The Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM) is a comprehensive Marxist lexicon which, upon completion, will span 15 volumes and over 1,500 entries. Of the nine volumes published so far in the original German, two volumes have been published in Chinese since 2017. In 2019, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung teamed up with the HCDM team to advance its "globalization" into English and Spanish, with the ultimate aim of recruiting a new generation of Marxist scholars from around the globe to the project and expanding its readership and reach. The below entry is one of a selection of these translations that are made available on our website.
For more information about the project and other translated entries, check out our HCDM dossier.
A: dīktātūrīya brūlītārīya. – F: dictature du prolétariat. – G: Diktatur des Proletariats. - R: diktatura proletariata. – S: dictadura deI proletariado. – C: wuchan jieji zhuanzheng 无产阶级专政
According to Wolfgang Leonhard, the term which was >probably coined by Auguste Blanqui in 1837< attained >its political meaning only through K. Marx und F. Engels< (1966, 86). It should be added: also through Lenin's reception of the Marxist classics in State and Revolution and finally through the use of this term, which was an abuse as used by Stalinism and the post-Stalinist state parties. In the 1970s eurocommunism made a fiercely disputed break with the idiom of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (DoP).
1. Marx declares in 1850 in Class Struggles in France that >the class dictatorship of the proletariat< is the >necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally< (MECW 10/127 [MEW 7/89]). In 1852 in a letter to Weydemeyer he claims to have discovered >that the class struggle necessarily leads to the DoP< and that >this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society< (MECW 39/58 [28/508]).
In 1891, on the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels concludes the introduction to Marx' Civil War in France with the words: >Of late, the German philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: DoP. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the DoP.< (MECW 27/191 [17/625; 22/199]) - Marx himself did not use the term in his brochure - he speaks of the >working- class government< (MECW 22/334 [17/342]) -, however he does work out its essential characteristics, which Engels summarizes in 1891 as follows: Removal of the old state machinery, the abolition of the standing army, the armament of the people, the merging of the legislative and executive, election of and possibility of voting out all managers, judges and teachers, the payment of all public officials according to the wages of the workers, limited (imperative) mandate for all delegates in representative bodies. Not until The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) does Marx describe the political period of transition from capitalist to communist society as >the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat< (MECW 24/95 [19/28]). In his Critique of the Social-democratic Draft Programme in 1891 Engels says 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 DoP< (MECW 27/227 [22/235]). At the same time he rejects the colossal illusion, >that a republic, and not only a republic, but also communist society, can be established in a cosy, peaceful way< there [in Germany] (ibid.). Because he considers the state to be >a machine for the suppression of one class by another< (190 [199]), it is only logical that he understands the state of the victorious proletariat as >at best an evil […], whose worst sides […] [it] cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible, until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap< (ibid.). This conception is already developed in Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and in the Anti-Dühring. The idea of the withering away of the state in a classless society is contained in a nutshell here.
The Paris Commune, confined to a relatively small area, was defeated after a short time and liquidated with bloody revenge by an international campaign of united French and German capitalists and military. The next attempt of the workers toward revolution was the Russian revolution of 1905; the first successful attempt of longer duration was the Russian October Revolution of 1917. The conditions were completely different from those in Paris: the national dimension of the revolution in the country with the greatest surface of the earth, a numerically small industrial proletariat without education and without experience in democratic organization, an extensive multinational front of counter-revolutionary governments aiming for the destruction of the revolution, limited development of the productive forces, thus objectively unripe for the revolution.
Lenin analyzes the problem in August/September of 1917, thus before the October Revolution, in State and Revolution. There he defines the DoP as >Democracy for the vast majority of the people and suppression by force […], i.e. the exclusion from democracy of the exploiters and oppressors of the people - this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to the communism< (CW 25/467). Remarkably he already speaks here of the fact that a special apparatus would not be necessary for this, but >the simple organization of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies […])< (468). Also in further sections of this text Lenin is far ahead of the developments and describes a future society based on grassroots democracy, whose opposite developed in the Stalin era.
