Doctor

CURRE TS IN ITALIAN SOCIALIST THOUGHT
VALERIO AGOSTINONE
VITTORIO FOA
• • •

LELIO BASSO

GIORGIO GALLI GIOVANNI PIERACCINI

LUCIO LIBERTINI
ITALO VIGLIANESI

THE LAST WRITINGS OF AND ZEJ STAWAR
An Interview: The Mind of an ..Angolese Revolutionary David BaU • /eremy Larner Marx and Engels Visit W alter Ulhricht • "We Shall All Char Together
. • .

Wolfgang Leonhard

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•Renata Adler
Robert V. Daniels

The Economics of Cybernation •

Paul Mattick Hal Draper

Toward a Definition of Soviet Socialism • A Report on Spain • Juan Bacofra
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Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat •

The Scientific Culture of C. P. Snow
Action In and Out of Painting •

A.lbert Fried

Nicola3 Calas

Her

ert

Hill: The ILGWU Today­

The Decay of a Labor UnionCORRESPONDENCE • CONTROVERSY • REVIEWS

Vol. I, No. 4

Hal Draper

THIS STUDY DEALS WITH the origin and history of the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat'' in Marx and Engels. It asks: What did this term mean to them? The larger subject behind it is "The State and Democracy" in Marx's writings. But study of this subject is shadowed by the belief that Marx advocated a "dictatorship."This is reinforced by the two types of exegetes who today carry on the cold war over the corpus of Marxism: the bourgeois ideologues who think they must prove Marx an authoritarian in order to defeat Moscow; and the Soviet schoolmen whose assignment it is to wrap Stalinism in quotations from Marx. Both these camps are anxious to prove the same thing. In fact, Marxian exegeses, once the property ofa few socialist scholars, bids fair to become a minor world industry. The larger issue, then, is the image of Marx for the modem world. For me, Marxism is the gateway to a revolutionary socialism which is thoroughly democratic and a democratic socialism which is thoroughly revolutionary. Hence the need for the investigation which follows.

Marx and the

Dictatorship
of the
Proletariat

1THERE IS NO SURVEY of the use of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Marx and Engels which is even near complete. The first question is what the word "dictatorship" meant in the middle of the 19th century. This happens to be a word that assumed its present meaning in relatively recent times. The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences dates this transformation to the "decade following the[First] World War." Till well into the 19th century the word remained primarily a reference to the institution of "dictatorship" in the Roman Republican constitution. The Roman dictatura

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was a constitutional provision for a temporary one-man ruler named for a particular crisis, with limited powers. The modern institution which cor.. responds to it is "martial law" (on the Continent, "stateof seige") as a form of crisis-government. By the time of the French Revolution, even the "one-man" connotation had weakened somewhat. The Girondins, for example, attacked "the dictatorship of the Paris Commune;" there were references to the "dictatorship of the Convention." We have here the "dictatorship" of a popular, relatively democratic body. The primitive communist movement led by Babeuf inthe last episode of the revolution picked up and used the word; between a one-man dictatorship and a dictatorship of the revolutionary leadership, they decided in favor of the latter. From this time to Marx, the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship was virtually standard in the early socialist and communist movement, being accepted in one form or another by Weitling, Saint-Simon, Bakunin,Proudban and Louis Blanc, as well as the Three B's of the period, Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui. While Blanqui and the Blanquists, like others, advocated a revolutionary dictatorship, it is not true that Blanqui or his followers anticipated Marx in using the term "dictatorship of the proletariat," as has been asserted in some hundreds of books, each copying from the other. It has been established by...