Justin?
Well, you are right that State and Revolution is
full of democratic verbiage (I misremembered) although
it is full of denunciations of "parliamentarism" drawing
on Marx.
Try "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government"
written after attaining power. Now Marx's concept of the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" is explicitly cited in a basically
bloodthirsty set of passages that support the use of an
"iron hand."
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 10:13 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:19169] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Marx and Malleability
>In a message dated 5/17/00 5:34:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>writes:
>
><< But he did at certain points issue some rather
> sulphurous diatribes about the wretchedness of bourgeois
> democracy and also painted a not so nice picture of the
> dictatorship of the proletariat as well in certain passages,
> these getting picked up by good old Lenin to justify some
> of his more unpleasant Bolshevik excesses (See _The
> State and Revolution_ for example). >>
>
>Hi, Barklay, glad to have you back.
>
>As is well known in the environs hereabouts, I am a great fan of bourgeois
>democracy, and I am happy to say that every sulpherous thing Marx had to
say
>about it is true in spades. It is rule by the rich that ignores the real
>differences in power created by wealth; its virtues evaporate quickly under
>the heat of class warfare; and it helps to stabilize and legitimate an
>indefensile system. Do you deny these (obviously true) propositions? And in
>asserting them, am I subscribing to any sort of antidemocratic politics?
>
>As for the dictatorship of the proletariat, what is the not-nice stuff you
>have in mind? But I will agree, without myself adopting the expression,
that
>any sort of large-scale systematic political change is goiung to involve
some
>not-nice stuff. To get rid of slavery, we had a not-nice civil war. Marx
was
>a political realist, and knew that the properties were not going to lie
down
>and roll over even a proletarian majority democratically voted away their
>property rights in a peaceful manner, as he imagined might happen in the
19th
>century US. So, does it make him undemocratic to recognize this reality?
>
>Now, I agree that Marx is not a liberal democrat. But there is nothing in
>what little he says about politics to suggest that he would have been
>anything but horrified at the perversions of Leninism--rule by one party,
>political police, censorship, repression of independent unions and worker's
>organizations, etc.--never mind Stalinism. Btw, these perversions are not
>advocated in The State and Revolution, which seem to envision a weak state
>based in a worker's militia with functioning soviets operating a relatively
>direct democracy. This vision is close of Marx's, attracted the anarchists,
>and didn't last a week in the hurricane of the Russian civil war.
>
>--jks
>
>
