WESTERN Europe has not forgotten the lessons learnt from the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, from Soviet exploitation of the economies of Eastern Europe and from Tito's experience with the Soviets when he aspired to a degree of independence for his country. Not only was he expelled from the Cominform, but Yugoslavia was subjected to strong economic pressure from the Soviet Union and other member countries of the Comecon. There are many other examples attesting to the perils of falling out with the Soviets. Second, the failure of this basic tenet of Marxist ideology to move from the realm of the theoretical to that of the applied: The socialist experience has proved to the communist parties of Western Europe and other parts of the developed world that the elimination by the proletariat of all other classes and its attainment of the highest stage of communism when there will be no antagonistic classes, no state and no law. but one single class living in peace, was no more than wishful thinking, a naive illusion that has not materialised nor shows the slightest indication of ever doing so in any part of the world. Classes still exist in the socialist counts, albeit under new guises, the state has become stronger and more centralised, laws are gradually coming closer to West European legal theories and many other Marxist expectations appear to be as illusory and elusive as the utopian dreams of Thomas More. One such expectation, confidently predicted by Lenin in 1917. was that World War I would put such unbearable pressure on the industrial capitalist states that the only way out of the crisis would be through the proletarian revolution. Events have since proved the fallacy of that analysis and we have yet to see a proletarian revolution in any large industrial state. Another such expectation, announced by the well known Bolshevik Zinoviev in 1918, was that within one year all of Europe would become communist! Only one year earlier, Zinoviev, together with Kamenev, considered that the bourgeois Russian Revolution of March 1917 should not transcend its historical limits and become a proletarian revolution too rapidly on the grounds that such a revolution would fail without the support of a general communist revolution in Western Europe! The expectation that a proletarian revolution would break out in all parts of Europe was not confined to Lenin and Zinoviev; it was shared by all the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution and by all European communists. That preposterous expectation persisted until the early 1930s, when it became clear to the communist movement in Russia and throughout the world that a proletarian revolution in Western Europe or anywhere else in the developed capitalist world was an impossibility. Having come to that conclusion, they had to revise their views on other matters as well. Thus, after holding that the building of socialism in Russia was dependent on the revolutions to be led by Western workers, they now claimed that it was the latter that needed the Russian experience to sustain, assist and support them. This new rationale marked the beginning of a new relationship between Soviet Russia and the West. The Soviet Union had to ensure its security in a world that did not seem to be moving, as had been expected, towards a proletarian revolution. Stalin signed several treaties with Germany, then with the allies after World War II, in a bid to expand his boundaries and set up a wall of socialist states to serve as a buffer between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. At a later stage, starting in the 1970s, the Soviet Union sought a modus vivendi with the West, deferring its old dream to some distant future and resorting to covert methods of operation. One European Marxist who did not share the belief of Marxist leaders in the Soviet Union and throughout Europe that capitalism was about to collapse, that the proletarian revolution was about to break out and that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be established in capitalist Europe, was Antonio Gramsci, the Secretary- General of the Italian Communist Party, who was imprisoned in 1928 and died in prison in 1937. He showed a more realistic grasp of the situation when he said that the path of the Western proletariat towards power and dictatorship was fraught with defeat. Third, the disappearance from the developed countries of the working class described by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England and on whom Marx focused all his studies: The proletariat Marx and Engels knew in the nineteenth century was an exploited working class performing hard manual labour in difficult and primitive working conditions, totally devoid of any guarantees or social security. Such a class no longer exists in the industrialised capitalist world, as it did in Munich, Lyon, Manchester, Leeds, London and other large industrial cities of the nineteenth century. There is no longer any trace of those workers in today's factories, where there is no proletariat in the technical sense of the term but, rather, employees engaged for the most part in non-manual work. In conclusion, the proletariat which toiled under such unspeakable conditions in the last century is a class that does not exist in the industrialised capitalist countries of our age, where technological advances are ushering in an age of industry without workers, where mental work will replace the manual work performed by Marx's proletariat. Avisit to any factory in a large industrial city today will corroborate the fact that today's working conditions are nothing like those which prevailed in the nineteenth century, and that an entire system of social guarantees and security is provided to the workers of today, a system that is certainly not enjoyed by their counterparts in the industrialised socialist countries. Consequently, there is no need for the communist parties of Western Europe to advocate the dictatorship of a class that no longer exists in developed capitalist systems. Fourth, the disintegration of the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat is also due to an important economic fact, hopes pinned by the early Marxist theoreticians on the stages during which the proletariat would be in control have failed to materialise. Marxists believe that between capitalism and communism, societies will go through a transitional stage, the post-capitalist socialist stage. During that transitional stage. the workers, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, would control all aspects of life, including the economy. They would strive to achieve greater growth to realise maximum productivity, the material basis for the establishment of the higher stage of communism, for it is through the realisation of such maximum productivity that society can move from the socialist principle of "each according to his work" to the communist principle of each "according to his need". 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
