Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution III

Hal Draper

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 1986
• ISBN:
  9781583675182
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this third volume of his definitive study of Karl Marx's political thought, Hal Draper examines how Marx, and Marxism, have dealt with the issue of dictatorship in relation to the revolutionary use of force and repression, particularly as this debate has centered on the use of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat." Writing with his usual wit and perception, Draper strips away the layers of misinterpretation and misinformation that have accumulated over the years to show what Marx and Engels themselves really meant by the term.

I DICTATORSHIP: ITS MEANING IN 1850

1 FROM ROME TO ROBESPIERRE

The question is: what did the word ‘dictatorship’ (dictature, Diktatur, etc.) mean in the year 1850, when Marx first used the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’?

The assumption of the marxologists, it seems, has always been that it meant exactly the same thing that we mean by it in the late twentieth century. Few people, to be sure, will admit making this assumption consciously; but all have incorporated it into their argumentation; and in any case no marxologist has ever questioned it*

But the present-day meaning of ‘dictatorship’ does not go back to the beginning of time; in fact, it is relatively recent. The first warning of this fact that I came across was sounded by Henry R. Spencer in 1931 in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences: “Dictatorship is a term which has undergone notable change in meaning.” He explained its original meaning, and added that, while modern times have seen absolutism, despotism and tyranny,

the concept of dictatorship has until recently been kept separate and history has used it to designate an emergency assumption of power…. In the decade following the [First] World War, however, there was a widespread tendency to use the term dictatorship as synonymous with absolutism or autocracy.¹

Actually, the change must have begun before the First World War, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. There is often a period in which new and old meanings jostle in the public consciousness; Spencer’s date probably marked the end of the jostling,† But his essential point is true and important: the present-day aura around the word ‘dictatorship’ is relatively modern.

1. THE ROMAN DICTATURA

To understand what ‘dictatorship’ meant in the middle of the nineteenth century, we must go back to Rome. The reason is not antiquarian: the old Roman meaning was not dead in 1850.

During most of that century, ‘dictatorship’ still retained a great deal of its original reference to the institution called the dictatura in the constitution of the classical Roman Republic, an institution that lasted for centuries. It had three main features:

(1) It was constitutional and legal. The constitution itself provided for the naming—in time of invasion or civil disorder, that is, of crisis and emergency— of a one-man ruler who united specially extended powers in his hands.

(2) It was temporary. The maximum duration was six months, but usually the dictator handed his power back sooner, whenever the emergency ended.

(3) It was limited in significant ways. Most particularly, while the laws were temporarily abrogated, the dictatorship could not make new laws. The dictator’s jurisdiction was primarily not civil but military, whether against an external foe or internal dissension. Money had to be voted; the Senate held the purse strings. The dictator’s authority was confined to Italy. Power of life and death over citizens was early limited by law. And in fact, in the course of time, changes were made in the limitations and conditions of the dictatura, precisely because it was not conceived to be an independent autocracy, and because there was an obvious danger that this institution would be put to unintended use.

It worked—for three centuries: that means it worked. For centuries the practice of the dictatura stayed within the constitutional, legal framework of the Republic and did not degenerate into tyranny. The first dictatura was said to have been established in 501 B.C.; the last of the general dictators (leaving aside a minor type of dictatura I have not mentioned) took office in 216 B.C.

Finally, like all other institutions, this one broke down. When Sulla and Caesar had themselves appointed “perpetual dictators,” this meant the scrapping of the constitutional dictatura. Even so, Sulla laid down the office after a few years and retired. Caesar instituted a dictatorship in our current sense as a result of destroying the institution in the original Roman sense— and incidentally gave rise to a whole family of new terms (Caesarism, kaiser, czar, etc.).

Was the dictatura the cause of the phenomenon that came to be called Caesarism? When first Sulla, then Caesar, wanted to establish his personal Imperium, the dictatura was invitingly at hand. It was the obvious institution for them to seize on and abuse. Therefore, in 44 B.C.—after the assassination of Caesar—a law was adopted abolishing the dictatura as part of the constitution. The far-from-world-shaking result was that, when Augustus took over and returned to republican forms, he called himself not dictator but Number One or Número Uno—depending on your translation of princeps civitatis or princeps.

