Marx and the Educative Dictatorship

I've written a a looong review of Jonanthan Sperber's new biography of Marx over at Dublin Review of Books. Why not read and share!

There are lots of other reviews on-line: some very interesting, some a bit predictable. Richard Overy in Literary Review is very interesting (it's an omnibus discussion of Sperber and Hosfeld):

Neither Hosfeld nor Sperber brings out clearly enough the role of consciousness in Marx's theory. This he borrowed from Hegel and never lost sight of. Consciousness - Vernunft in Hegelian terms - was not mere understanding (Verstand), but a deeper appreciation of the existing reality of the material world whose actual conditions would determine the possibility of revolutionary transformation. Workers who developed this conscious apprehension of the real world were the communists of the Communist Manifesto, who saw further and more deeply than their proletarian peers. The whole purposes of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' (a term Marx first used in 1850) was not to impose the harsh dictatorship of characteristic of the 20th century. rather, it was a moment of transition while those with heightened consciousness educated those who had little or none.

I don't agree that Marx meant by the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' an 'educative dictatorship' (it's an argument made by Hosfeld - page 47 - which is maybe where Overy got it from). It seems clear to me that Marx wished to suggest an urban and plebeian intimidation of the counter-revolutionary soldiery and constitutionalist waverers. This comes across in his writings for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848. As I put it in my book:

Marx and Engels were concerned that the Frankfurt Parliament, being located in a relatively small city and thus isolated from the revolutionary crowd, would be timid in the face of counter-revolutionary aggression. In essence, they hoped that the urban revolutionary crowd would harass the Frankfurt assembly in order to counteract the pressure of the princely governments and armed forces: ‘Intimidation by the unarmed people or intimidation by an armed soldiery - that is the choice before the Assembly.’ (p. 72)

This is what Marx meant by popular 'dictatorship', and as the proletariat matured it would be 'proletarian dictatorship'. If education was to happen, it would be in the course of struggle. Take his rebuke to August Willich in 1850: "we say to the workers: you have 15 or 20 years of bourgeois and national wars to go through, not merely to alter conditions but to alter yourselves and make yourselves fit to take political power". Or his comments in Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875):

Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc. ... is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! ... the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.

I don't want to prettify 'dictatorship of the proletariat': it clearly implied the suspension of the rule of law. But the idea of an educative dictatorship was Blanquist rather than Marxist.

But my main point is that I'm very interested by Overy's distinction between Vernunft and Verstand. Does anyone know if Overy writes on this elsewhere? Or where else I might look?

Why did Marx Expect the Workers to be Socialist?

 

A while ago I wrote an article on why Marx and Engels believed that it was the wage-earning proletariat in particular who, as a social force, would be attracted to the message of socialism.

It's summarised by Marx's introduction to the 1880 programme of the Parti Ouvrier:

The emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race;

The producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production

That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them

1. The individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress;
2. The collective form the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society;

This collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat - organized in a distinct political party;
Such an organization must be pursued by all the means the proletariat has at its disposal including universal suffrage ...

What this actually meant I discuss in some detail in an article from Critique, here.

You can read the entire article, free of charge, at this website.

Here's my conclusion:

Marx argued that humans were necessarily dependent on one another, and upon nature. However, this dependence is felt by the individual as an imposition, and as powerlessness, unless it is voluntarily accepted as a means of self-realisation. For Marx, such voluntarism is only realisable when responsibility for the production of the means of life is assumed collectively. Such a state of affairs is socialism. Objectively, socialism becomes feasible insofar as production is spatially and temporally integrated under the influence of scientific knowledge and organisation. Subjectively, the modern working class becomes available as the agent of socialist transformation. Class consciousness arises from an innate desire to secure one's mode of subsistence. In history, producers have access to the means of subsistence either in a form dependent on the will of others, or independently, in the form of indefeasible property rights. Class consciousness always idealises independent proprietorship. This holds true for proletarians. However, as capitalism makes individual proprietorship impossible, only collective ownership appears to offer secure independence. This definition of Marx's theory brings into focus his examination of the problem of money wages. Income streams derived from the sale of labour power must be insecure if Marx's theory is to be robustly predictive of proletarian socialist preference formation. With this allowance made, Marx's theory is strikingly in accordance with historical data, and evidence gathered by social scientists.

 I still think it's a pretty good take on the subject! Feel free to disagree.