Dictatorship

Rule of a particular interest over the whole political apparatus and through it over the social whole.

All ruling classes exercise their dictatorship through the state

All class societies have organized themselves politically as dictatorships of the interest of their ruling class, regardless of the concrete form of their political organization. Greek democracy was nonetheless a dictatorship of the slave-owning class over society as a whole, just as the aristocratic government of its rivals was. They are in fact forms of government of the same dictatorship, all designed to defend, in different ways and in different contexts, one and the same class interest and to impose it as the objective of the whole of society.

That is why, in any class dictatorship, asserting an opposing interest will never seem sensible and sometimes not even legitimate. On the other hand, the preponderance of the interest of the exploiting class over the universal needs of the species, not to mention those of the working class of that society, will seem the most "sensible" thing.

We see it every day. The trade unionist who tells us that we cannot demand "what the company's accounts cannot sustain without losses", or the politician who tells us that medical treatments or pensions must be subordinated to the "deficit target", are in fact saying that the most basic, universal, generic human needs -well-being, health, etc.- can only be satisfied once the need of capital has been satisfied: to accumulate profits in each cycle so as not to be devalued.

When an environmentalist argues that we must get used to living with less, he is also saying the same thing. He is taking it for granted that capital cannot be devalued, not even to reduce its most destructive practices. And from that perspective, that of the sustainability of capital, the only way to reduce the ecological impact is to reduce our consumption, the social form that access to everything we need to satisfy our needs takes under capitalism.

And the fact is that capitalism, under any of its political forms -from its original liberal forms to stalinist state capitalism- has been and will be, for as long as it exists, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in and from the state, centred on ensuring the accumulation of capital.

The dictatorship of the proletariat

The passage from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to the dictatorship of the proletariat would mean that, for the first time, the exploited class, the most numerous in society, would exercise its dictatorship. A dictatorship that by its very nature would not have radically different forms and contents. The proletariat is the universal class; the interest it defends and the guiding principle that moves it is that of generic, universal human needs.

This, since its first revolutionary experience, the Paris Commune of 1871, has conditioned its relationship with the state. To begin with, it cannot simply appropriate an apparatus designed for oppression and the reinforcement of exploitation; it has to destroy them and raise its own forms.

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. [...]

The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.

Karl Marx. The Civil War in France, 1871.

Its aims are in fact none other than the reorganization of production and of the whole of society on the criterion of human need; that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the phase of transition between what the workers' struggles implicitly pose (in themselves) and the conscious and universal realization of that logic: communism.

The Commune first and the soviet later are nothing more than the forms in which this dictatorship is imposed from the base of production upon the different aspects of social life. And unlike the dictatorship of an exploiting class, which is all the more repressive the more democratic it wishes to appear, the dictatorship of the proletariat shows itself openly, while it leads the broadest strata of the workers and of society to take directly into their own hands the organization and transformation of production and of all social relations.

We, the workers, shall organize large-scale production on the basis of what capitalism has already created, relying on our own experience as workers, establishing strict, iron discipline backed up by the state power of the armed workers;

we shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid "foremen and accountants" (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees):

this is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution.

Such a beginning, on the basis of large-scale production, will of itself lead to the gradual "withering away" of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an order -an order without inverted commas, an order bearing no similarity to wage slavery- an order under which the functions of control and accounting, becoming more and more simple, will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a special section of the population.

"The State and Revolution". Lenin, 1918

Dictatorship of the proletariat and social revolution

The main objective of the dictatorship of the working class is none other, and from the very first moment, than the destruction of the capital-labor relationship, wage labor, the fundamental and defining institution of capitalism. That is why all the coming proletarian revolutions will be social revolutions from day one.

The revolution will be a social revolution in the very place where it arises and not simply a political one (the seizure of power by the proletariat). A workers' state, let us stress, cannot be maintained in any case if the international revolution does not break out, and therefore socialism cannot be established in a single country.

