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

== Capital and its Abolition == 

One should not, either, be distracted by the discussion in an earlier paragraph of the “productive forces”

Page 4.

because it contains considerable elaboration on exactly what the details of this universal abolition of class are:

<blockquote>Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.
</blockquote>

None of this relies on any concept of blind historical necessity, instead it is dealing with the discovery of where liberatory agency lies within capitalism.

Lukacs captures the essence of this theory of class struggle:

<blockquote>Only when consciousness stands in such a relation to reality can theory and practice be united. But for this to happen the emergence of consciousness must become the decisive step which the historical process must take towards its proper end (an end constituted by the wills of men, but neither dependent on human whim, nor the product of human invention). The historical function of theory is to make this step a practical possibility. Only when a historical situation has arisen in which a class must understand society if it is to assert itself; only when the fact that a class understands itself means that it understands society as a whole and when, in consequence, the class becomes both the subject and the object of knowledge; in short, only when these conditions are all satisfied will the unity of theory and practice, the precondition of the revolutionary function of the theory, become possible.
</blockquote>

''What is Orthodox Marxism?''. Page 2.

The concept of political-economic class is critical on this point, and cannot be overstated. This is what separated Marx and Bakunin, because for Marxists, once you remove the element of Capital from society, the class struggle is won decisively.

Page 5.

For Bakunin, and indeed many of the detractors of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is sufficient to abolish the capitalist state alone, by act of will.

When it comes to adducing what it is that Marxism considers the “abolition of Capital”, the dictatorship of the proletariat plays a key role.

One could think of both Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin’s appreciation as “broad” and “narrow” approaches respectively. Luxemburg for the most part gave few prescriptions about the content of the dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas Lenin could be thought of as being more specific–and probably more enthusiastic: it entails democratic centralism–the practice that a worker’s party is, among other conditions, duty-bound to act in unison.

What Luxemburg and Lenin would have both assented to was the necessity of the dominance (or “hegemony”) of the working class through the exercise of power–through a state or otherwise.