Communist Party of Mexico (M-L)
Since 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet revisionist regime (which since 1956 began a process of restoration of capitalism, and essentially the same process developed in Eastern Europe and in Albania under Ramiz Alia), the Dictatorship of the Proletariat suffered a redoubled ideological offensive by the bourgeoisie, which claimed that it had been defeated historically, that it reached the “end of history and ideology.” This was reinforced by the identification that the “Communist” Parties made of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat with Soviet social-imperialism, Cuba, North Korea, China, which in their programs in theory and practice abandoned the struggle for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Part of this offensive is the characterization by petty-bourgeois liberalism, which identified the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and fascism as totalitarian, in a vulgar manner giving them the same political features. Trotskyism did this with some hues but with the same logic, in the caricature attack that it made against “Stalinism.” If we add the various petty-bourgeois currents that all themselves “communist” and “socialist”: Maoism, the 21st century socialists, the new anti-establishment self-management movements, the neo-anarchists who want to “change the world without taking power,” the post-Marxists, all in a holy alliance have buried the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in theory and practice. From there were created myths and distortions, deliberately causing confusion among the proletariat to abandon one of the central elements that distinguish the revolutionary meaning of Marxism-Leninism. Therefore it is necessary to rescue the theoretical and practical foundations of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat put forward by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and the struggle developed by the proletariat since the Paris Commune of 1871, the USSR and Eastern Europe (until 1953) and Albania before the emergence of Ramiz Alia.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is not based on ideas or principles invented by the classics of Marxism-Leninism; it is a concept with historical content whose highest peak was reached in the 1950s, which in essence corresponded to what was developed and elaborated by the classics of Marxism-Leninism, collective production, centralized management, economic planning (Five-Year Plans), development of heavy industry, and labour developed as a moral duty of a collective character. In such a short period the rich theoretical, scientific, cultural and educational contribution puts proletarian emancipation at the centre. Thus the idea of “superseding” the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in history by the degeneration of Soviet social-imperialism, the people’s democracies and Albania, and the strategy of the “Communist” Parties to find a “new road” to socialism, has no basis for the Marxist-Leninist Communist Parties, since the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is not a particular method that the Bolsheviks used, a model of the 20th century that has no relevance in the 21st century, or one “road” out of many to build socialism. For Marxism-Leninism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the historical trend that leads from capitalism to communism, under the conditions of capitalism in its highest and last stage, imperialism. It is not petrified but is in constant transformation and enrichment, each crisis and development of capitalism creates better material conditions for the centralization of capital, the development of the productive forces, the skill and growth of the working class, all joined with the experience and struggle of the proletariat that the Marxist-Leninist Communist Parties today summarize to merge with the proletariat. To the extent that the next wave of proletarian revolutions in content and form will be socialist on the way towards communism, this would not have been possible without the experience, victories and defeats of the world proletariat in power in the last century, or even more since the Paris Commune in 1871.Fundamentals of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the classics of Marxism-Leninism
Below we recreate some of the points raised by the classics that underlie the relevance, necessity and character of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the proletariat organized as the ruling class. The Marxist-Leninist theory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat has been created and developed in the midst of a bitter class struggle, against revisionism and bourgeois ideological tendencies, not without reason, because in essence, it means the proletariat organized as the ruling class. Therefore petty-bourgeois socialism and the various ideological tendencies of the bourgeoisie attack and distort it, and propose their bourgeois road to “humanize” capital or impose the interests of a sector of the ruling class. “21st Century Socialism,” “humanist and democratic Socialism,” “New Democracy,” “Change the world without taking power,” etc..
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a general criterion for distinguishing Marxism-Leninism from opportunism and revisionism. A Marxist-Leninist is only one who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; now as before the attitude toward the Dictatorship of the Proletariat has become one of the main criteria to distinguish Marxist-Leninists from opportunism, social democracy and revisionism.
The new “contributions” that argue that the overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be established other than by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, naturally come to the conclusion that there is another historic force other than the proletariat that can play this role: the peasants, civil society, the crowd, new social actors (the Occupy movement).
The class struggle necessarily leads to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the abolition of social classes:
1. The existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, 2. The class struggle necessarily leads to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; and 3. This same dictatorship is itself no more than the transition to the abolition of classes and to a classless society.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat covers an entire historical epoch. As Stalin pointed out in Foundations of Leninism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is not a fleeting period but a whole historical epoch, filled with civil wars, external clashes, tenacious work of organization and economic construction, of offensives and retreats, of victories and defeats.
Such has been the dialectic of the class struggle from the Paris Commune to the present day, of revolution and counterrevolution.
