Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party Pt. 1

I

Every class struggle is a political struggle (Marx).

A struggle which limits itself to obtaining a new distribution of economic gains is not yet a political struggle because it is not directed against the social structure of the production relations.

The disruption of the relations of production peculiar to a particular social epoch and the overthrow of the rule of a certain social class is the result of a long and often fluctuating political struggle. The key to this struggle is the question of the State: the problem of “who has power?” (Lenin).

The struggle of the modern proletariat manifests and extends itself as a political struggle with the formation and the action of the class party. The specific features of this party are to be found in the following thesis: the complete development of the industrial capitalist system and of bourgeois power which issued from the liberal and democratic revolutions, not only does not historically exclude but prepares and sharpens more and more the conflict of class interests and its development into civil war, into armed struggle.

II

The communist party, as defined by this historical foresight and by this program, accomplishes the following tasks as long as the bourgeoisie maintains power:

a) it elaborates and propagates the theory of social development, of the economic laws which characterize the present social system of production relations, of class conflicts which arise from it, of the State and of the revolution;

b) it assures the unity and historical persistence of the proletarian organisation. Unity does not mean the material grouping of the working class and semi-working class strata which, due to the very fact of the dominance of the exploiting class, are under the influence of discordant political leaderships and methods of action. It means instead the close international linking-up of the vanguard elements who are fully orientated on the integral revolutionary line. Persistence means the continuous claim of the unbroken dialectical line connects the positions of critique and struggle adopted by the movement during the time course of a series of changing conditions;

c) it prepares well in advance for the class mobilisation and offensive by appropriately employing every possible means of propaganda, agitation and action, in all particular struggles triggered off by immediate interests. This action culminates in the organisation of the illegal and insurrectional apparatus for the conquest of power.

When general conditions and the degree of organisational, political and tactical solidity of the class party reach a point where the general struggle for power is unleashed, the party which has led the revolutionary class to victory through the social war, leads it likewise in the fundamental task of breaking and demolishing all the military and administrative organs which compose the capitalist State. This demolition also strikes at the network of organs, whatever they may be, which allege to represent the various opinions or corporative interests through the intermediation of bodies of delegates. The bourgeois class State must be destroyed whether it presents itself as the mendacious interclassist expression of the majority of citizens or as the more or less open dictatorship wielded by a government apparatus which pretends to fulfil a national, racial or social-popular mission; if this does not take place, the revolution will be crushed.

III

In the historical stage which follows the dispersal of the apparatus of capitalist domination, the task of the political party of the working class is as vital as ever because the class struggle – though dialectically inverted – continues.

Communist theory in regard to the State and the revolution is characterized above all by the fact that it excludes all possibility of adapting the legislative and executive mechanism of the bourgeois State to the socialist transformation of the economy (the social-democratic position). But it equally excludes the possibility of achieving by means of a brief violent crisis the destruction of the State and a transformation of the traditional economic relationships which the State defended up to the last moment (the anarchist position). It also denies that the constitution of a new productive organization can be left to the spontaneous and scattered activity of groups of producers shop by shop or trade by trade (the tradeunionist position).

Any social class whose power has been overthrown, even if by means of terror, survives for a long time within the texture of the social organism. Far from abandoning its hopes of revenge, it seeks to politically reorganise itself and to re-establish its domination either in a violent or disguised way. It has turned from a ruling class into a defeated and dominated one, but it has not instantly disappeared.

The proletariat – which in its turn will disappear as a class alongside all other classes with the realization of communism – organises itself as a ruling class (Communist Manifesto) in the first stage of the post-capitalist epoch. After the destruction of the old State it represents the new proletarian State, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The precondition for going beyond the capitalist system is the overthrow of bourgeois power and the destruction of its State. The condition for bringing about such a deep and radical social transformation is the creation of a new proletarian State apparatus, capable of using force and coercion just as all other historical States.

The presence of such an apparatus does not characterise communist society, it instead characterises the stage of its construction. Once this construction is secured, classes and class rule will no longer exist. But the essential organ of class rule is the State – and the State can be nothing else. Therefore communists do not advocate the proletarian State as a mystical creed, an absolute or an ideal but as a dialectical tool, a class weapon that will slowly wither away (Engels) through the very realisation of its functions; this will take place gradually, through a long process, as the social organisation is transformed from a system of coercion of men (as it has always been since the dawn of history) into a comprehensive, scientifically built network for the management of things and natural forces.