PRAGOTI

The practice of Leninism, therefore, is the effective calibration of the actions of the proletariat’s Dictatorship to achieve Communism.

III: Democratic Dictatorship

“The Dictatorship of the proletariat implies a recognition of the necessity to suppress the resistance of the exploiters by force, and the readiness, ability and determination to do it-V.I. Lenin

The State Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Thesis III: Leninism is the relative contextualisation of the State Dictatorship of the proletariat

Thesis IV: Leninism is the calibration of the state Dictatorship in the road to the higher stage of communism

By no means is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat a purely Leninist conception. To claim so would be falling back on the uniquely selective memory of the writings of Marx and Engels that is enjoyed by the ‘verbal Marxists’ in the tradition of Karl Kautsky. Marx, being his modest self, wrote in Weydemeyer that in his work, he had made only 3 original contributions to the theory of proletarian revolution. The second product of his originality, Marx said, was “that the class struggle necessarily leads to the Dictatorship of the proletariat” [Marx’s italics].

If this is the case and the Dictatorship of the proletariat is one of the fundamental ideas of the founders of Marxism themselves, from where does the name of Lenin arise in this debate?

As an answer, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, on the 125th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, wrote:

The greatest contribution made by Lenin in enriching the theory of Marx and Engels lies in defending the theory of class nature of the state, the contradiction between bourgeois Dictatorship masqueraded as “parliamentary democracy”, and proletarian democracy which is Dictatorship in relation to the bourgeoisie

While it is absolutely true that the defence of proletarian democracy and Dictatorship is a key link in the theory and practice of Leninism, the treatment of the Dictatorship as a thoroughly relative entity by Lenin is equally essential. Organically speaking, the Dictatorship is of little value. It draws its utility to the communists and the toilers from a spatial set of functional relations and an epochal set of structural relations. Leninism, in its thrust for the Dictatorship, also diligently identifies the place of such a Dictatorship relative to the sum total of its relation; herein lies the primary innovation of Leninism in the field of proletarian Dictatorship.

The Relative Functional Utility of the Dictatorship: The Dictatorship of the proletariat as a subsequent development of the proletarian revolution is a Dictatorship not a form of despotism or of absolute individual authority. As with much of Lenin’s thought, it is an unprecedented concept of ‘a new type’ The first aspect of this novelty is the establishment of the Dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of a class-alliance of all the toiling classes of society. The Dictatorship of the proletariat is the concrete form of the relationship between the broad convergence between the class interests of the proletariat and the peasantry. It is within the relativity of the correlation of the proletariat and peasantry that the ultimate functional relativity between the empowered oppressed and the national and international gang of the oppressors finds utterance. In other words, it is the non-antagonistic relationship of the proletariat and peasantry in the Leninist Dictatorship that enables these classes to avail sufficient might to advantageously handle their relativity with the oppressors [which is the intensification and resolution of the antagonistic contradiction between the exploiters and the exploited.]

“The question of the Dictatorship of the proletariat is a question of the relation of the proletarian state to the bourgeois state” – so it is said in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. What we can notice here is that the class-alliance of the peasantry, the semi-proletariat and the proletariat is a preliminary relational entity, whose translation into a united State Dictatorship acts as a pre-requisite in any successful class struggle against the totality of the bourgeoisie and its multifarious state apparatuses.

“The Dictatorship of the proletariat” is “the most determined and revolutionary form of class struggle against the bourgeoisie”, and draws its entire functional value from such a relationship. It owes its necessity to this antagonistic relationship, as it arises since “The proletariat needs the state as a special form against the bourgeoisie”. The Dictatorship - in its form of a class-alliance and content of heightened and decisive class struggle - under Leninism undergoes a leap where it becomes the weapon of the entire mass of toilers in their class struggle against the bourgeoisie.

In essence,

: The Leninist class alliance and Dictatorship become the principal revolutionary force capable of waging the class-war against the post Marx-Engels context of hegemonic imperialism.

