- 17 Aug 2023 17:21
#15283175
To answer with yes or no would amount to lathering a bath of anachronism. Marx's time had no genuine democracies and we will never know what his attitude would have been if he had exercised his political activity in a society like ours. Without pretending to answer the question, I will try to venture some reflections on the subject of the dictatorship of the proletariat and on the subject of human rights.
1- THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
Marx's ultimate goal is communism. A society of abundance where men are freed from necessity and work out of taste, a society without classes, without market, without wages, without money, without property, without a State.
The phase that precedes communism is socialism. Following Marx, socialism is not an end in itself as it can be for non-Marxist socialists; it is a phase of transition towards communism. As a result, it is evolutionary: the capitalist characteristics of society gradually vanish as the communist characteristics emerge. The two foundations are the collective ownership of the means of production and the planning of the economy. The division of society into classes is being erased, but only gradually.
What is the place of the dictatorship of the proletariat in this scheme? It comes at the very beginning, just after the revolution that overthrows the old order. It is in a way the initial stage of the socialist phase. Marx remained evasive about it. We know that during this phase, logically quite short, the means of production are transferred from capitalist ownership to collective ownership.
We know what dictatorship of the proletariat is. Now the question arises: HOW does it work? How did Marx INTRINSICALLY conceive it? How is power exercised there?
What I know of Marx's writings has not given me the answer to this question. However, let us try to clarify.
Contrary to all expectations, the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat” is very rarely present in Marx's work, even if variants such as “dictatorship of the working class” or “revolutionary dictatorship” are included . The expression does not appear at all in “The German Ideology”, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party”, “The Poverty of Philosophy”, “The Eighteenth Brumaire”, “The Civil War in France”, “Capital”. That it does not appear in “The Civil War in France” is most surprising since this text deals with the Paris Commune (1871), which, according to some commentators, Marx considered a possible example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is perfectly plausible because Marx's empathy for the Paris Commune is evident. This historic event was tragic from start to finish. In a defeated, partially occupied France with a deposed emperor, its beleaguered capital was the scene of a full-blown civil war. These dramatic conditions seem to me too specific to constitute a model.
Let us now see the works of Marx where he makes use of the said phrase.
• An occurrence appears in “The Critique of the Gotha Program” where it is written:
• In a letter to a political friend, Weydemeyer, after indicating that he was not the inventor of the class struggle, Marx writes:
• “The class struggle in France” holds the record: 4 occurrences of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” including variants. But they must be put into perspective in the face of the nine appearances of the “bourgeois dictatorship”.
The “dictatorship of the proletariat” appears perhaps in other less important texts that I have not read. But it seems that one should not count on Marx to be explicit. The sentence that I underlined in the extract from Gotha makes Marx lose an opportunity to be. In “The Class Struggle in France”, none of the 4 occurrences explain how the dictatorship of the proletariat works. It reiterates it each time as an objective. After having written there that “revolutionary socialism is the permanent declaration of the class dictatorship of the proletariat”, he immediately adds: “the space reserved for this exposition does not allow me to develop this subject further” (my translation of the French text). Would Marx be reluctant to explain himself on this question?
Here is my personal interpretation of what Marx meant by the dictatorship of the proletariat. It can only be understood by adopting a broad historical view, much broader than the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat alone. The controversies about Marxism have brought the dictatorship of the proletariat to the fore so much that we have forgotten that it is only an avatar of a more general phenomenon which is repeated each time a new class establishes its domination.
When a class comes to power, it sets its rules. Marx was waiting for the moment when the turn of the proletariat would come. But over the past millennia, other classes have preceded it in this exercise, the latest being the bourgeoisie. And these regimes have always imposed themselves from above and with violence. Marx knew well the origin of capitalism, the primitive accumulation with the expropriation of the small peasants to constitute the future proletariat, the writing of a civil and commercial legislation under the baton of absolutist governments or parliaments elected by tax-based suffrage. The dictatorship of the proletariat is called upon to repeat what happened then and which no commentator thought of calling “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. This is the meaning that the word “dictatorship” takes on here: to dictate and impose new rules in terms of ownership and management of the means of production and thus to dispossess the predecessor of this power.
