> What I am trying to say is that a likely interpretation of Marx's use
> of the
> term "dictatorship" is that he meant that masses and majorities of
> uncoerced, self-determining working people would support and endorse
> and
> carry out (!) , yes, mass repression in class warfare with the
> bourgeoisie
> and its allies.
>
> In other words, it was Marx who formulated the _dictatorship_ of the
> proletariat as, contradictorily, a key component of socialist
> _democracy_.
> There is a nuanced possibility ,probability even, that Marx
> anticipated a
> mass and even majority of working people who would be repressively and
> murderously hostile toward resistent owning classes , including petit
> owning
> classes, intellectual strata, AND THAT THIS DICTATORIAL ATTITUDE WOULD
> BE
> SUBTANTIALLY RATIONAL and democractic in the full historical context
> and in
> face of the murderous and repressive resistance of the bourgeoisie to
> peaceful socialist revolution.
>
> Marxists can denounce the dictatorship and repression of the SU, but
> not on
> the basis that Marx and Engels considered all repression
> undemocratic. They
> assumed that the socialist state would repress masses of people, who
> were
> part of the ruling classes or allied with the ruling classes. ( See
> _The
> State and Revolution_ for a summary of Marx and Engels' attitudes
> toward
> these issues.).
If Marx thought this, he would have been mistaken. He would also have been contradicting his conception of human "authenticity."
As it happens, it's the opposite of what he thought. His understanding of "the dictatorship of the proletariat" is elaborated in his account of the Paris Commune in the Civil War in France.
He explicitly claims there that the Commune's actions were not motivated by repressive and murderous hostility or by desire for retribution. What little of this there was he explains as the product of "the inveterate habits acquired by the soldiery under the training of the enemies of the working class," habits which "are not likely to change the very moment these soldiers change sides." The Commune was "magnanimous" to a fault.
> From March 18 to the entrance of the Versailles troops into Paris, the
> proletarian revolution remained so free from the acts of violence in
> which the revolutions — and still more the counter-revolutions — of
> the "better classes" abound, that no facts were left to its opponents
> to cry out about, but the executions of Generals Lecomte and Clement
> Thomas, and the affair of the Place Vendome.
>
> One of the Bonapartist officers engaged in the nocturnal attempt
> against Montmartre, General Lecomte, had four times ordered the 81st
> line regiment to fire at an unarmed gathering in the Place Pigalle,
> and on their refusal fiercely insulted them. Instead of shooting women
> and children, his own men shot him. The inveterate habits acquired by
> the soldiery under the training of the enemies of the working class
> are, of course, not likely to change the very moment these soldiers
> change sides. The same men executed Clement Thomas.
>
> "General" Clement Thomas, a malcontent ex-quartermaster-sergeant,
> had, in the latter times of Louis Philippe's reign, enlisted at the
> office of the republican newspaper Le National, there to serve in the
> double capacity of responsible man-of-straw (gerant responsable) and
> of duelling bully to that very combative journal. After the February
> Revolution, the men of the National having got into power, they
> metamorphosed this old quarter-master-sergeant into a general on the
> eve of the butchery of June — of which he, like Jules Favre, was one
> of the sinister plotters, and became one of the most dastardly
> executioners. Then he and his generalship disappeared for a long time,
> to again rise to the surface on November 1, 1870. The day before, the
> Government of National Defence, caught at the Hotel de Ville, had
> solemnly pledged their parole to Blanqui, Flourens, and other
> representatives of the working class, to abdicate their usurped power
> into the hands of a commune to be freely elected by Paris.[B] Instead
> of keeping their word, they let loose on Paris the Bretons of Trochu,
> who now replaced the Corsicans of Bonaparte.[C] General Tamisier
> alone, refusing to sully his name by such a breach of faith, resigned
> the commandership-in-chief of the National Guard, and in his place
> Clement Thomas for once became again a general. During the whole of
> his tenure of command, he made war, not upon the Prussians, but upon
> the Paris National Guard. He prevented their general armament, pitted
> the bourgeois battalions against the working men's battalions, weeded
> out officers hostile to Trochu's "plan", and disbanded, under the
> stigma of cowardice, the very same proletarian battalions whose
> heroism has now astonished their most inveterate enemies. Clement
> Thomas felt quite proud of having reconquered his June pre-eminence as
> the personal enemy of the working class of Paris. Only a few days
> before March 18, he laid before the War Minister, Leflo, a plan of his
> own for "finishing off la fine fleur [the cream] of the Paris
> canaille". After Vinoy's rout, he must needs appear upon the scene of
> action in the quality of an amateur spy. The Central Committee and the
> Paris working men were as much responsible for the killing of Clement
> Thomas and Lecomte as the Princess of Wales for the fate of the people
> crushed to death on the day of her entrance into London.