Let us add to this that the suppression of capitalist relations is in no way equivalent to socialism (or to communism!!) but only -and in all this we take it for granted that it is a destruction carried out by the working class itself- a step towards socialism.

But this step, we assert, must be taken as quickly as possible through the immediate attack on and suppression of wage labor, even before the proletariat takes power on an almost global scale. Without this, however proletarian the power may be, it will turn into its opposite, since the devastation of the revolution is not a clean and immediately perceptible cut.

"Letter to the Third International Conference of 'Communist Left' Groups", FOR, 1980

In other words, the real movement which abolishes the present state of things, the movement of the proletariat as a class, is not a two-stroke engine; it knows no mechanical break between the political and the social. It is a movement against wage labor in all its phases and moments. And when it reaches the form of a political revolution, even on a local scale, it cannot but attack its main objective.

Even if it takes place only in a single industrial district, a social revolution adopts the standpoint of the totality, because it is a protest of man against dehumanized life, because it starts from the standpoint of each real individual, because the community from which the individual strives not to remain separated is the true community of man, human nature.

On the contrary, the political spirit of a revolution consists in the tendency of the classes without political power to put an end to their isolation from the being of the state and from power. Its standpoint is that of the state, an abstract totality that exists only through its separation from real life, and that would be unthinkable without the organized contradiction between the general idea and the individual existence of man.

In accordance with its limited and ambiguous nature, a revolution with a political spirit therefore creates a ruling sphere in society at the expense of society itself... Every revolution dissolves the old society: in this sense it is social. Every revolution overthrows the old power: in this sense it is political.

Marx in The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the opposite of the stalinist dictatorship

Stalinism, the expression of the state capitalist counter-revolution in Russia, could emerge and assert itself because the organs of the class dictatorship, the soviets, were already greatly weakened by the civil war and by the NEP, the policy of building a state capitalism under the supervision of the soviets as a desperate way of trying to maintain the bases of the dictatorship during the stagnation of the first wave of the world revolution in the 1920s. The Russian Revolution, a permanent revolution, thus abruptly cut short the attack on capitalist relations of production that was the guide of its socialist phase. The bureaucracy, which is in charge of the reconstruction of national capital, will gradually reimpose its dictatorship.

By 1936, the soviets, already completely subordinated to the new managing class by a thousand procedures and through brutal repression, will be legally replaced in the new state constitution by bodies made up exclusively of bureaucrats. For obvious political reasons, the new organs through which the state controls the workers retain the name of those through which the workers exercised their dictatorship. But one needed only to look at any of their most basic expressions or practices to discover that they were not organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but of a dictatorship over the proletariat.

Dictatorship of the proletariat, [is, in its] thuggish acceptation, [a] police, militarist and bureaucratic despotism, directed against the proletarian revolution at home and abroad. A supremely centralized party-state of capital in which power is exercised, without control or responsibility, by a handful of all-terrorist and all-powerful leaders. Historically, its origin is the destruction of the 1917 revolution and the extermination of its protagonists. It is a dictatorship over the proletariat.

[In its] revolutionary acceptation, [on the other hand, it is the] government of the proletariat based on its own armament, after the dismantling of the capitalist repressive bodies, on the workers' management of the economy and of the distribution of the social product of labor. It thus carries out the suppression of wage labor, and as a result of it the disappearance of classes and of the state.

It is, therefore, the most complete democracy, not merely in law, but in fact. With the dictatorship of the proletariat the first and most important of the Rights of Man will begin to rule: the right of every person to live and fulfil themselves without having to sell their capacity for work and creation, nor to buy or sell the products of either. The second right to be guaranteed: the right of insurrection against any attempt to go back. Through the proletariat humanity takes possession of itself, inaugurating an entirely new civilization.

"Lexicon of Contemporary Political Thuggery, Compared with the Revolutionary Lexicon", 1970