Editing Philosophical Research:The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (section)

== Class Society and its Abolition ==

Going beyond judging the phrase by how it immediately sounds, many people have levelled serious accusations of blood-thirstiness, power-hungriness, and brutish excess against the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It is indeed possible to locate easily in Marx’s own pen writing in support of revolutionary terrors, and there was–it goes without saying–no love lost between Marx and Bakunin. There is no shortage of repetition of Bakunin’s famous “people’s stick” epithet.

The issue cannot be dealt with so quickly. Historical materialism is not, as Bakunin would only be so pleased to have you believe, mere Metaphysical trickery.

As shocking as it may sound, Marxists have a firm and sincere grasp on the everyday and common sense meaning of democracy, and are firmly committed to the abolition of all class societies.

The major point Marxists are trying to make is not that history is proceeding necessarily and deterministically

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toward paradise, and that all we need merely do is hold our party membership cards and nod along. Further, as Lukacs observes,

<blockquote>Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders.
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''What is Orthodox Marxism?''. Page 1.

The notion that Marxism is some dogma that, say, follows in line with the “tradition of Russian autocracy” is a convenient and popular attitude, and completely ignores the content of Marxism.

Marxism speaks of a true and genuine revolution, one that addresses the substance of the ills of capitalist society. Marx was clear when he addressed Proudhon:

<blockquote>Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? No.
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<blockquote>The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and all orders.
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''The Poverty of Philosophy'' (1847).

The reason why follows in the very next parapgraph–the abolition of the working class is the abolition of all classes altogether:

<blockquote>The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.
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