2. The Experience of 1848-51¶
Core Argument¶
In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Marx argued that the working class would replace bourgeois society with an association without classes or class antagonism, and that political power—the official expression of that antagonism—would then cease to exist. The Communist Manifesto (1847) advanced this by defining the state as “the proletariat organised as the ruling class” and calling for the proletariat to win political supremacy, centralise production, and increase productive forces. This formulation introduced the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, later named after the Paris Commune. Marx held that the proletariat needs a state that begins to wither away immediately, an organisation of violence to suppress the bourgeoisie. Petty-bourgeois democrats, who dreamt of class harmony and a state above classes, were refuted by the revolutions of 1848 and 1871.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx drew a concrete conclusion from 1848-51: all previous revolutions had perfected the state machine—its bureaucracy and standing army—but the proletarian revolution must smash it. This marked a major advance over the Manifesto’s abstract treatment. The state machine, a parasitic body choking society, had grown since absolutism; bourgeois parties fought only to possess it. Marx did not yet specify what would replace it—that question was answered by the Paris Commune in 1871. Engels later noted that France displayed the class struggle in its sharpest form, but the same process of strengthening the executive and bureaucratic apparatus occurred across all capitalist states, especially under imperialism.
Marx did not originate the theory of class struggle; bourgeois historians and economists had already described it. His novel contribution was threefold: first, that classes exist only in specific historical phases of production; second, that class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; and third, that this dictatorship is merely the transition to the abolition of all classes and a classless society. Lenin argues that reducing Marxism to class struggle alone is a distortion acceptable to the bourgeoisie. A true Marxist must extend recognition of class struggle to recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the decisive test of Marxist understanding. Opportunists like Kautsky, who vacillate between reformism and Marxism, repudiate this dictatorship. They confine class struggle to bourgeois relations and refuse to extend it to the transition from capitalism to communism, a period of unprecedentedly violent class struggle. During this period, the state must be democratic for the proletariat and dictatorial against the bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of a single class is necessary for every class society and for the entire historical period separating capitalism from communism. All bourgeois states are ultimately dictatorships of the bourgeoisie; the transition to communism will produce varied political forms, but all will share the essence of proletarian dictatorship.