The state form that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat takes is the power of the soviets and the people’s democracies, but whose content is the same: Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Historically the first form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was the Paris Commune, which enriched Marxism by clearly defining the state form and the main content of the proletarian revolution, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. A people in arms, with elected representatives, subject to recall, in which the salaries of all officials are the average of those of a manual worker. Moreover, the Paris Commune was an expression of proletarian democracy, a legislative and executive organ.
But in its development the class struggle and the seizure of power by the proletariat headed by the Bolshevik established the state form that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would take, the soviets as insurrectionary forms of the proletariat, which was shown in the revolution of 1905 and 1917 in the former USSR, but also in 1919 in Hungary and Germany even though they were defeated. It showed that this is not a national phenomenon, but it is the international expression of the proletariat for the generalized insurrection, and in the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, as the state form that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would take.
In the framework of the Second World War another form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat developed, which was a new contribution to the theory and practice of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat: the people’s democracies in Eastern Europe. Thus it is clear that according to the relationship of forces, the creativity of the masses as makers of history, the tradition of struggle, etc., the forms may vary, but the content does not change.
After realizing that the transition from capitalism to communism covers a whole historical period, there has been (and will continue to develop) a variety of political forms, but the essence of them all will be the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Those who claim that we
Marxists-Leninists are trying to mechanically transfer the Russian revolution to our country, have not understood the essence, because the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is born as an objective necessity of the working class for its victory and emancipation; there will undoubtedly be particularities, but these become secondary for the aims of the proletariat, because they are not essential.
Central historical objectives of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
1. Elimination of class differences. 2. Elimination of the relations of production on which they rest. 3. Elimination of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production. 4. Elimination of all the ideas that spring from all these social relations.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is necessary for a whole historical period from capitalism to communism:
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a new State, which establishes the proletariat as the ruling class.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a new State, which arises on the basis of the destruction of the bourgeois State, and which has the same essence as any State, that is, it is the dictatorship of one class over another, the difference being that now it is the dictatorship of the majority against the exploiting minority, which is a qualitative distinction.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is not only or principally the organized violence of the proletariat, but has the role of builder and organizer of the working class as the vanguard class.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat has as its central function to consolidate the advances and victories of the socialist revolution. Therefore it has the function of a society based on collective production and appropriation, which requires the organization and discipline of the working class.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat serves to re-educate the proletariat from petty-bourgeois prejudices and conceptions.
To re-educate in protracted struggle on the basis of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat the proletarians themselves, who do not get rid of their petty-bourgeois prejudices suddenly, by a miracle, by the work and grace of the Holy Spirit or the magical effect of a slogan, resolution or decree, but only in a prolonged and difficult struggle of the masses against the influence of petty-bourgeois ideas.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and revisionism
As Stalin said, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the content of the socialist revolution (not its form), so whoever denies it in their strategy, or attacks it in theory, in practice brings one of the variants of bourgeois ideology into the heart of the proletariat, as has long been the practice of world revisionism and opportunism. In Mexico they have their specific expression, ranging from the autonomist neoanarchism of “changing the world without taking power” that gained strength with the rebellion of the EZLN [Zapatista Army for National Liberation], the theory of “people’s power” that various organizations with mass work from the 1970s took up, understood as the realm of small-production that is opposed to the power of the monopolies under the capitalist system; Maoism and the New Democratic revolution, that is, the dictatorship not of the proletariat, but of four classes; Trotskyism with its petty-bourgeois socialism, the “new socialism of the 21st century,” postmodern neo-Marxism, which sees new social actors as the protagonists of social change, etc.
* The Marxist-Leninist theory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
continues to be fully relevant and develops and strengthens through
debate against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies that are trying
to divert the proletariat from its historic revolutionary role, for its
emancipation and thus for the whole of humanity.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat can be established as a result of
the socialist revolution, but it can also degenerate and then be
liquidated through revisionism, as a weapon of the internal
counterrevolution and the imperialist offensive. And in the case of the
Communist Parties that are not in power, a symptom of degeneration is
when they deny this in their strategy and tactics, arguing for
national, “new” roads, or a “development” of Marxism to the conditions
of the 21st century * It is necessary to make a historical assessment
of this first phase of the experience of the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat; this will not be the product of one Party in particular,
but of the collective discussion of the ICMLPO, which will draw the
theoretical, historical and political lessons, so that the next phase
of proletarian revolutions and the consequent establishment of the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat will be a conscious product of the
proletariat, which learns from its defeats, but at the same time is the
product of the enormous theoretical and practical contributions of the
proletariat that began with the Paris Commune, continued with the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and reached its highest peak in the early
1950s with the USSR, Eastern Europe and Albania headed by Enver Hoxha.