For good or ill, this site is stuck with what might be considered a controversial name. There are two reasons for the name Dictatorship Now! First, the name is something of a parody of the liberal radio program Democracy Now!. This isn’t arbitrary, however — in every conceivable way, the communist movement stands opposed to the kind of politics represented by Democracy Now!. Where liberals and the left call for “social justice,” we point out that capitalist justice — “a fair day’s wage” — is nothing worth striving for; where they call for peace, we point out that even when capital’s guns fall silent, millions die thanks to the commodity system…
… and when they call for democracy, the unity of all classes, we call for dictatorship, for the passing of power into the hands of the working class alone until such a time as classes disappear and the state and democracy itself wither away.
For those unfamiliar with the Marxist definition of dictatorship its use here may seem abhorrent. Even initiates of Marxist phraseology might find it in bad taste to not part ways with what many of them see as nothing more than a “bad choice of words” on Marx’s part. Yet the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat (the working class, that is) was one of Marx’s most important contributions to the wider workers’ movement of the 19th century, as he himself said in an 1852 letter to Joseph Wedemeyer:
Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
In simple terms, the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing more than the carrying out and the defense of the revolution of the working class. This is a dictatorship in the sense that it involves the working class imposing its will on society, against all other classes, in opposition to the established laws and political procedures. It is also a dictatorship in the sense that the working class, after having won its victory, must suppress the adherents of the old order.
Thus, contrary to the meaning it has in common parlance, this isn’t a an inordinately violent or monolithic dictatorship. Lenin, in State and Revolution, one of his few useful works, counterpoises the rule of the capitalist class and the rule of the working class:
the exploiters are naturally in no position to suppress the people without a most complex machine for performing such a task, whereas the the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple ‘machine’, almost without a ‘machine’, without a special apparatus: by means of the simple organization of the armed masses (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies…)
Moreover, as the socialization of property proceeds apace and the material bases of the bourgeois class disappears, even this dictatorship is rendered more superfluous. In Engels’s famous formulation, the state “withers away.” This withering away has been regarded as unlikely, even fantastic, by bourgeois and anarchist critics who are apparently incapable of recognizing the differences in form and function between the capitalist and state and the proletarian state.
Implicit or tacit objection to the dictatorship of the proletariat on the part of supposed revolutionaries stems from two mistakes. The first — the anarchist objection to the continued existence of the state — requires little rebuttal, other than to repeat that the proletarian state and the capitalist state are two very different creatures indeed and that, without the application of violence, the return of the old rulers could never be prevented. Anarchists seem to see the truth in this, and thus instead of agitating for revolution they turn their attention to activities where the question of power will never be raised — bicycling, tending community gardens, eating vegan food, dumpster diving, freeing caged animals, burning empty buildings, and naively lending their support to a thousand different reformist movements.
Other so-called socialists have jettisoned all mention of the proletarian dictatorship from their speech for the simple reason that, whether they know it or not, they have really abandoned the class struggle. Consider the various Trotskyist groups whose most radical demands consist of calls for public ownership of capitalist enterprises (whose nature as capitalist enterprises would be left unchanged). With such a platform, what does the working class need to impose its will on society for when society is willing enough to concede this or that reform? In many other instances, the concept of proletarian dictatorship was thrown out as soon as leftists found that workers had less interest in state capitalism than did various third-world non-proletarian strata. How could these leftists advocate the seizure of power by the working class in Oaxaca, for instance, when the movements these leftists were cheering on were comprised of everyone from peasants to workers to every kind of business owner?
So, in short, proletarian dictatorship is defending by this blog on both tactical grounds and because it is the logical consequence of class struggle — something we have not abandoned.