Page 231 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

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

and whether it would develop as intended. Since this process was not explained, the ultimate aim Notes
that “free development of each will lead to the free development of all” might not ever be realizable.
In the Ami Duhring, Engels introduced the notion of the “withering away of the state”, and the fact
that “government of persons would be replaced by administration of things”, a phrase borrowed
from William Morris (1834-1896). Engels stressed that the state would not be abolished, but it
would wither away. Engels did not articulate on the nature of future society, except, like Marx, on
insisting that it was the condition, rather than the nature and form of the future society that was
important. Both Engels and Marx accepted that the proletarian state would be centrally planned
and directed, but without coercion and force. However, they failed to resolve the possible conflict
between centralized planning and individual freedom in the Communist society. They remained
ambivalent on the role of markets, but the inference was that markets had to be eliminated, for
they were unequal in their outcomes.
Thus, Marx and Engels reacted sharply to Bakunin’s criticism about the statist implications of
their conception and Lassalle’s ‘Free State’. By 1875, it became clear that the German Social
Democrats began to think about using the existing state apparatus, and had settled down to a
more reformist method. Marx still advocated the revolutionary overthrow of the existing
bureaucratic-military state, and replacing it with the truly transitory (but majoritarian and
democratic) dictatorship of the proletariat. Bakunin insisted on the immediate elimination of all
forms of political authority, replacing them with spontaneous and voluntary organizations. Marx
accepted the Anarchist demand of abolition of the state, but emphasized the majoritarian content
of the transitional state purely as a temporary measure, hoping to counter both his critics, Bakunin
and Lassalle.

12.6 Revisionism, Russian Revolution and Dictatorship of the
Proletariat
In the 1890s, the German Social Democrats decided on a new programme, which was adopted as
the official policy of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1891 for the next 30 years. The Erfurt
Programme, as it came to be known, contained two parts. The first part was prepared by Karl
Johann Kautsky (1854-1938), known as the Pope of Marxism and the most important Marxist
theoretician of the period of the Second International (1890-1914). Reaffirming orthodox Marxist
posture, he emphasized economic determinism. The second part was prepared by Bernstein, laying
down practical reforms with a view to realizing socialism.
Bernstein rejected the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat as barbaric, “an atavism” belonging
to a lower culture and civilization. He categorically insisted that socialism had to eschew all forms
of violence and dictatorial rule. He conceived of a representative democratic state organized on
the basis of socio-economic equity. He believed in democracy as the only framework for realizing
Socialism. It was not surprising that he characterized the Bolshevik regime as a brutal distortion
of Marxism. Within Russia, Julian Martov (1873-1923) of the Menshevik group accused the
Bolsheviks of undermining the majoritarian content of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as
envisaged by Marx and Engels. He contended that Lenin had superimposed on a passive majority
the will of an active minority, thereby reducing the former to passive subjects in a social experiment.
Martov and the Mensheviks broke away from the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDLP), for
they disagreed with Lenin’s conception of the Vanguard Party.
In order to confront the Revisionist challenge, and seizing the observations made by Marx and
Engels in 1882, Lenin as a strategist committed himself whole heartedly to effecting a working-
class revolution, and explored its possibilities in Tsarist Russia. Taking a cue from Kautsky’s
formulations in the Class Struggles (1892), Lenin elaborated his theory of a party consisting of
professional revolutionaries, on the plea that the workers were capable of only trade union, rather
than revolutionary consciousness. Looking at the possibility of an outbreak of revolution in Tsarist
Russia, to counter the continuous criticism by the German Left and to meet the radical challenge

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 225