Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

This paper will attempt to assess whether Marx's arguments for a dictatorship of the proletariat in the Communist Manifesto were faulty or not. In attempting for some historical balance, the paper will consider his arguments in light of what was known in his time, not just in terms of modern "20-20 hindsight."

Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, and the specter of Communism is no longer haunting Europe and the world, it is possible to have a more sober look at socialism in general and at Marx's ideas. One could hardly have known, or said out loud, during the worst of the Cold War, that Marx was one of the great founders of modern social science, but that is the almost universal opinion of modern scholars, e.g., the cultural historian Leslie White. This had to do not with his particular historical conclusions, but with his methods for analyzing the causes of social phenomena.

Marx was arguing against "idealism," as exemplified in the work of Hegel. At the risk of great oversimplification, one could say that Hegel apparently epitomized a viewpoint which assumed that progress and evolution were driven from the top down, that is, that people would get a new idea, create some sort of social organization to carry it out, and then attempt to do so. Of course, one can observe people behaving in just this way, but Marx felt that this analysis did not go deep enough to explain the overall patterns of history. He wanted to know why people would come up with this idea, and not

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ate, and that could be fed to animals who provided food or work--which is why energy is still measured in units of horsepower. Up until the industrial revolution, somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the population everywhere had to be farmers. Cities, scholars, churches, ruling classes, constituted only the 10 to 20 percent of the population that could be supported by the extra food the farmers could grow to support them. As Leslie White emphasize, it was only with the invention of the "engine," meaning a device that turns inanimate fuel directly into usable energy, that the economic basis of human society changed. During the medieval era, there had been some changes; windmills and water-driven mills were introducing enough technological change to shift the demographics to some degree. This is probably why independent merchant cities, the first of the "bourgeoisie," evolved during the Middle Ages, and these were able to generate enough wealth that they could even import some of their food from elsewhere, which allowed their populations to grow beyond the limits that would have otherwise been imposed by the local farming economy. However, even these changes were not radical enough to break the inertia of ancient social pat

Category: History - M