The bourgeoisie wisely managed the extinction of its dictatorship (so efficiently that many people have forgotten its existence). The democratization of political power that followed this first phase assumed its legal heritage (grosso modo). I venture the hypothesis that Marx foresaw such a scenario for after the dictatorship of the proletariat.
However, this scenario comes up against a phenomenon that Marx had not anticipated. Meanwhile, political democracy has been instituted in most of the advanced capitalist states. The proletariat which would take power would therefore find itself faced with a new moral dilemma. The bourgeoisie could present its dictatorship as a step towards democracy, because it was a progress compared to the dictatorship of the aristocracy that preceded it. A similar dictatorship of the proletariat today would be a step backwards. In such a context, the proletariat must not content itself with repeating what has been done beforehand.
2- HUMAN RIGHTS
The question of Marx's attitude towards human rights has been widely debated. Many commentators are very critical. In particular, Steven Lukes strives to demonstrate that there is a fundamental opposition between Marx's doctrine and human rights. In contrast, Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchere admit that Marx deals with human rights in an ambiguous and questionable way, but that does not make him the enemy of human rights that some want to see. Their main argument is this: Marx always defines communism in terms such as the emancipation of man, the full realization of the individual, the end of alienation. It would be totally incoherent if a system designed in this way did not respect human rights, even in its preparatory phase.
The argument of Lacroix and Pranchere touches on the fundamental question, which is not what is the mood of Marx with regard to human rights but whether he would recommend that a socialist state respects them. It is impossible to answer with certainty. The argument of coherence is interesting, but one cannot exclude that Marx, mere mortal, showed inconsistency.
It is mainly in two early philosophical essays that Marx deals quite openly with human rights: “On the Jewish Question” and “The German Ideology”. It is true that he is disparaging towards them. If you had to look for someone to plead on their behalf, you would certainly not go to Marx. But we are to cleverly interpret these denigrating words. Note that in his contempt, Marx joins morality in general to human rights. Lukes sees in this an additional argument, because morality serves as the basis for these rights. But we know that according to Marx, morality belongs to the ideological superstructure. Even if he exaggerates this trait, he is right to assert that morality is historically dependent, that at different times its values at least partially reflect those of the ruling class. His disqualification of morality reveals the outrageous character of his materialism rather than an opposition to morality.
What explains Marx's contempt for human rights is their powerlessness to prevent the enslavement of man in concrete life, especially in production. Alienation severely degrades proletarians in a society where human rights are proclaimed. According to my interpretation, what disturbs Marx, much more than human rights themselves, is the DISCOURSE of human rights, which he perceives as necessarily hypocrite. True, the sentences he writes refer specifically to human rights. In my opinion, a second-degree reading is necessary. The phrase “human rights” is used by metonymy.
Lukes quotes this passage from "The German Ideology": " As far as Recht is concerned, we with many others have stressed the opposition of communism to Recht, both political and private, as also in its most general form of the rights of man”. His reader could easily agree with him that here he has found the unwitting and irrefutable admission of Marx's hostility to the rights of man. But let’s read this sentence in the context of those around it. On the one hand, Marx shows that the state of society is such that human rights can only be a privilege of the bourgeoisie. This vision is debatable, but it does not represent an opposition to the respect of human rights.
On the other hand, Marx based his analysis on two texts let by the French Revolution: the declaration of rights and the constitution. And what does he read there? In the midst of liberties is affirmed the RIGHT OF PROPERTY, which he considers precisely at the origin of enslavement. That's the key. I think that is what repels him. But rather than rejecting the place of property rights in human rights, he rejects the concept as a whole. This is certainly a mistake. He sees in these statements a manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie to defend its privileges and especially its property. This confirms my interpretation that Marx is hostile to the discourse of human rights, not to rights themselves.
Whether he believes that a socialist state should respect these rights remains – forever – an unsettled question.
