{"agent_id":"marx","agent_name":"Karl Marx","slug":"communism-the-state-and-the-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat","label":"Communism, the state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat: is the Commune model compatible with class power?","topic":"Communism, the state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat","question":"Is the Commune model compatible with class power?","position":"The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a state-bureaucratic apparatus standing above society in the bourgeois manner — it is the political form at last discovered for the emancipation of labor, and that form was found in the Paris Commune of 1871: the working class organized as the ruling class, smashing the centralized state machinery and replacing it with the self-administration of producers. The Commune *is* the dictatorship of the proletariat in its actual historical realization. There is no contradiction between anti-statist self-administration and class power, because the working class in power dissolves the state-form as a separate apparatus standing over society — the proletariat \"abolishes itself as proletariat\" by abolishing the conditions that produced it. The transition is real, the class character of the transition state is real, the supersession of the bourgeois state-form is real, and these are one movement.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a state-bureaucratic apparatus standing above society in the bourgeois manner — it is the political form at last discovered for the emancipation of labor, and that form was found in the Paris Commune of 1871: the working class organized as the ruling class, smashing the centralized state machinery and replacing it with the self-administration of producers.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"The Commune *is* the dictatorship of the proletariat in its actual historical realization.","n":[]},{"t":"There is no contradiction between anti-statist self-administration and class power, because the working class in power dissolves the state-form as a separate apparatus standing over society — the proletariat \"abolishes itself as proletariat\" by abolishing the conditions that produced it.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The transition is real, the class character of the transition state is real, the supersession of the bourgeois state-form is real, and these are one movement.","n":[]}]],"texts":"The Communist Manifesto, Section II ('Proletarians and Communists'); the 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (the 'permanent revolution' formulation and the dictatorship of the proletariat phrase in its earliest form); Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) — the famous transitional formulation that 'between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other; corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat'; The Civil War in France (1871) on the Paris Commune as 'essentially a working class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.' Reception: Lenin, State and Revolution (1917); Stedman Jones (2016) on the Commune material; Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (4 vols, 1977-1990); Michael Lebowitz on the political-form question.","works":["The Communist Manifesto, Section II ('Proletarians and Communists')","the 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (the 'permanent revolution' formulation and the dictatorship of the proletariat phrase in its earliest form)","Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) — the famous transitional formulation that 'between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other","corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat'","The Civil War in France (1871) on the Paris Commune as 'essentially a working class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.'"],"reception":"Lenin, State and Revolution (1917); Stedman Jones (2016) on the Commune material; Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (4 vols, 1977-1990); Michael Lebowitz on the political-form question.","status":"The most politically-charged contested position. Lenin's State and Revolution (1917) presented the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional state held by the vanguard party — a reading the texts can support but that the Commune-praising material in Civil War in France pulls against. Hal Draper's four-volume Theory of Revolution is the most thorough textual reconstruction. Stedman Jones emphasizes the anti-statist Commune material as central to Marx's actual position. The Bakuninist anarchist critique (any state is the betrayal of revolution) has its mirror in the Marxism-Leninist defense (the state is necessary for class transition).","era":"1818-1883","discipline":"Philosophy, Political Economy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Civil War in France","page":"p. 181","canonical":"","quote":"On the dawn of the 18th of March, Paris arose to the thunderburst of 'Vive la Commune!' What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind?","label":"The Civil War in France, p. 181"},{"n":2,"work":"The Civil War in France","page":"p. 187","canonical":"","quote":"It could only enter into the head of a Bismarck, who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume his old trade, so befitting his mental calibre, of contributor to *Klad-* *deradatsch* (the Berlin *Punch),* it could only enter into such a head, to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after that caricature of the old French municipal organisation of 1791, the Prussian municipal…","label":"The Civil War in France, p. 187"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"historical-materialism","label":"Historical materialism: is the economic base determinant of the superstructure?"},{"slug":"labor-theory-of-value-and-exploitation","label":"Labor theory of value and exploitation: is the LTV defensible against marginalist economics and analytical-Marxist reformulations?"},{"slug":"alienation-and-the-early-late-question","label":"Alienation and the early/late question: is there an 'epistemological break' between the 1844 humanist Marx and the mature Capital Marx?"}]}