ONE of the issues most closely associated with the transition to socialism is “the dictatorship of the proletariat". In Marxist theory, the transition to socialism is meant to come about through the eruption of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class, or proletariat, whereby state power would pass into the hands of the proletariat. The latter would exercise its dictatorship until it triumphs over all the other classes, which remain in society even after the proletariat assumes power as residuals of a long, deep-rooted past. During that phase, all power would be in the hands of the proletariat to enable it to accomplish its historic task, that of eliminating all classes antagonistic to the working class. Once it has accomplished its mission, its dictatorship will come to an end, since no other classes will exist and the state apparatus will fall, along with the entire system of laws, when all men (those who remain!) will have attained the highest stage of communism. Briefly, that is the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", its rationale, functions and fate. To show how basic this idea is to the whole structure of Marxist ideology, and to leave no room for the argument that its repudiation is a development within the framework of the Marxist theory itself and not a blatant contradiction of its very foundations, let us turn to the words of Marx himself. In a letter postmarked London, Karl Marx wrote to Joseph Wiedmeyer in New York on March 5 1852, affirming that "The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat". Twenty-three years later, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme published in 1875, he wrote: "Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transition of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat". Communist leaders in many parts of the world still declare their total adherence to that belief; some even hold that the dictatorship of the proletariat must continue beyond the transition to socialism, as long as capitalism remains strong in the world. Contemporary socialist experiments are still at the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, nowhere has the proletariat come to power through a long struggle against capitalism, nor through the eruption of the struggle in the form of a violent workers' revolution. Rather, it has always seized power either through military coups or through takeovers by communist parties supported by Soviet military presence, and then in countries that did not go through the stage of capitalist development in the orthodox Marxist sense of the word. In other words, the accession to power by these dictatorships did not proceed in the manner envisaged by Marx. Another glaring discrepancy between the theory he expounded and its application in practice is that not one of the dictatorships of the proletariat existing in countries of the socialist bloc can claim to have been established by the working class. In the Soviet Union, for example, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party all came either from the middle or upper-middle class. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kaganovitch and other Bolshevik leaders who laid the foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union were all middle-class intellectuals, many of them Russian Jews from professional and merchant families. The same applies to those who created dictatorships of the proletariat in the rest of the socialist countries, including those in the Third World. In Cuba, for example, the dictatorship of the proletariat was established by members of the uppermiddle class, by the sons of rich families who had been sent to European capitals for their studies, a great luxury in such poor societies. Heggy is the 2008 winner of Italy's top prize for literature “Grinzane Cavour”. http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarek_Heggy http://www.tarek-heggy.com