NB: for counting the occurrences of "dictature of proletariat" in various essays, I used the [CONTROL F] function on the PDF.
1- THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
Marx's ultimate goal is communism. A society of abundance where men are freed from necessity and work out of taste, a society without classes, without market, without wages, without money, without property, without a State.
The phase that precedes communism is socialism. Following Marx, socialism is not an end in itself as it can be for non-Marxist socialists; it is a phase of transition towards communism. As a result, it is evolutionary: the capitalist characteristics of society gradually vanish as the communist characteristics emerge. The two foundations are the collective ownership of the means of production and the planning of the economy. The division of society into classes is being erased, but only gradually.
What is the place of the dictatorship of the proletariat in this scheme? It comes at the very beginning, just after the revolution that overthrows the old order. It is in a way the initial stage of the socialist phase. Marx remained evasive about it. We know that during this phase, logically quite short, the means of production are transferred from capitalist ownership to collective ownership.
We know what dictatorship of the proletariat is. Now the question arises: HOW does it work? How did Marx INTRINSICALLY conceive it? How is power exercised there?
What I know of Marx's writings has not given me the answer to this question. However, let us try to clarify.
Contrary to all expectations, the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat” is very rarely present in Marx's work, even if variants such as “dictatorship of the working class” or “revolutionary dictatorship” are included . The expression does not appear at all in “The German Ideology”, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party”, “The Poverty of Philosophy”, “The Eighteenth Brumaire”, “The Civil War in France”, “Capital”. That it does not appear in “The Civil War in France” is most surprising since this text deals with the Paris Commune (1871), which, according to some commentators, Marx considered a possible example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is perfectly plausible because Marx's empathy for the Paris Commune is evident. This historic event was tragic from start to finish. In a defeated, partially occupied France with a deposed emperor, its beleaguered capital was the scene of a full-blown civil war. These dramatic conditions seem to me too specific to constitute a model.
Let us now see the works of Marx where he makes use of the said phrase.
• An occurrence appears in “The Critique of the Gotha Program” where it is written:
“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Presently, the program does not have to concern itself, either with the latter, or with the future state in communist society" . (emphasis mine).
• In a letter to a political friend, Weydemeyer, after indicating that he was not the inventor of the class struggle, Marx writes:
“What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Production), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”
• “The class struggle in France” holds the record: 4 occurrences of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” including variants. But they must be put into perspective in the face of the nine appearances of the “bourgeois dictatorship”.
The “dictatorship of the proletariat” appears perhaps in other less important texts that I have not read. But it seems that one should not count on Marx to be explicit. The sentence that I underlined in the extract from Gotha makes Marx lose an opportunity to be. In “The Class Struggle in France”, none of the 4 occurrences explain how the dictatorship of the proletariat works. It reiterates it each time as an objective. After having written there that “revolutionary socialism is the permanent declaration of the class dictatorship of the proletariat”, he immediately adds: “the space reserved for this exposition does not allow me to develop this subject further” (my translation of the French text). Would Marx be reluctant to explain himself on this question?
Here is my personal interpretation of what Marx meant by the dictatorship of the proletariat. It can only be understood by adopting a broad historical view, much broader than the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat alone. The controversies about Marxism have brought the dictatorship of the proletariat to the fore so much that we have forgotten that it is only an avatar of a more general phenomenon which is repeated each time a new class establishes its domination.
When a class comes to power, it sets its rules. Marx was waiting for the moment when the turn of the proletariat would come. But over the past millennia, other classes have preceded it in this exercise, the latest being the bourgeoisie. And these regimes have always imposed themselves from above and with violence. Marx knew well the origin of capitalism, the primitive accumulation with the expropriation of the small peasants to constitute the future proletariat, the writing of a civil and commercial legislation under the baton of absolutist governments or parliaments elected by tax-based suffrage. The dictatorship of the proletariat is called upon to repeat what happened then and which no commentator thought of calling “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. This is the meaning that the word “dictatorship” takes on here: to dictate and impose new rules in terms of ownership and management of the means of production and thus to dispossess the predecessor of this power.
