "dictatorship" is probably not the best one, since
the bourgeoisie and U.S. will use it as a basis of denouncing and
undermining Venezuela. So, d.o.p. might be scientifically useful, but
rhetorically poor usage today. So far, not repressing the Venezuelan
bourgeoisie and "Solzhenitzyn's" has worked. Although , of course, there was
the coup attempt.
Lou Pro referred Yoshie F. to the d.o.p. for today's usage. As stirring as
these passages from Marx, Engels and Lenin are, I don't know whether it's a
good idea.
Yoshie said:
>If a dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't command enthusiasm even >among
Marxists outside the West, let alone among broadly defined >leftists inside
the West, there is a historical reason for it. While >rejecting gross
distortions and exaggerations peddled by professional >anticommunists, we
have to reckon with the record of democracy, or >lack thereof, under
formerly and actually existing socialist >countries. It seems to me that
revolutionaries in Venezuela and Nepal >are trying to avoid the errors of
the past in this respect.
We might whisper that the counter-coup was the Venezuelan Commune.
Charles
^^^^^^
From: "michael a. lebowitz"
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).
