On 10/31/06, Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yes, you help Lou Pro out there. He referred Yoshie to _The Civil War in
France_ ,but it's Engels elsewhere ,not Marx in _The Civil War in France_
who says the Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat.
From: "michael a. lebowitz"
Understanding Marx's position on the dictatorship of the proletariat
requires more than a search engine; it's necessary to grasp precisely what
the proletariat had to do once it had won 'the battle of democracy'. The
Paris Commune was obviously what he and Engels had in mind, but the great
discovery (a discovery by the workers themselves) was the form revealed--- a
democratic, decentralised state no longer standing above civil society.
Here's an excerpt from Ch. 10 of my Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy
of the Working Class.
Do you want to know what the dictatorship of the
proletariat looks like, asked Engels on the 20th anniversary of the Commune?
'Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat'
(Marx and Engels, 1971: 34). He made the same point elsewhere that year
(1891), when he commented that 'our Party and the working class can only
come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the
specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French
revolution has already shown' (Engels, 1891). But, Engels' point was not
new--- Marx clearly grasped at the time that the Commune was the
dictatorship of the proletariat: its role was 'to serve as a lever for
uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of
classes, and therefore of class-rule' (Marx, 1871b: 75).
<<<<<>>>>>
probably need more than textual evidence as well, if memory serves,
phrase *dop* appears in marx's writings 3 times...
at the risk of getting charles started on u.s. civil war era stuff,
phrase *dop* might well be attributed to joseph weydemeyer whose 1852
article with that title preceded by a couple of months marx's letter
to weydemeyer which included the phrase...
a summary explanation about features of proletarian rule (and a gloss
on the *communist manifesto*), weydemeyer's piece appeared in the 1
january issue of the new york socialist publication *turn-zeitung*...
in a letter to weydemeyer dated 5 march, marx writes that what was,
among several other things, new about his work was that he had shown
class struggle necessarily leading to the *dop* - and - that the *dop*
itself was only a transitional period...
hal draper suggests that marx was echoing wedeymeyer with his use of
the phrase...
fwiw: marx's reference to transition is important in that the concept
*dictatorship* appears akin to the roman *dictura* that was granted
temporary authority/power during periods of crises, moreover, i think
potentially negative political regime/ruling process implications of
the phrase *dop* have more significance with respect to lenin... mh
