Maximilien Rubel 1976

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Source: Le Monde, 7 May 1976;

Translated: by the author, revised at the request of
the author by Adam Buick;
Transcribed: for marxists.org by Adam Buick;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute &
ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005.

In the current debate on the French Communist

Party’s (PCF) “abandoning” of the dictatorship of
the proletariat one essential point which merits
our particular attention for its pre-eminence in
clarifying the meaning and nature of this decision
seems to have been overlooked: it is precisely the
Party which has taken upon itself the right to
determine whether or not the proletariat should
exercise its dictatorship. It is the Party, or more
correctly its First Secretary in collaboration with
his ideologues, who, in substituting themselves for
the class and mass of working men and women,
have agreed to eliminate with a stroke of the pen a
period in society’s evolution which Marx
considered to be “transitional” but nonetheless
necessary and inevitable, rather than accidental, to
be accepted or rejected according to the tactical
imperatives dictated by the most recent political
strategy of the programme commun. The PCF has
cautiously avoided the essential question, namely
its right to act as the self-proclaimed
representative of the working class. It is always the
Party, through the intermediary of its leaders,
which decides on behalf of the working class; it is
the Party which determines the nature and form of
the action to be taken by this class. And nothing
guarantees that once the dictatorship of the
proletariat has been abandoned this will lead to it
renouncing the dictatorship over the proletariat –
the only dictatorship that really counts for the PCF.

The concept of “the dictatorship of the

proletariat” is an integral part of the theory of the
development, whose “natural law” Marx stated he
had revealed, of the capitalist mode of production
and of bourgeois society. Engels considered this
theory to be one of his friend’s two great scientific
discoveries, the other being the Materialist
Conception of History, and compared it with
Darwin’s discoveries: “Just as Darwin discovered
the law of development of’ organic nature, so Marx
discovered the law of development of human
history...” The political postulate of the
dictatorship of the proletariat must be seen in the
perspective of a fully developed capitalist society
that has become the field of conflict between a tiny
minority possessing class at the height of its power
and the immense majority, the working class,
economically and socially dispossessed but
intellectually and politically mature and ready to
establish their domination by the “conquest of
democracy” through the use of universal suffrage.
Once it has attained this position of dominance the
proletariat will only use violence in answer to
violence should the bourgeoisie act illegally in a
bid to preserve the privileges of their
domination. Capital ends with a description of the
dictatorship of proletariat as the “expropriation of
the expropriators,” as the “expropriation of’ a few
usurpers by the mass of the people.”

Although specific to a definite stage in the world-

wide evolution of the human race the laws and
tendencies of capitalist economic development
“work with iron necessity”; the industrially
advanced countries show the less developed
nations “the image of their own future.” Quoting
the words of a Russian reviewer of Capital,Marx
subscribed unhesitatingly to the latter’s
interpretation which accentuated the implacable
determinism of his social theory. According to
the reviewer Marx’s social theory

“proves at the same time both

the necessity of the present
order of things, and the
necessity of another order into
which the first must inevitably
pass over; and this all the
same, whether men believe it
or not, whether they are
conscious or unconscious of
it.”

Marx himself is no less categoric on this:

“And even when a society has

got upon the right track for the
discovery of the natural laws of
its movement ... , it can neither
clear by bold leaps, nor
remove by legal enactments,
the obstacles offered by the
successive phases of its normal
development. But it can
shorten and lessen the birth-
pangs.”

What would be thought of a learned society

which dared proclaim the “renunciation” of the
Newtonian law of gravity or the Mendelian laws of
plant hybridation and of heredity in vegetables?
And to justify such a decision invoked the
“undogmatic nature” of these laws without any
effort to disprove them scientifically, under the
pretext that there had been a profound change in
the way of thinking of the non-intellectual classes?
A “scientific” assembly of this sort would soon be
the object of the most derisive ridicule. Such is
nevertheless the attitude of that learned society
which claims to be both Marxist and Communist.
And although this society pretends to base itself on
a theory which it never ceases to qualify as
“scientific,” it rejects the central teaching of that
theory, the very one which directly concerns the
existence of the majority of mankind. The leaders
and ideologues of this society, acting in the name
of “scientific socialism,” have simply declared that
the evolution of capitalist societies has rendered
obsolete the imperative of a dictatorship of the
proletariat. Which in fact is the same as
challenging the validity of a thesis which Marx
himself considered to be his chief contribution to
scientific socialism.

It is of little importance to know whether the

“abandoning of the dictatorship of the proletariat”
derives from electoral tactics or was caused by
other considerations. Essentially this “abandoning”
signifies that those responsible for the policy of the
PCF have excluded from the debate the principal
body concerned: the proletariat, which alone has
the “historical mission” of exercising its
dictatorship and liberating society from the
modern slavery of money and the State. This is the
meaning we find for “f the dictatorship of the
proletariat” in Marx’s science and it accords well
with simple non-Marxist common sense. Since the
dictatorship of the proletariat can only concern the
exploited – consequently almost the whole of the
human race – no decision of any Party to dispense
with a postulate whose ethical significance vies
with its scientific form can exert the slightest effect
on society’s evolution or on the revolutionary and
emancipatory vocation of today’s wage slaves. For,
since in accordance with the Communist
Manifesto the working class movement is defined
as the “movement of the immense majority in the
interests of the immense majority,” the
dictatorship of the proletariat can be thought of as
the domination of the immense majority in the
interests of the immense majority; in other words,
as the self-determination of the proletariat. In
short, the proletariat is expected to realise the
promises of complete democracy, of popular self-
government, as opposed to partial (bourgeois)
democracy, the institutions of which guarantee the
dictatorship of the possessing class – of capital in
control of political power and thus of a minority of
society – over the non-possessing class, the
immense majority of society. Given these factors,
how can it be explained that a Party which refers to
Marx and Communism has abandoned the notion
of the dictatorship of the proletariat which –
whether rightly or not – announces the coming of
complete democracy?

Before October 1917 Lenin envisaged a form of

workers’ and peasants’ self-government for Russia.
Following the take-over of political power he
moved towards the conception of a “dictatorship of
the proletariat” which could be exercised through
the “dictatorship of several individuals” or even by
the “will of a single individual.” His conception was
perfectly in keeping with the economic and social
conditions of a country able to “develop” anything
except ... Socialism. The dictatorship of the Party
aimed to create not abolish a “Soviet” proletariat,
and so to establish social relations compatible with
the exploitation of wage labour and the domination
of man by man. It is in this school, not the school
of Marx, in which the leaders of the Communist
Parties learned their politics. Moreover, they are
pronouncing their own condemnation when they
take their distance from a regime which has
constructed for millions of peasants-turned-into-
proletarians an archipelago of labour camps whose
description defies all analogies except that of
Dante’s Inferno.

The imperative of the dictatorship of the

proletariat envisages the shortening and the
lessening of the birth-pangs of a finally human
society. The “Marxist” revolutions in Russia and
China have only given rise to the suffering which
they were supposed to eliminate. This is the
mystification of our era. And if so-called working
class parties can decree the “abandoning of the
dictatorship of the proletariat,” is this not due to
the fact that the proletariat has not (yet) acquired
that revolutionary consciousness which the
Materialist Conception of History holds to be the
inevitable result of the catastrophic future which
awaits the capitalist mode of production as it
spreads all over the world?