It was not the dictatura that created Caesarism or the Caesarist type of dictatorship; it was Caesarism that bent the dictatura to its purpose. If not that, something else would have been found, as always. Significantly, this prefigured the fate of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

2. SURVIVAL OF THE DICTATURA

Something like the Roman dictatura still exists in the contemporary world. It is called martial law (on the Continent, state of siege), a form of crisis government or emergency regime. It has the essentia] features of the Roman device: behind martial law is understood a framework of constitutional law, not tyranny; it is temporary; it can abrogate laws (temporarily) but cannot legally impose new laws or constitutions.

Modern history, which has seen many invocations of martial law, shows that it does not necesearily lead to tyranny, though it can be abused. It is not regarded as ipso facto undemocratic, though a particular invocation may be so, of course. It is not only consistent with democratic institutions but, when it is directed against a threat to these institutions, it appears as a veritable democratic bulwark.

An academic conservative, Clinton Rossiter, has offered an extensive examination of martial-law forms of government as the modern incarnation of the Roman dictatura, in a book called Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (1948). The best-known example of such a “constitutional dictatorship” was provided for by Article 48 in the Weimar Constitution of pre-Hitler Germany, a constitution sometimes called the most democratic in the world. This offers the classic case of what may be called the political version of Murphy’s Law: viz., if anything can be abused, it will be.

Between 1919 and 1925 this “constitutional dictatorship” was invoked 135 times,³ by Social-Democratic and other governments pledged to combat “Marxism” and revolution. Although Article 48 gave the president of the republic authority to issue emergency decrees in face of a threat to public order, it was actually used frequently to impose economic and other measures for which popular democratic sanction was lacking. When the economic situation eased up, in 1925-1930, it was invoked only nineteen times. By 1930 it was used by Chancellor Briining to maintain his government, with the support of the Social-Democrats, on the basis of an economic program of cuts in welfare that could not get a majority vote in the Reichstag. The historian Arthur Rosenberg sees this situation as the death of the Weimar Republic: “The Reichstag thus abandoned the struggle with the unconstitutional dictatorship of Bruning and his friends by a majority vote.”⁴ The republic then collapsed from one dictatorship into another, the Nazi dictatorship coming as the end term. In 1931-1932 Article 48 was invoked 101 times.

It is usually argued that the “constitutional dictatorship,” that is, Article 48, was not used but misused; no doubt. But the situation would not have been different if there had been no convenient Article 48 to abuse. The real history of Weimar was a struggle of social forces, not an exercise in political forms. Still, we have to understand the political forms of the struggle.

Professor Rossiter had no doubt that “dictatorship” might be needed to defend “democracy”—constitutional dictatorship, that is. Constitutional dictatorship, he wrote, has been used “in all free countries, and by all free men.” Indeed

It is in this twentieth century and indeed in these very days that the age-old phenomenon of constitutional dictatorship has reached the peak of its significance.

And

Our problem is to make that power [of the United States government] effective and responsible, to make any future dictatorship a constitutional one. No sacrifice is too great for our democracy, least of all the temporary sacrifice of democracy itself.⁵

Rossiter, a democrat and a patriotic American, would know what to think if he heard a dictator talking about “temporarily” sacrificing democracy in order to save it. Yet this would not shake his view that a democracy must have this device at its disposal. Obviously, any particular invocation of a “constitutional dictatorship” can be justified only by a specific sociopolitical analysis; nor can it be impugned simply by pointing with alarm.