The bourgeoisie wisely managed the extinction of its dictatorship (so efficiently that many people have forgotten its existence). The democratization of political power that followed this first phase assumed its legal heritage (grosso modo). I venture the hypothesis that Marx foresaw such a scenario for after the dictatorship of the proletariat.
However, this scenario comes up against a phenomenon that Marx had not anticipated. Meanwhile, political democracy has been instituted in most of the advanced capitalist states. The proletariat which would take power would therefore find itself faced with a new moral dilemma. The bourgeoisie could present its dictatorship as a step towards democracy, because it was a progress compared to the dictatorship of the aristocracy that preceded it. A similar dictatorship of the proletariat today would be a step backwards. In such a context, the proletariat must not content itself with repeating what has been done beforehand.
2- HUMAN RIGHTS
The question of Marx's attitude towards human rights has been widely debated. Many commentators are very critical. In particular, Steven Lukes strives to demonstrate that there is a fundamental opposition between Marx's doctrine and human rights. In contrast, Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchere admit that Marx deals with human rights in an ambiguous and questionable way, but that does not make him the enemy of human rights that some want to see. Their main argument is this: Marx always defines communism in terms such as the emancipation of man, the full realization of the individual, the end of alienation. It would be totally incoherent if a system designed in this way did not respect human rights, even in its preparatory phase.
The argument of Lacroix and Pranchere touches on the fundamental question, which is not what is the mood of Marx with regard to human rights but whether he would recommend that a socialist state respects them. It is impossible to answer with certainty. The argument of coherence is interesting, but one cannot exclude that Marx, mere mortal, showed inconsistency.
It is mainly in two early philosophical essays that Marx deals quite openly with human rights: “On the Jewish Question” and “The German Ideology”. It is true that he is disparaging towards them. If you had to look for someone to plead on their behalf, you would certainly not go to Marx. But we are to cleverly interpret these denigrating words. Note that in his contempt, Marx joins morality in general to human rights. Lukes sees in this an additional argument, because morality serves as the basis for these rights. But we know that according to Marx, morality belongs to the ideological superstructure. Even if he exaggerates this trait, he is right to assert that morality is historically dependent, that at different times its values at least partially reflect those of the ruling class. His disqualification of morality reveals the outrageous character of his materialism rather than an opposition to morality.
What explains Marx's contempt for human rights is their powerlessness to prevent the enslavement of man in concrete life, especially in production. Alienation severely degrades proletarians in a society where human rights are proclaimed. According to my interpretation, what disturbs Marx, much more than human rights themselves, is the DISCOURSE of human rights, which he perceives as necessarily hypocrite. True, the sentences he writes refer specifically to human rights. In my opinion, a second-degree reading is necessary. The phrase “human rights” is used by metonymy.
Lukes quotes this passage from "The German Ideology": " As far as Recht is concerned, we with many others have stressed the opposition of communism to Recht, both political and private, as also in its most general form of the rights of man”. His reader could easily agree with him that here he has found the unwitting and irrefutable admission of Marx's hostility to the rights of man. But let’s read this sentence in the context of those around it. On the one hand, Marx shows that the state of society is such that human rights can only be a privilege of the bourgeoisie. This vision is debatable, but it does not represent an opposition to the respect of human rights.
On the other hand, Marx based his analysis on two texts let by the French Revolution: the declaration of rights and the constitution. And what does he read there? In the midst of liberties is affirmed the RIGHT OF PROPERTY, which he considers precisely at the origin of enslavement. That's the key. I think that is what repels him. But rather than rejecting the place of property rights in human rights, he rejects the concept as a whole. This is certainly a mistake. He sees in these statements a manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie to defend its privileges and especially its property. This confirms my interpretation that Marx is hostile to the discourse of human rights, not to rights themselves.
Whether he believes that a socialist state should respect these rights remains – forever – an unsettled question.
NB: for counting the occurrences of "dictature of proletariat" in various essays, I used the [CONTROL F] function on the PDF.
Paul Jael
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