Chapter III: The Role of the Labour Movement and the Proletarian Dictatorship

The Labour Party is the political expression of the whole Trade Union movement so far as the latter formulates national demands, directed towards the State and society generally. The Labour Party will function the more effectively, and be able to accomplish its allotted task, as its foundation--the Trade Union movement--becomes established and strengthened, and the more comprehensive will be its effects. The Trade Unions are not merely to be satisfied with the work of the present, but are to become the focus and centre of gravity of the proletarian aspirations which arise out of the social transformation process, and are to work for the abolition of Capitalism. The most effective lever for the achievement of this object is the conquest of political power. With its aid the proletariat can consciously carry out the transformation of a Capitalist into a Communist society. To this transformation, there also corresponds a political transition period, the state of which can be nothing else than a revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat.--(Marx, Letter to the German Social Democracy, 1875, on their Gotha Programme.)

Marx considered himself to be the real author of the idea of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In a letter written by him, in 1852, to his American friend, Weydemeyer, he declares:

"As far as I am concerned, I can't claim to have discovered the
existence of classes in modern society or their strife against
one another. Middle-class historians long ago described the
evolution of the class struggles, and political economists
showed the economic physiology of the classes. I have added as a
new contribution the following propositions: (1) that the
existence of classes is bound up with certain phases of material
production; (2) that the class struggle leads necessarily to the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat; (3) that this dictatorship is
but the transition to the abolition of all classes and to the
creation of a society of free and equal."--("Neue Zeit," Vol.
XXV., second part, p. 164.)

With the exception of the year 1870, Marx remained true to his doctrine of Proletarian Dictatorship: he thought in 1875 as he did in 1847, when he sketched the groundwork of the Proletarian Dictatorship in the Communist Manifesto:

"The first step in the revolution by the working class is to
raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win
the battle of democracy.

"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by
degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all
instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of
the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase
the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by
means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the
conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures,
therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable,
but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves,
necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are
unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of
production."

But suppose that it is not the revolutionary working class which first attains to power in the revolution, but the democracy of the lower middle class and the social reformists. In this case, Marx gives the following advice: "Separate from it, and fight it." In the address to the League of Communists in 1850 he said:

"It may be taken for granted that in the bloody conflicts that
are coming, as in the case of previous ones, the courage,
resolution, and sacrifice of the workers will be the chief
factor in the attainment of victory. As hitherto, so in this
struggle, the mass of the lower middle class will maintain an
attitude of delay, irresolution, and inactivity as long as
possible, in order that, as soon as victory is assured, to
arrogate it to themselves and call on the workers to remain
quiet, return to work, avoid so-called excesses, and to exclude
the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It is not in the
power of the workers to hinder the lower middle classes from
doing this, but it is within their power to render their success
over the armed proletariat very difficult, to dictate to them
such conditions that from the beginning the rule of the
middle-class democrats is doomed to failure, and its later
substitution by the rule of the proletariat is considerably
facilitated.

"The workers must, during the conflict and immediately
afterwards, as much as ever possible, oppose the compromises of
the middle class, and compel the democrats to execute their
present terrorist threats. They must aim at preventing the
subsiding of the revolutionary excitement immediately after the
victory. On the contrary, they must endeavour to maintain it as
long as possible.

