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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: What is socialism? (Dictatorship of the Proletariat)
Message-ID: <193@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-Feb-85 14:30:07 EST
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Posted: Fri Feb 15 14:30:07 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Feb-85 03:45:15 EST
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In response to Rich Carnes, I can't see how dictatorship of the proletariat
could ever be a "fundamentally democratic concept", unless one means
democracy as it is interpreted in the socialist world, as rule by the
working class, so that dictatorship of the proletariat and democracy
are the same by definition.

Power to the working class, esp. in the context of DotP, means democracy
for the working class and dictatorship for everybody else.  The reason
the Paris Commune could be a democracy was because it only existed
in Paris.  If DotP were extended to the French countryside, one might
really have discovered what it meant.

Marx always recognized the existence of substantial classes other than the
proletariat; I think he meant the DotP to extend over the interregnum after
a revolution when the new government based on the proletariat has to
consolidate its authority against counterrevolutionaries.  If the
revolution was violent (and Marx expected it would be), then that violence
would take some time to cool down.  Hence the DotP, an explicitly
transitional, and hopefully short, phase.

The Russian Revolution was followed by civil war and War Communism, which
would correspond to a DotP period.  That was followed by the New Economic
Policy, a retreat back to partial capitalism, which could be said to
correspond to a post-DotP period.

What I wonder is if Marx meant the end of the DotP to mean the dissolution
of the Communists as a party organization.  Somehow I doubt it, but he
wrote so little about post-revolutionary life that it's nearly pointless
to speculate.

Tony Wuersch
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