>As I indicated, this point is also made in the Civil War in France. It
>remains necessary at the beginning of the "socialist" phase of the
>transition to the "realm of freedom" to have a "state," i.e. a capacity to
>use coercive force to implement and defend the democratic political and
>economic arrangements the vast majority of the population have
>self-consciously agreed to create, given that their will still be others
>who will forcibly oppose the creation of these arrangements.
Yes. You indicated that. I added the bit from the Bakunin annotations because it was an apropos spot to address Charles' apparent prediliction for violence, and I thought the text here was much clearer than the Civil War stuff.
>In the annotations following the one you quote, Marx spells out how a
>democratic "state power" organized in accordance with the principles set
>out in the Civil War in France should treat peasants. Are you claiming
>that "state power" in the form given it by Lenin and Stalin and the peasant
>policies it implemented correspond to what Marx meant, as indicated both in
>these annotations and in the Civil War in France, by "dictatorship of the
>proletariat" and so would have been endorsed by him?
Are referring to this?:
[the passages from Bakunin are in double quotes]
>>e.g. the krestyanskaya chern, the common peasant folk, the peasant mob,
>>which as is well known does not enjoy the goodwill of the Marxists, and
>>which, being as it is at the lowest level of culture, will apparently be
>>governed by the urban factory proletariat.
>
>i.e. where the peasant exists in the mass as private proprietor, where he
>even forms a more or less considerable majority, as in all states of the
>west European continent, where he has not disappeared and been replaced by
>the agricultural wage-labourer, as in England, the following cases apply:
>either he hinders each workers' revolution, makes a wreck of it, as he has
>formerly done in France, or the proletariat (for the peasant proprietor
>does not belong to the proletariat, and even where his condition is
>proletarian, he believes himself not to) must as government take measures
>through which the peasant finds his condition immediately improved, so as
>to win him for the revolution; measures which will at least provide the
>possibility of easing the transition from private ownership of land to
>collective ownership, so that the peasant arrives at this of his own
>accord, from economic reasons. It must not hit the peasant over the head,
>as it would e.g. by proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance
>or the abolition of his property. The latter is only possible where the
>capitalist tenant farmer has forced out the peasants, and where the true
>cultivator is just as good a proletarian, a wage-labourer, as is the town
>worker, and so has immediately, not just indirectly, the very same
>interests as him. Still less should small-holding property be strengthened,
>by the enlargement of the peasant allotment simply through peasant
>annexation of the larger estates, as in Bakunin's revolutionary campaign.
I mentioned the "not hitting the peasant over the head" thing here:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040510/010287.html
First, I'm not "claiming" anything. Second: I don't know the history of what happened to Russian peasants, so I'll have to take a pass on that. I do recall hearing about "forced collectivization"; on the face of it, that does sound like "hitting the peasant over the head".
>From what I've gathered in my readings, the "dictatorship of the
proletariat" is basically the control the proles exercise in government for
the benefit of their class. Nowhere do I recall Marx asserting that the D
of P would be perfect, faultless, peaceful, necessarily bloody-minded,
totalitarian, or whatever.
I'm not sure what Marx would have endorsed. Certainly he was not a pacifist or even pacifistic. He had at least a fair idea of how workers behave under capitalism's dictatorship. He didn't endorse putting into place a "model" and forcing people to carry that out a la Owen. I don't recall him saying what revolutionaries should do if other countries didn't follow their lead and have revolutions of their own, or what to do if a single socialist country were to be surrounded by hostile capitalist ones. I think he would have approved of fresh thinking for new situations (assuming the fresh thinking wasn't utter crap). He left the "field" fairly open (deliberately so, I think). So, do I think he would have approved of and endorsed Lenin's and Stalin's actions? Short answer: I don't know. Why does this matter? Marx was a smart cookie, but only a human; why should he be the be-all and end-all, the final word on how a revolution must be conducted, time without end? He's definitely important and full of good ideas and advice, but he doesn't have access to The Plan any more than Lenin or Stalin did.
Todd, who's guilty of writing tests for other Marxists too (It's one way I learn)
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