>
> The massacre of unarmed citizens in Place Vendome is a myth which M.
> Thiers and the Rurals persistently ignored in the Assembly, entrusting
> its propagation exclusively to the servants' hall of European
> journalism. "The men of order", the reactionists of Paris, trembled at
> the victory of March 18. To them, it was the signal of popular
> retribution at last arriving. The ghosts of the victims assassinated
> at their hands from the days of June 1848, down to January 22,
> 1871,[D] arose before their faces. Their panic was their only
> punishment. Even the sergents-de-ville, instead of being disarmed and
> locked up, as ought to have been done, had the gates of Paris flung
> open wide for their safe retreat to Versailles. The men of order were
> left not only unharmed, but allowed to rally and quietly seize more
> than one strong hold in the very centre of Paris. This indulgence of
> the Central Committee — this magnanimity of the armed working men — so
> strangely at variance with the habits of the "Party of Order", the
> latter misinterpreted as mere symptoms of conscious weakness. Hence
> their silly plan to try, under the cloak of an unarmed demonstration,
> what Vinoy had failed to perform with his cannon and mitrailleuses. On
> March 22, a riotous mob of swells started from the quarters of luxury,
> all the petits creves in their ranks, and at their head the notorious
> familiars of the empire — the Heeckeren, Coetlogon, Henri de Pene,
> etc. Under the cowardly pretence of a pacific demonstration, this
> rabble, secretly armed with the weapons of the bravo, fell into
> marching order, ill-treated and disarmed the detached patrols and
> sentries of the National Guard they met with on their progress, and,
> on debouching from the Rue de la Paix, with the cry of "Down with the
> Central Committee! Down with the assassins! The National Assembly
> forever!" attempted to break through the line drawn up there, and thus
> to carry by surprise the headquarters of the National Guard in the
> Place Vendome. In reply to their pistol-shots, the regular sommations
> (the French equivalent of the English Riot Act)[E] were made, and,
> proving ineffective, fire was commanded by the general [Bergeret] of
> the National Guard. One volley dispersed into wild flight the silly
> coxcombs, who expected that the mere exhibition of their
> "respectability" would have the same effect upon the Revolution of
> Paris as Joshua's trumpets upon the walls of Jericho. The runaways
> left behind them two National Guards killed, nine severely wounded
> (among them a member of the Central Committee [Maljournal]), and the
> whole scene of their exploit strewn with revolvers, daggers, and
> sword-canes, in evidence of the "unarmed" character of their "pacific"
> demonstration. When, on June 13, 1849, the National Guard made a
> really pacific demonstration in protest against the felonious assault
> of French troops upon Rome, Changarnier, then general of the Party of
> Order, was acclaimed by the National Assembly, and especially by M.
> Thiers, as the savior of society,for having launched his troops from
> all sides upon these unarmed men, to shoot and sabre them down, and to
> trample them under their horses' feet. Paris, then was placed under a
> state of siege. Dufaure hurried through the Assembly new laws of
> repression. New arrests, new proscriptions — a new reign of terror set
> in. But the lower orders manage these things otherwise. The Central
> Committee of 1871 simply ignored the heroes of the "pacific
> demonstration"; so much so, that only two days later, they were
> enabled to muster under Admiral Saisset, for that armed demonstration,
> crowned by the famous stampede to Versailles. In their reluctance to
> continue the civil war opened by Theirs' burglarious attempt on
> Montmartre, the Central Committee made themselves, this time, guilty
> of a decisive mistake in not at once marching upon Versailles, then
> completely helpless, and thus putting an end to the conspiracies of
> Thiers and his Rurals. Instead of this, the Party of Order was again
> allowed to try its strength at the ballot box, on March 26. The day of
> the election of the Commune. Then, in the mairies of Paris, they
> exchanged land words of conciliation with their too generous
> conquerors, muttering in their hearts solemn vows to exterminate them
> in due time.
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/
> ch04.htm>
Some idea of what Marx would have thought of Stalin's relation to and treatment of peasants can be obtained from the passage I earlier quoted from the 18th Brumaire. Marx there answers the suggestion that his argument that Napoleon III represented the peasants is contradicted by Napoleon III's demagogic provocation of the worst "persecution" of the peasants "since Louis XIV" as follows:
> "But, it may be objected, what about the peasant uprisings in half of
> France, the raids of the army on the peasants, the mass incarceration
> and transportation of the peasants?
> "Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar persecution of
> the peasants "on account of demagogic agitation."
> "But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not
> the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who
> strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small
> holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the
> countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old
> order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in
> solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and
> their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It
> represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant;
> not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not
> his modern Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in
> 1702-1705. — Ed.] but his modern Vendee. [A peasant-backed uprising
> against the French Revolution in the French province of Vendee, in
> 1793. — Ed.]
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/
> ch07.htm>
Ted