Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party Pt. 2
IV
The role of the State with regard to social classes and collective organizations shows fundamental differences, if we compare the history of the regimes that spring from the bourgeois revolution, and the situation after the victory of the proletariat.
a) Revolutionary bourgeois ideology, prior to its struggle and final victory, presented its future post-feudal State not as a class State but as the people’s State, based on the abolition of every inequality before the law, which it presented to be sufficient to assure freedom and equality for all members of society.
Proletarian theory openly asserts that its future State will be a class State, i.e., a tool wielded by one class only, as long as classes exist. The other classes will be excluded from the State and «outlawed» in fact as well as in principle. The working class having achieved power «will share it with no one» (Lenin).
b) After the bourgeois political victory and in keeping with a tenacious ideological campaign, constitutional charters or declarations of principles were solemnly proclaimed in the different countries as a basis and foundation of the State. They were considered as being immutable in time, a definitive expression of the at last discovered immanent rules of social life. From then on, the entire interplay of political forces was supposed to take place within the insuperable framework of these statutes.
During the struggle against the existing regime, the proletarian State is not presented as a stable and fixed realization of a set of rules governing the social relationships inferred from an idealistic research into the nature of man and society. During its lifetime the working class State will continually evolve up to the point that it finally dissolves: the nature of social organization, of human association, will radically change according to the modifications of technology and the forces of production, and man’s nature will be equally subject to deep alterations always moving away more and more from the beast of burden and slave which he was. Anything such as a codified and permanent constitution to be proclaimed after the workers revolution is nonsense, it has no place in the communist program. Technically, it will be convenient to adopt written rules which however will in no way be intangible and will retain an «instrumental» and temporary character, putting aside all jests about social ethics and natural law.
c) Having conquered and even crushed the feudal apparatus of power, the victorious capitalist class did not hesitate to use the force of the State to repress the attempts of counterrevolution and restoration. However the most resolute terrorist measures were justified as being directed not against the class enemies of capitalism but against the traitors of the people, of the nation, of the country, and of civil society, all these hollow concepts being identified with the State itself and, as a matter of fact, with the government and the party in power.
The victorious proletariat, by using its State in order to «crush the unavoidable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie» (Lenin), will strike at the old rulers and their last supporters every time they oppose, in a logical defense of their class interests, the measures intended to uproot economic privilege. These social elements will keep an estranged and passive position vis-à-vis the apparatus of power: whenever they try to free themselves from the passivity imposed upon them, material force will subdue them. They will share no «social contract», they will have no «legal or patriotic duty». As veritable social prisoners of war (as in fact were the former aristocrats and clergymen for the Jacobin bourgeoisie) they will have nothing to betray because they will not be requested to take any ridiculous oath of allegiance.
d) The historical glitter of the popular assemblies and democratic gatherings hardly disguised the fact that, at its birth, the bourgeois State formed armed bodies and a police force for the internal and external struggle against the old regime and quickly substituted the guillotine for the gallows. This executive apparatus was charged with the task of administering legal force both on the great historical level and against isolated violations of the rules of appropriation and exchange characteristic of the economy founded on private property. It acted in a perfectly natural manner against the first proletarian movements which threatened, even if only instinctively, the bourgeois form of production. The imposing reality of the new social dualism was hidden by the game of the «legislative» apparatus which claimed to be able to bring about the participation of all citizens and all the opinions of the various parties in the State and in the management of the State with a perfect equilibrium and within an atmosphere of social peace.
The proletarian State, as an open class dictatorship, will dispose of all distinctions between the executive and legislative levels of power, both of which will be united in the same organs. The distinction between the legislative and executive is, in effect, characteristic of a regime which conceals and protects the dictatorship of one class under an external cloak which is multi-class and multi-party. «The Commune was a working, not a parliamentary body» (Marx).
e) The bourgeois State in its classical form – in coherence with an individualist ideology which the theoretical fiction universally extends to all citizens and which is the mental reflection of the reality of an economy founded on the monopoly of private property by one class – refused to allow any intermediate body other than elective constitutional assemblies to exist between the isolated individual subject and the legal State centre. Political clubs and parties that had been necessary during the insurrectional stage were tolerated by it by virtue of the demagogic assertion of free thought and on the condition that they exist as simple confessional groupings and electoral agencies. In a later stage the reality of class repression forced the State to tolerate the association of economic interests, the trade unions, which it distrusted as a «State within the State». Finally, unions became a form of class solidarity adopted by the capitalists themselves for their own class interests and aims. Moreover, under the pretext of legally recognising the trade unions, the State undertook the task of absorbing and sterilizing them, thus depriving them of any autonomy so as to prevent the revolutionary party from taking their leadership.
Trade unions will still be present in the proletarian State as long as there still be employers or at least impersonal enterprises where workers remain wage earners paid in money. Their function will be to protect the standard of living of the working class, their action being parallel on this point to that of the party and the State. Non-working class unions will be forbidden. Actually, on the question of distribution of income between the working class and the non-proletarian or semi-proletarian classes, the worker’s situation could be threatened by considerations other than the superior needs of the general revolutionary struggle against international capitalism. But this possibility, which will long subsist, justifies the unions’ secondary role in relation to the political communist party, the international revolutionary vanguard, which forms a unitary whole with the parties struggling in the still capitalist countries and as such leads the proletarian State.
The proletarian State can only be animated by a single party and it would be senseless to require that this party organizes in its ranks a statistical majority and be supported by such a majority in «popular elections» – that old bourgeois trap. One of the historical possibilities is the existence of political parties composed in appearance by proletarians, but in reality influenced by counterrevolutionary traditions or by foreign capitalisms. This contradiction, the most dangerous of all, cannot be resolved through the recognition of formal rights nor through the process of voting within the framework of an abstract «class democracy». This too will be a crisis to be liquidated in terms of force relations. There is no statistical contrivance which can ensure a satisfactory revolutionary solution; this will depend solely upon the degree of solidity and clarity reached by the revolutionary communist movement throughout the world. A century ago in the West, and fifty years ago in the Czarist Empire, Marxists rightly argued against the simple-minded democrats that the capitalists and proprietors are a minority, and therefore the only true government of the majority is the government of the working class. If the word democracy means power of the majority, the democrats should stand on our class side. But this word both in its literal sense («power of the people») as well as in the dirty use that is more and more being made of it, means «power belonging not to one but to all classes». For this historical reason, just as we reject «bourgeois democracy» and «democracy in general» (as Lenin also did), we must politically and theoretically exclude, as a contradiction in terms, «class democracy» and «workers’ democracy».
The dictatorship advocated by marxism openly claims to be necessary because it is impossible that it be unanimously accepted and furthermore it will not have the naiveté to abdicate for lack of having a majority of votes, if such a thing were ascertainable; then it will not run the risk of being confused with a dictatorship of men or groups of men who take control of the government and substitute themselves for the working class. The revolution requires a dictatorship, because it would be ridiculous to subordinate the revolution to a 100% acceptance or a 51% majority. Wherever these figures are displayed, it means that the revolution has been betrayed.
In conclusion the communist party will rule alone, and will never give up power without a physical struggle. This bold declaration of not yielding to the deception of figures and of not making use of them will aid the struggle against revolutionary degeneration.
In the higher stage of communism – a stage which does not know commodity production, money nor nations and which will also witness the death of the State – trade unions will be deprived of their «reason to be». The party as an organization for combat will be necessary as long as the remnants of capitalism survive in the world. Moreover, it may always have the task of being the depository and propagator of social doctrine, which gives a general vision of the development of the relations between human society and material nature.