Rosa Luxemburg raises fundamental concerns about Lenin's principles of organization in her fragment on the Russian revolution (Luxemburg 1918/2006, 183-220 [GW 4/332-65]). To be sure, Luxemburg welcomes the October Revolution, fears however the deformation of the DoP and demands that socialist democracy must begin not >only in the promised Land<, not >as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people<: >Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of Socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the Socialist party. It is the same thing as the DoP.< (220 [363])
2. The victory of the October Revolution deepens and hardens the splitting of the international labour movement. Kautsky becomes an opponent of the Russian revolution, rejects now in The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) the revolution by force and the DoP. The criticism is directed first against the obviously undemocratic measures - in the sense of formal bourgeois democracy -, with which the Bolsheviks tried to secure their rule and indeed succeeded. It serves first as a defence of the now banned Menscheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, but then expands to a position confronting the Russian revolution. - Lenin reacts to it with the brochure The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (CW 28/227-318), in which can be read: >Bolshevism has popularized throughout the world the idea of the ^DoP^^ […] translated […] then into all the languages of the world and has shown by the example of Soviet government that the workers and the poor peasants even of a backward country […] have been able for a whole year […] to create a democracy that is immeasurable higher and broader than all previous democracies and to […] start […] the practical construction of socialism.< (293)
Lenin's hard and detailed polemic can be explained partially from the fact that Kautsky had taken in former times a somewhat more radical position; thus he still speaks in 1909 in The Road to Power of revolutionary struggles of the proletariat, whereby he does not assign an important role to physical force (on the part of those suppressed), and of the DoP, about which one can confidently let the future decide (106). A little later he affirms his faith in the existing parliamentary system: >And the goal of our political struggle remains the same as it was so far: Conquest of the authority of the state through winning the majority in parliament and elevating parliament to rule the government. Not however destruction of the authority of the state.< (1912, 732)
Anton Pannekoek contradicts this line vehemently, regards the parliamentary conquest of power as an illusion. For him struggles for power are fought out as mass actions, in which the proletariat becomes conscious of its significance and power and creates its own organs of power: >The organization of the majority has then proved its superiority by the fact that it has destroyed the organization of the ruling minority.< (1912, 548)
The austromarxist Max Adler tries a compromise in 1919 and believes that a DoP is also possible in parliamentary forms. In a later study (1922) he specifies this more exactly by differentiating between >political democracy […], which actually is no democracy and therefore must be overcome if one wants democracy<, and social (full) democracy. With this not always conscious double sense of the term democracy he solves the apparent contradiction associated with Marx and Engels, who presented the Paris Commune which - according to Adler - >actually was a democracy, as an example of the DoP< (127). However he turns critically against the undemocratic methods of the DoP used in Soviet Russia. – Otto Bauer (1920) takes a similarly critical stance, however he explains the deviations from the rules of democracy in Russia with the preponderance of the peasantry, the cultural and economic backwardness of the country: >Despotic socialism is the product of the Russian lack of culture.< (1920, 64)
Already between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Trotsky speaks of the DoP in Russia. In 1923 he explains and justifies the repressions and the red terror as necessary resistance of a revolution against the hitherto dominant class, which does not resign itself to its disempowerment, but hopes and works for its return to power; thus he regards the terror as a temporary measure against the bourgeoisie: >terror is helpless […], if it is employed by reaction against a historically rising class. But terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands.< (1920/2007, 58) In the Soviets Trotsky sees then organs of democracy, which mobilize and at the same time represent the masses much more comprehensively and directly than the labour party and trade unions. After the military, economic and political consolidation the DoP can be limited, dismantled, replaced by more democracy.
Stalin contributed no new thoughts to Marxist theory in the question of the DoP. In 1926 he defines it as follows: >The DoP is a class alliance between the proletariat and the labouring masses of the peasantry for the purpose of overthrowing capital, for achieving the final victory of socialism on the condition that the guiding force of this alliance is the proletariat< (1954, 29). As the Secretary-General of the CPSU he, together with his leadership group, after liquidating the bourgeoisie and the great land owners as a class, turned the state and party instruments of power against his real or possible opponents in the directing organs of the army, public administration, economics, party, central committee and to a great extent physically liquidated these experienced communists. The theoretical embellishment furnishes the unproven claim that after the victory of socialism class struggle intensifies; he declares his opposing party comrades to be agents of capitalism, German fascism etc. - The methods of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union were equated by the rulers there with the DoP.