Twelve years after publishing his Constitutional Dictatorship Rossiter crowned his labors of erudition with a work, Marxism: The View from America (1960), in which he did not fail to pay the usual respects to Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Only somehow, in the intervening years, Rossiter had forgotten all about his insight into the concept of ‘dictatorship’ and the survival of the Roman meaning. His new book had not a single sentence showing awareness that ‘dictatorship’ did not always mean what it means now to any newspaper reader. In fact, in at least one passage he lightly takes it for granted that ‘dictatorship’ means only “absolute power,”⁶ and that it meant this to Marx, as to anyone else, at any time and place. Elsewhere, in a genial moment, he credits Marx with a thought about “this proletariat, operating through the famous dictatorship…. “⁷ This breezy reference is to the dictatorship made “famous” by one ignorant book after another, not to the ‘dictatorship’ discussed by Rossiter in 1948.

There is another piquant example of the fixed idea that ‘dictatorship’ is historically immutable: a multivolume reference work with the notable title, Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by P. P. Wiener. History of ideas: that is exactly what we need! It has, for instance, a long historical article on the career of the word ‘despotism’. But there is no article on ‘dictatorship’, and among all mentions of the term that can be traced through the index, there is not a single sentence to intimate that this word has not always meant what it does now.

On the other hand, there are some different cases: modern political scientists who understand that the Roman meaning of ‘dictatorship’ still has life. For example, Charles . Merriam explained in 1939 that it was a misnomer to call the Nazi regime a dictatorship. His discussion shows, not a softer view of Nazism, but a reminiscence of the classical ‘dictatorship’, and a feeling that it was still viable for him.⁸

In the same year, the theoretician of liberalism R. M. Maclver published a discussion of dictatorship in which he thought it useful to point out that the old Roman sense “is not unknown in the modern world.” He was referring to the Weimar constitution. Then he linked this thought with Marx as follows:

The original Marxist doctrine of the “dictatorship of the people” [sic] had in it something akin to the Roman idea. It was to be a temporary and exceptional form of government to prepare the way for the inauguration of a new dictatorless—in fact, stateless—order.⁹

Clearly, like Rossiter in 1948, Maclver did not think that the Roman dictatura was quite as dead as a doornail, and also had a glimmering of the situation in the nineteenth century.

Third example (to make a trio): Elie Halévy, in his much-praised book The Era of Tyrannies (1938), explains why he uses the word ‘tyranny’ instead of ‘dictatorship’:

The Latin word ‘dictatorship’ implies a provisional regime, leaving intact in the long run a regime of liberty which, in spite of everything, is considered normal…

unlike the Greek ‘tyranny’.¹⁰ He was not motivated by any special knowledge about Marx’s use of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, for on this point he displays the usual ignorance.¹¹

I am not citing these three cases to show that the Roman meaning of dictatura has been common coin in our century. On the contrary: by their own time these writers were exceptional—more than a bit archaizing. True, exceptions still occur: for example, the Columbia Encyclopedia speaks of Abraham Lincoln’s “wise control that amounted practically to dictatorship.”¹² This language no doubt reflects Lincoln’s ignoring of legalities in order to impose emergency measures. But while the Roman meaning shows only twitching signs of life in this century, we must be prepared for the news that it was in flourishing health early in the previous century.

And that is the point.

Thus, in 1855 the New York Daily Tribune carried an editorial titled “British Disaster in the Crimea” which talked of “dictatorship” by a commander in chief on the field of battle. The thought not only made the term ‘dictatorship’ equivalent to the Roman dictatura, it made the connection explicitly. The subject was the disastrously inept organization of the British army, revealed in the war. “But what was to be done?”

… there is only one remedy. This is the assumption by the General-in-Chief of the expedition upon his own authority, and his own responsibility, of that dictatorship over all the conflicting and contending departments of the military administration which every other General-in-Chief possesses, and without which he cannot bring the enterprise to any end but ruin. That would soon make matters smooth; but where is the British General who would be prepared to act in this Roman manner, and on his trial defend himself, like the Roman, with the words, “Yes, I plead guilty to having saved my country”?¹³

The author of this article was Friedrich Engels. The article made it plain that nothing startling was being proposed, for “every other General-in-Chief” had this power, which of course operated only i...