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Democracy and Class Dictatorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Richard W. Miller
Richard W. Miller
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Cornell University
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Extract

Clearly, Marx thought he was promoting democratic values. In the Manifesto, the immediate goal of socialism is summed up as “to win the battle of democracy.” Marx sees the reduction of individuality as one of the greatest injuries done by a system in which most people buy and sell their labor power on terms over which they have little control. As they supervised translations and re-issues of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels singled out just one point as a major topic on which their view in 1848 had been superseded. The forms of government needed to be changed to give people more control over the state, a change in structure pioneered by the Paris Commune.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Spring 1986 , pp. 59 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1986

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References

1 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Work in One Volume (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 52.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, , Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 488Google Scholar, and , Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in his Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 122ff.Google Scholar

3 Marx, Selected Works pp. 32ff.

4 , Marx and , Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 64.Google Scholar

5 ibid., p. 318.

6 Manifesto, Selected Works, p. 53.

7 ibid., p. 37.

8 ibid., p. 37.

9 The Civil War in France, Selected Works, p. 290.

10 ibid., pp. 289, 290.

11 See Miller, R., Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, Chapter 3.

12 , Marx and , Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1977), pp. 79ff.Google Scholar

13 Selected Correspondence, p. 222.

14 See The Civil War in France, Selected Works, p. 291.

15 Manifesto, Selected Works, p. 37.

16 See The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Selected Works, pp. 169–77; The Civil War in France, ibid., pp. 289ff.

17 , Marx, Capital, I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), p. 17.Google Scholar

18 See Analyzing Marx, pp. 114–36.

19 See Manifesto, Selected Works, p. 53; The Civil War in France, Selected Works, p. 289.

20 ibid., pp. 291, 293.

21 Critique of the Gotha Program, Selected Works, pp. 330ff.

22 ibid., p. 323.

23 The Civil War in France, Selected Works, pp. 291ff.

24 The Webbs report the original income regulations, and admit the first departure in a poignant footnote, in Sidney and Webb, Beatrice, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (New York: Scribner, 1936), p. 349.Google Scholar For further discussion of the “Great Retreat” of the early thirties, see Hough, Jerry and Fainsod, Merle, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 161–65.Google Scholar

25 Thoug h the Webbs have a frustrating tendency to rely on official sources, they present a newspaper report of the review of Party members at a factory which is detailed and plausible, as far as it goes. See Soviet Communism, I, pp. 381–387. They describe other aspects of workers' participation in the early thirties, with brief eyewitness accounts, on pp. 172–193. There is a thoughtful and plausible discussion of institutions of workers' participation before the Great Retreat in Bienstock, Gregory, el al., Management in Russian Industry and Agriculture (London: Oxford University Press, 1944)Google Scholar, Chapter III. Louise, Anna Strong's relatively early memoir, I Change Worlds (London: Routledge, 1935)Google Scholar contains some nuanced observations of the psychological climate of this period among rank and file Soviet activists.

26 For a concise description of Cuban block associations by a skeptical but reasonably open-minded reporter, see Ward, Fred, Inside Cuba Today (New York: Crown, 1978), pp. 69–75.Google Scholar

27 See, for example, Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), pp. 337–41Google Scholar, and Dahl, Robert, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 305ff.Google Scholar

28 Civil War in France, Selected Works, pp. 308ff.

29 Selected Correspondence, p. 318.

30 See, for example, Churchill's description of his Moscow visit of 1942 in The Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), Chapters 4 and 5.

31 See, for example, Stalin's Report to the Seventeenth Congress of the C.P.S.U. (1934), especially pp. 276–84 and Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), pp. 320–22, in The Essential Stalin (New York: Anchor Books, 1972).

32 See Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965)Google Scholar, esp. Chapters 1 and 13; and Kirkpatrick, Jeane, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Commentary, vol. 68 (November 1979), pp. 34–45.Google Scholar