Critically examine Marxist theory of the state with reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat. (2001)
For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels every state is class rule: political power is “merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another” (The Communist Manifesto, 1848). The dictatorship of the proletariat is its hinge — the state between the bourgeois state’s destruction and the end of the state itself. The test is whether a class state can abolish itself.
The Theory and Its Hinge
- Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) roots the state in private property; liberal democracy is thus a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
- Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875): the revolutionary transformation from capitalist to communist society has a state that “can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”.
- The model was the Paris Commune (The Civil War in France, 1871): an armed people instead of a standing army; officials elected, recallable and paid workmen’s wages. Engels (1891): “That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The word carried the Roman sense of emergency rule, here by the majority over a defeated minority.
- Yet Marx allowed (Amsterdam, 1872) that workers in England or America might win peacefully.
- V. I. Lenin (The State and Revolution, 1917) made the transition doctrine: the bourgeois machine is smashed, not captured; the proletarian semi-state then withers away as the “administration of things” replaces the government of persons.
Critique
- Rosa Luxemburg (The Russian Revolution, 1918): suppressing elections, press and assembly yields “only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians”, and “freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
- Karl Kautsky (The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918) read it as a condition won by a democratic majority, not a form of government. Lenin’s retort — rule “unrestricted by any laws” — confirmed the fear.
- The prediction inverted: Joseph Stalin held the state must grow strongest before withering; it never withered. Leon Trotsky (The Revolution Betrayed, 1936) saw a degenerated workers’ state; Milovan Djilas (The New Class, 1957) a new ruling class owning through the party.
- For Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945) certainty about history licenses any means; for Friedrich A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944) fused economic and political power selects those readiest to coerce.
- B. R. Ambedkar (Buddha or Karl Marx, 1956) accepted the end but rejected dictatorship as the means, asking when the state would wither and what would replace it.
- Eurocommunism drew the lesson: the French Communist Party dropped the phrase in 1976, and Santiago Carrillo (Eurocommunism and the State, 1977) proposed a democratic road — as India’s communists, elected in Kerala in 1957, did in practice.
- China’s Constitution still proclaims a “people’s democratic dictatorship”, and the 2018 removal of presidential term limits shows the transitional state entrenching.
Conclusion
The theory’s diagnosis — that formal equality masks class power — survives; its remedy does not. By abolishing opposition before abolishing classes, the dictatorship removed the only check on its own apparatus. Marxism explains how a state suppresses a class, not how that state avoids becoming one.