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Unit 12: Karl Marx: Class Struggle and Social Change and Theory of Surplus Value

political power, and a description of political power itself. “It is, in fact, the nature of political Notes
power which it describes which guarantees its class character”.
To Marx and Engels, the dictatorship of the proletariat was by the entire class, for the revolution
would be made by the masses themselves. In a series of articles written in Neue Rheinische Zeitung,
which were subsequently compiled under the title The Class Struggles in France (1848-1850), Marx
contended that
... the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the
proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally
to the abolition of all relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all
social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing
of all the ideas that result from these social relations .
The phrase dictatorship of the proletariat was incorporated into the first of the six statutes of the
Universal Society. In a letter to Otta Luning, co-editor of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx clarified
that he did not find any significant departure from the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as
articulated in the Class Struggles, to the one formulated in the Manifesto.
The ambiguous compromise slogan “dictatorship of the proletariat” would have died a natural
death, had the Marxists and Blanquists not renewed their contacts in the aftermath of the Paris
Commune. The ramification of the concept was attempted by Marx, when engaged with Michael
Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876) during their high-pitched debate in the First International,
and in response to the initiatives undertaken by the German Social Democrats.

The Civil War in France
Meanwhile, an important event that helped in the clarification of the concept was the Paris
Commune, leading to an immediate amendment of the Manifesto in 1872. “One thing especially
was proved by the Commune, viz. that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-
made state machinery and wield it for its own purpose”.
Marx was enthused about the Commune, regarding it as a “glorious harbinger of a new society”,
and observed in his letter to Kugelman in April 1871 that:
If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I say that
the next attempt of the French Revolution will no longer be, as before, to transfer the
bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another but to smash it and this is the
precondition for every real people’s revolution on the continent. And this is what our
heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting .
Marx characterized the Paris Commune as the first major rebellion of the modern industrial
proletariat, in consonance with his belief that France would set the example in a struggle between
capital and labour. In his address in 1868 to the General Council of The International Workingmen’s
Association or the First International in London, he outlined the importance of the Commune and
its lessons for future socialist movements. These were identified as follows.
1. Abolition of the standing army and the institution of the citizen’s militia.
2. Election of all officials, subjecting them to recall.
3. Removal of political attributes of the police.
4. Abolition of the monarchy.
5. The role of the majority in directing and performing all functions of the state, which were
previously executed by a privileged minority.
With regard to the last-point, Marx emphasized the following measures.
1. Abolition of all representative allowances, all monetary benefits to officials, and reducing the
remuneration for officials to the level of “workmen’s wages”.
2. Abolition of the distance between the governed and the governors, and erasing the labels of
“High” dignitaries.

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