3. The communist parties of the capitalistic countries professed the DoP out of completely different experiences and considerations. The peaceful growing into socialism, the reformist path, had proven to be a false path. With the help of the Social Democratic Party of Germany the November Revolution of 1918 had been obstructed until it finally degenerated into the restoration of the militarily defeated capitalist class. To be sure, bourgeois democracy turned out to be a favourable battleground for the working class; however it was by no means an insurmountable bulwark against fascism in its most brutal form. In no highly industrialized land did bourgeois-parliamentary democracy realize itself in the ideal-typical form, which the Social Democrats had made the basis of their strategy. The dominant social forces prevailed, bypassing the universal and equal right to vote in the following form: >economic governance<, with its lobbies in the pre-parliamentary sphere, military, state bureaucracy (legal system, police, secret services), press and media, finally, electoral laws and the drawing of electoral constituencies which gave little weight to the voices of urban workers. The party that formulates the interests of the (working) majority could achieve the parliamentary majority only seldom. The bourgeoisie in most countries did not prove itself ready for social reforms and was unable to recognize and accept their necessity. Instead it tried to reverse reforms in crisis situations. Added to these experiences came the first unrestricted admiration of the left for the victory and the self-assertion of the Russian revolution. However, the ideas of how the DoP was to be realized were quite varied and far from the Soviet reality.
Particularly among German Marxists Rosa Luxemburg's anticipatory criticism had a lasting effect and they looked for specific forms of the DoP, which would fuse the generally accepted lessons of the Russian revolution with the long democratic experience of the German workers' movement into a synthesis. Thus the platform of the Communist Party of Germany - Opposition speaks among other things of the following, >starting today foreseeable moves toward a German socialist republic of councils: […] The active participation of the entire working population in the government and management of the workers' council state will be implemented immediately by virtue of the long schooling and self-government of the proletarian mass organizations. This includes the greatest restriction of the bureaucracy of the workers' council and its most extensive control by the working population. Hence the goal of the full removal of a state bureaucracy could be achieved rapidly in Germany. The proletarian dictatorship realizes proletarian democracy, i.e. the democracy of the overwhelming majority of the population. In contrast to bourgeois democracy, the proletarian dictatorship does not acknowledge a state apparatus which is separated from the people and oppresses it. The state apparatus of the proletarian dictatorship is based on the active involvement of the popular masses and their organizations. The councils unite the powers of executive, legislative and judicial. They are a working body. The elected representatives are subject to recall at any time. The state servant is paid according to the rates set for workers' wages.< (1930, 30)
The official communist parties outside of the Soviet Union were up until the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956 actually willing to equate the forms of domination and the methods of the Stalin era with the DoP and identify themselves with these as far as possible. However, this led in numerous situations of crisis to organized split-offs, exclusions, individual resignations (Spanish civil war, Moscow Trials, Stalin-Hitler Pact).
Stalin and the Comintern leadership dominated by his group modified their commitment to the DoP according to the respective needs of Soviet foreign policy, which increasingly determined the strategy of the Comintern. Thus in China in the 1920s, in Spain in the 30's, the implementation of the DoP was explicitly abandoned. In the countries of east, southeast and central Europe, conquered by the Red Army in 1945, >people's democracies< were installed and the communist rule and the social transformation disguised with spurious tricks.
4. After the close alliance and the unconditional identification of the communist parties with the CPSU until 1953, there followed after 1956 an incremental loosening of the close ties, and finally the renunciation of the DoP in the goals and strategy programs of numerous parties. In this way the distancing from the Soviet model of socialism was to be demonstrated outwardly. In addition, the tactics were substantially changed and approached reformism: Participation in bourgeois governments being partially installed and controlled by the occupying forces, in Italy, France, and the three German west zones; attempt of the historical compromise with the Christian Democrats of Italy.
E. Kardelj, theoretician of the Yugoslav communists, which had come to power through civil war and military victory, rejected implicitly the revolutionary way to power >for a whole set of countries< in a speech in Oslo on October 8, 1954. W. Harich was of the opinion, >that Western European socialism will replace capitalism in a peaceful way< (qtd. in Hillmann 1967, 191). Luciano Gruppi, long responsible for the ideology in the central committee of the Italian CP, in 1964 refused to recognize Lenin's conceptions of the state and the DoP as sacrosanct and universally valid. P. Togliatti (1967) explicitly committed himself to a Party Congress document of the CPI, in which the language is that >the historical task set to the working class and the people is to build socialism, thereby taking a new path that differs from the method of establishing the DoP< (374). While he was still editor-in-chief of the theoretical magazine of the Communist Party of Austria Franz Marek in 1966 did not want to make use of the concept of the DoP any longer, because it was discredited >after the crimes committed during the time of Stalin had been revealed< and became >identified, also by young people, with the reign of terror and police arbitrariness<. The programs of Western European communist parties have gradually dropped the avowal of the DoP, particularly clear with the Communist Party Sweden, which under the leadership of C.H. Hermansson renamed itself the Left Party when they published their new program in 1967.