: The solidarity of the workers and peasants takes shape as the State Dictatorship. The iron unity of the toiling classes in the form of the Dictatorship plays a pivotal role in socialist construction and the building of a powerful socialist state. Thus, in the context of the development of “socialism in one country” and the functional requirement of an economically and militarily potent state in the face of bourgeois encirclement, the constructive potency of the Leninist concept of the class-alliance Dictatorship acquires enormous significance in building socialist states capable of countering imperialist and hegemonic onslaughts.

Thus, Leninism contextualizes Marxism in the era of imperialism by emphasizing the functional necessity of the class-alliance form of the State Dictatorship to successfully handle the intransigence of imperialism.

The Relative Structural Utility of the Dictatorship:

As E.M.S. Namboodiripad suggests, the defence of the class nature of the state against all forms of right revisionism and anarchist sectarianism is a nodal point of Leninist theory and practice. It so corresponded that in a classless society, there could be no room whatsoever for the State, and therefore, with each triumph and each instance of its ascendant proletarian hegemony, the State Dictatorship moves closer to its own exhaustion. Leninist practice, true to the maxim that the proletariat cannot liberate itself without liberating all of society, dictates that each action of the State Dictatorship must be firmly situated in the context of reaching the higher phase of communism. Leninism does not recognize Socialism to be a ‘universality’ in its Hegelian sense, but instead an instrumentality. Socialism and the Dictatorship are stripped threadbare of all its scientific character if it does not locate its position relative to communism, and the material path of progress that leads to communism. As far as Leninism is concerned, Communism is not some lofty ideal that is to be assigned to textbooks and learnt by rote, but something that is to be concretely approached by making its achievement a raison d’etre of the democratic Dictatorship.

Each and every action of the proletarian Dictatorship organized along Leninist lines is judged and made with one sole concern in mind: How is it that such an action serves the primary task of the abolition of classes, the withering away of the state and the establishment of communism? It is such a structural relativity between the transitional mode of production and the final mode of production that determines the actions of the proletariat in its Dictatorship. Not only does the Leninist proletariat in the light of Communism judge actions, but new solutions are sought out to help catalyse the fundamental priority of the establishment of Communism. One only needs to look at Lenin’s own stewardship of Russian Dictatorship of the Proletariat to find the historical precendnts of such a revolution in the mode of relative thought and action. The 1919 programme of the R.C.P.(B.), after listing a set of measures to mitigate bureaucracy, reads:

The full and universal application of all these measures, which represents a further step in the road trodden by the Paris Commune, and the simplification of the function of administration accompanied by a rise in the cultural level of the workers will lead to the abolition of state power

Even at the height of the whiteguardist reaction, when the survival of Socialism and the existence of the Dictatorship itself was under threat, the Dictatorship of the Russian workers and peasants maintained the primacy of higher communism as the monistic objective of the socialist state. The centralisation of power in the hands of the state and agglomeration of the power of the state are part of the monistic objective of the withering away of the state itself, as the proletarian state withers away only after it has established - through class struggle - its total hegemony and established – through the development of its productive forces – the economic basis for the withering away of the state. Actions which rightly require an aggrandizement of the state such as the anti-imperialist struggle and the massive armament of the workers are in themselves one and the same as the struggle for Communism. For how can Communism be established unless the forces of imperialism are defeated and the entire bourgeoisie liquidated? E.H. Carr summed up this dialectical condition of Leninist practice in arguing that the state “had to be strong and ruthless in order to crush the last resistance of the bourgeoisie and complete the repression of the small minority by the majority; it had at the same time to prepare for its own dying away and even had to begin the process at once”. It is through such an intensive and monistic preparation through of the State Dictatorship of the proletariat that makes it a truly ‘new type’ of state.

The practice of Leninism, therefore, is the effective calibration of the actions of the proletariat’s Dictatorship to achieve Communism.

Continued

Part I

Part II

Part IV

Part V