Lenin’s Revisionist “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”
Leave a comment09/03/2020 by socialistfight
“If only that jabbering idiot Lenin had had Hal Draper there to guide him from 1893 to 1917 and 1923 he might have led the Russian Revolution to victory” is the thought that came into my mind after reading this jibberish. Lenin made such simple mistakes, totally misunderstood Marx and had no idea how to forge a revolutionary programmme and party. We live and learn with the likes of Hal Draper to teach us. Remind me what did this Shachtmanite Third Campist dilettante accomplish apart from great piles of anticommunist propaganda?
By Hal Draper. Originally published as chapter 4 (Lenin and ‘Dictatorship’) and part of chapter 5 (The International Debate on ‘Dictatorship’) of Draper’s book, The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin.
As we have seen, in the social-democratic party in which Lenin grew up the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was accepted by almost everyone. What did Lenin come to understand by the term?
Like everyone else, Lenin had to ask himself what Marx could have meant. By the time he started writing on socialist problems (the first writings in his Collected Works stem from 1893) the word “dictatorship’ had already acquired some of its modem meaning; it was even beginning to be counterposed to ‘democracy’ to some extent. Yet Lenin, like other Marxists, assumed that the historical fate of socialism was inextricably linked to the advance of democracy, social, economic and political: “Whoever wants to reach socialism’…
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