"Far from opposing so-called excesses, and making examples of
hated individuals or public buildings to which hateful
remembrances are attached, by sacrificing them to the popular
rage, such examples must not only be tolerated, but their
direction must even be taken in hand. During the struggle and
after the struggle, the workers must seize every opportunity to
present their own demands side by side with those of the
middle-class democrats. The workers must demand guarantees as
soon as the middle-class democrats propose to take the
government in hand. If necessary, these guarantees must be
exacted, and the new rulers must be compelled to make every
possible promise and concession, which is the surest way to
compromise them. The workers must size up the conditions in a
cool and dispassionate fashion, and manifest open distrust of
the new Government, in order to quench, as much as possible, the
ardour for the new order of things and the elation which follows
every successful street fight. Against the new official
Government, they must set up a revolutionary workers'
government, either in the form of local committees, communal
councils, or workers' clubs or workers' committees, so that the
democratic middle-class government not only immediately loses
its support amongst the working classes, but from the
commencement finds itself supervised and threatened by a
jurisdiction, behind which stands the entire mass of the working
class. In a word: from the first moment of victory the workers
must no longer level their distrust against the defeated
reactionary party, but direct it against their former allies,
who would seek to exploit the common victory for their own ends.
The workers must be armed and organised to enable them to
threaten energetic opposition to this party, whose treason to
the workers will commence in the first hour of victory. The
arming of the whole proletariat with rifles and ammunition must
be carried out at once, and steps taken to prevent the reviving
of the old militia, which would be directed against the workers.
But should this not be successful, the workers must endeavour to
organise themselves as an independent guard, choosing their own
chief and general staff, with orders to support not the State
power, but the councils formed by the workers. Where workers are
employed in State service, they must arm and organise in a
special corps, with a chief chosen by themselves, or form a part
of the Proletarian Guard. Under no pretext must they give up
their arms and equipment, and any attempt at disarmament must
be forcibly resisted. Destruction of the influence of the
middle-class democrats over the workers, immediate independent
and armed organisation of the workers, and the imposition of the
most irksome and compromising conditions possible upon the rule
of the bourgeois democracy, which is for the time
unavoidable.... We have noted that the Democrats come to power
in the next phase of the movement, and how they will be obliged
to impose measures of a more or less Socialistic nature. It will
be asked what contrary measures should be proposed by the
workers. Naturally, in the beginning of the movement the workers
cannot propose actual Communist measures, but they can (1)
compel the Democrats to attack the old social order from as many
sides as possible, disturb its regular course, and compromise
themselves, and concentrate in the hands of the State as much as
possible of the productive forces, means of transport,
factories, railways, etc. (2) When the Democrats propose
measures which are not revolutionary, but merely reformist, the
workers must press them to the point of turning such measures
into direct attacks on private property; thus, for example, if
the small middle class propose to purchase the railways and
factories the workers must demand that such railways and
factories, being the property of the reactionaries, shall be
simply confiscated by the State, without compensation. If the
Democrats propose a proportional tax, the workers must demand a
progressive tax; if the Democrats themselves declare for a
moderate progressive tax, the workers must insist on a tax so
steeply graduated as to cause the collapse of large fortunes; if
the Democrats demand the regulation of the State debt, the
workers must demand State bankruptcy. Thus the demands of the
workers must everywhere be directed against the concessions and
measures of the Democrats.... Further, the Democrats will either
work directly for a Federal Republic, or, at least, if they
cannot avoid the Republic one and indivisible, will seek to
paralyse it by granting the greatest possible independence to
the municipalities and provinces. The workers must set
themselves against this plan, not only to secure the one and
indivisible German Republic, but to concentrate as much power as
possible in the hands of the State. They need not be misled by
democratic platitudes about the freedom of the Communes,
self-determination, etc. Their battle-cry must be 'the
revolution in permanence.'"

This Address of Marx, written in 1850, appears to be the guide of the Bolsheviks and Spartacists.

The working classes may, however, not expect their immediate emancipation from their political victory.

"In order to work out their own emancipation, and with it that
higher form of life which present-day society inevitably
opposes, the protracted struggle must pass through a whole
series of historical processes, in the course of which men and
circumstances alike will be changed. They have no ideal to
realise; they have only to set free the elements of the new
society, which have already developed in the womb of the
collapsing bourgeois society."--(Marx, "Civil War in France.")

The means of production will gradually be socialised, production will be placed on a co-operative basis, education will be combined with productive work, in order to transform the members of society into producers. So long as the transition period lasts the Communist maxim, "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs," cannot become operative. For this period is in every respect--economic, social, and intellectual--still tainted with the marks of the old society, and "rights cannot transcend the economic structure of society, and the cultural development which it determines."--(Criticism of Gotha Program.) To each will be given according to his deeds.

"Accordingly the individual producer will receive back what he gives to society, after deductions for government, education, and other social charges. He will give society his individual quota of labour. For example: the social working day consists in the sum total of individual working days; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day which he contributes; his share thereof. He will receive from society a certificate that he has performed so much work (after deducting his work for social funds), and with this certificate he will draw from the social provision of articles of consumption as much as a similar quantity of labour costs. The same quantity of labour as he will give to society in one form he will receive back in another.... The right of producers will be proportionate to the work they will perform: the equality will consist in the application of the same measure: labour."

Because performances will vary in accordance with unequal gifts and degrees of diligence, an unequal distribution will actually take place during the transition period. Only in a fully developed Communistic society, after the distinction between intellectual and physical labour has disappeared, when productive activity has become a first need of life, when the all-round development of the individual and the productive forces has been achieved, and all the springs of co-operative riches flow abundantly; only then can the narrow middle-class idea of rights be improved on, and the Communist principle of equality be put into operation.

Marx, who reasoned on strictly economic lines, and placed the emancipation of the working class as the highest goal, to which all other political and economic movements are subordinated, did not mistake the economic, political, and historical role of the nation: this is shown by the Communist Manifesto, where the creation of the national State by the bourgeoisie is indicated. He mocked at the young enthusiasts who thought they could brush aside the nation as an obsolete prejudice, but, in spite of this, he considerably under-estimated the unifying force of national feeling, considered from a biological and cultural point of view. He divided civilised mankind into antagonistic classes, and assumed that the economic dividing lines would prove to be more effective than national and political boundary lines. He was, therefore, through and through international. Marx demanded that the national Labour Parties should act internationally as soon as there was a possibility of the collapse of the capitalist domination. He reproached the original Gotha program with the fact that "it borrowed from middle-class Leagues of Peace and Freedom the phrase of the international brotherhood of peoples, whereas it was necessary to promote the international combination of the working classes in a common struggle against the ruling classes and their Governments." Marx had no confidence in the pacifism of the bourgeoisie.