From: Ted Winslow <
If Marx thought this, he would have been mistaken.
^^^^^ CB: Well, that's what is in dispute. I'm saying that "if" Marx thought this, he would have been correct.
I just mention Marx as an authority for those who take Marx as an authority, i.e. for Marxists.
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He would also have been contradicting his conception of human "authenticity."
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CB: Could you be more specific. I have read your posts defining your understanding of Marx's concept of human "authenticity". I can see that the human relations you consider there would not be very compatible with murderous repression, however I would say that it is not possible to achieve your peaceful conception while still fighting the class war full tilt with the capitalists. In the socialist phase communism, the working class has a state , and a state uses repression and force, as Marx understood it.
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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.
^^^^^ CB: It seems you are saying he meant the "dictatorship" of the proletariat, in the sense that he didn't really mean a dictatorship in the common meaning of the word.
I don't think your quotation of Marx's discussion of this issue in _The Civil War in France_ is quite the whole story of what he said there and elsewhere. As Lenin argues in _The State and Revolution_ ( quoted below), Marx , _on the basis of the experience of the Commune_ modified his opinion of the amount of violence that would be necessary for the workers to employ.
In _The State and Revolution_ , Lenin points out:
"The only "correction" Marx thought it necessary to make to the Communist Manifesto he made on the basis of the revolutionary experience of the Paris Commune.
The last preface to the new German edition of the Communist Manifesto, signed by both its authors, is dated June 24, 1872. In this preface the authors, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, say that the programme of the Communist Manifesto "has in some details become out-of-date", and the go on to say:
"... 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 purposes'...."[1]
The authors took the words that are in single quotation marks in this passage from Marx's book, The Civil War in France.
Thus, Marx and Engels regarded one principal and fundamental lesson of the Paris Commune as being of such enormous importance that they introduced it as an important correction into the Communist Manifesto.
Most characteristically, it is this important correction that has been distorted by the opportunists, and its meaning probably is not known to nine-tenths, if not ninety-nine-hundredths, of the readers of the Communist Manifesto. We shall deal with this distortion more fully farther on, in a chapter devoted specially to distortions. Here it will be sufficient to note that the current, vulgar "interpretation" of Marx's famous statement just quoted is that Marx here allegedly emphasizes the idea of slow development in contradistinction to the seizure of power, and so on.
As a matter of fact, the exact opposite is the case. Marx's idea is that the working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery", and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.
On April 12, 1871, i.e., just at the time of the Commune, Marx wrote to Kugelmann:
"If you look up the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare that the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it [Marx's italics--the original is zerbrechen], 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." (Neue Zeit, Vol.XX, 1, 1901-02, p. 709.)[2] "
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CB: "Smashing" the bureaucratic-military machine is a euphemism for employment of quite a lot of violence.
Marx modified his view based on the very limited experience of the Commune to asserting the need for use of more "smashing", i.e. violence against the counterrevolution. What would have been his attitude to the much greater violence of the counterrevolution against the Russian revolution.