This re-orientation goes too far for Marxists of the old school, particularly with the German historical experiences. To lay bare the errors seems to be more important if one wants to regain the confidence which was lost by the identification with the course of Stalin for many decades. The collapse of the socialist states in Europe and the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1989/90 confirm the criticism of Rosa Luxemburg rather than that of revisionism.
Bibliography: M.Adler, Demokratie und Rätesystem, Vienna 1919; id., Die Staatsauffassung des Marxismus, Vienna 1922, Darmstadt 1964; O.Bauer, Bolschewismus und Sozial-Demokratie, Vienna 1920 (also in: Werkausgabe, ed. by Arbeitsgemeinschaft f.d. Geschichte der österreichischen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 4, Wien 1975-1980, 223-357); U.Bermbach and F.Nuscheler (eds.), Sozialistischer Pluralismus, Hamburg 1973; >Eine sozialistische Alternative – Programmentwurf der KP Schwedens<, Ostprobleme 14, 14.7. 1967, 396 et seqq; L.Gruppi, >Die Thesen Lenins und Engels’ über den Staat<, Ostprobleme 1964, 662-66; G.Hillmann, Selbstkritik des Kommunismus. Texte der Opposition, Reinbek 1967; K.Kautsky, The Road to Power (1909), transl. by R.Meyer, Alameda/CA 2007; id., >Die neue Taktik<, Neue Zeit, 1912, XXX, II, 654-64, 688-98, 723-33; id., The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918), transl. by H.J.Stenning, Ann Arbor/Michigan 1964; id., The Labour Revolution (1924), transl. by H.J.Stenning, Abingdon 2011; V.I.Lenin, Collected Works (CW), Moscow 1960-1977; W.Leonhard, >Diktatur des Proletariats<, Marxismus im Systemvergleich, ed. by C.D.Kernig, Grundbegriffe 1, Frankfurt/M-New York 1966, 86-103; R.Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke (GW), vol. 1-5, ed. by IML of the CC of the SED, Berlin 1970-1975; ead., Reform or Revolution. The Russian Revolution, transl. from German by B.Wolfe, Mineola/NY 2006; F.Marek, >Probleme der kommunistischen Parteien Westeuropas<, Weg und Ziel, 11.11.1965, Vienna; K.Marx and F.Engels, The Collected Works (MECW), New York-London 1975 et sqq.; A.Pannekoek, >Massenaktion und Revolution<, Neue Zeit, 1912, XXX, II, 541-50, 585-93, 609-16; J.Stalin, >Concerning Questions of Leninism<, Works, vol.8, Moscow 1954; P.Togliatti, >Für eine demokratische Regierung der werktätigen Klassen<, Reden und Schriften, ed. by C.Pozzoli, Frankfurt/M 1967, 124-34, qtd. in Bermbach/Nuscheler, 368-77; L.Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920), London/New York 2007; Was will die KPD-Opposition? Berlin 1930, 3. edition.
Theodor Bergmann
Translated by Kolja Swingle and Larry Swingle
→ Absterben des Staates, Arbeiter-/Bauernstaat, Austromarxismus, Bürgerkrieg, bürgerliche Revolution, Demokratie, Demokratie/Diktatur des Proletariats, demokratischer Sozialismus, despotischer Sozialismus, dritter Weg, Erziehungsdiktatur, Gewalt, historischer Kompromiß, Kautskyanismus, Legalität, Novemberrevolution, Pariser Kommune, Parlamentarismus, Rätekommunismus, Revolution in einem Land, russische Revolution, sozialdemokratische Sowjetkritik, Staatsmacht, Staatsterrorismus, Stalinismus, Volksdemokratie, Volksfeind
→ Austro-Marxism, bourgeois revolution, civil war, council communism, democracy, democracy/dictatorship of the proletariat, democratic socialism, despotic socialism, enemies of the people, historic compromise, Kautskyism, legality, November Revolution, Paris Commune, parliamentarism, people’s democracy, revolution in one single country, Russian Revolution, social democratic critique of the Soviet Union, Stalinism, state power, state terrorism, third way, violence, power, withering away of the state, workers’ (and peasants’) state
Originally published as Diktatur des Proletariats in: Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, vol. 2: Bank bis Dummheit in der Musik, edited by Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Argument-Verlag, Hamburg 1995, col. 720-727.