1.2 The dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to Communism

It is clear for Marx that, in the transition from capitalism to communism, denominated socialism (first phase or inferior phase of communism), there is still the class society although no more based in the exploitation and that, consequently, the second or superior phase is the communism per se , that is, the classless society. It also means that for Marx the passage from socialism to communism will not be an exclusively economic product, a naturalist result of the productive forces development.To overcome the “narrow horizon of the bourgeois right” it will be necessary the disappearance of the social division of labour; the same labour will be the first vital requirement of all individuals and the individual development will correspond to the progress of the whole collective. Only under these economic conditions but also ideological ones, we will be able to write on our banners: from each individual according to his capacity, to each one according to his need. It will be the end of the bourgeois right since now there will not be a unique measure for different individual requirements; such a condition is only possible with the ideological development of the whole society. And in this so radical transition of the humankind history what role will be assigned to the State? Marx answers:

“The question then arises: what transformation will the State undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present State functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a fleahop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word ‘people’ with the word ‘State’. Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Now the programme does not deal with this nor with the future State of the communist society”. (Karl Marx, Critique of the Programme of Gotha, bold from the author).

Marx characterizes precisely this transition from capitalism to communism as a “period of revolutionary transformation”. As we see in the Marxist analysis, the complete socialization of the means of production represents the immediate result of the proletarian revolution; this result, however, did not eliminate the bourgeois right, still preserved. That is why socialism precedes necessarily the communism as a “political period of transition”, whose State is the “ revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”. Marx, after the Working Insurrectin of June, 1848, in Paris, had concluded, for the first time, on the need of the dictatorship of the proletariat whose revolutionary dictatorship was the political form of the proletarian power, indispensable to the fulfilment of the economic objective of the scientific socialism already pointed out in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, i. e., the socialization of the means of production. Nevertheless, Marx saw the need to bridge the gap in the Manifesto through the Preface to the 1872 edition in which it is affirmed: “ In view of the gigantic strides of modern industry in the last twenty-fice years and of the accompanying improved and extended party organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held polical power for two whole months, this programme has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”. Now, at the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx specifies that the political role of the State of the dictatorship of the proletariat is not restricted to this socialization but this dictatorship represents the “revolutionary transformation” of the capitalism into communism.

Comrade Lenin, on September, 1917, as we have already related, extracts in The State and the Revolution precious lessons of Marx’s last great oeuvre. It is there, as Marxism-leninism, that the proletariat will find in a complete way the formulation of the concept “dictatorship of the proletariat”. That was a key issue and it was an object of Lenin’s hard struggle against the revisionist Kautsky. In turn, the modern revisionism of Khrushchev that, after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( CPSU), in 1956, with its infamous “secret report” against comrade Stalin, will try to attack the Marxist-leninist concept on the dictatorship of the proletariat. The putrid khrushchevike thesis on the “State of all the people” tried exactly to attack the character of dictatorship of the more revolutionary class in history, this driving character of the class struggle in socialism, precisely as a need to eliminate the classes towards communism, pointed out by the great Marx and developed by comrade Lenin.

In the revisionist CPUS answer to the Letter of 25 points from the Communist Party of China (CPC), Khrushchev tried to support his rotten argument of the “State of the whole people”, distorting the quotes of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. The revisionists searched to substantiate their revisionist thesis using the last phrase of the above quote, when Marx says about a “future State ordering of the communist society”, Khrushchev takes out the sentence from its context to justify his theory of the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat; but in the previous phrase Marx had been abundantly clear when saying that to the transition of capitalism into communism corresponds the period “which State cannot be other but the dictatorship of the proletariat”. This is Khrushchev’s false communism, unmasked by the CPC and by Chairman Mao at the 9th Commentary to the CPUS Letter. In this bright document, the Chinese comrades continue unmasking the revisionist Khrushchev:

“Lenin, though he had envisaged that the revisionists would use this phrase from Marx to prevaricate Marxism, in his The Marxism on the State, made an excellent explanation on the sentence: “The dictatorship of the proletariat is a political period of transition… However in another place Marx says about the future State organization of the communist society!! Thus, in the communist society the State organization will exist!! Are not there here contradications? “ “No”, Lenin answered. And then he exposed schematically the three stages of the State development, since the bourgeois State until the extinction of the State. The first stage: the bourgeoisie needs in the capitalist  society a State, the bourgeois State. The second stage: in the periodo of transition from capitalism to communism, the proletariat needs a State, the State of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The third stage: in the communist society, the State is not necessary, it extinguishes” (CPCh: On the false communism of Khrushchev and its historical lessons to the world).

Then the CPC concludes: “ In the picture presented by Lenin there is only the bourgeois State, the State of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the extinction of the State. Lenin made clear that with communism the State will extinguish and there will not be any State organization”. In the magnificent two-line struggle led by Chairman Mao, in 1963, the khrushchevite theses will be completely unmasked and confronted with Marx’s theses on the Critique of the Gotha Programme and Lenin’s The State and the Revolution and The Marxism on the State.  And Chairman Mao, besides this defence developed a Marxist theory of the State solving the problem of the transition of capitalism to communism in a theoretical way (On the Contradiction, 1937, and On the New Democracy, 1942 ) and practical way with the Great Cultural Proletarian Revolution ( 1966-1976), giving contents and shape to the class struggle in socialism as a permanent revolution to eliminate the classes and provide conditions for the State to extinguish.

1.3 The two-line struggle against the Lassalianism return

In this particular aspect, the Critique of the Gotha Programme deals with the very serious setbacks of the German social-democracy with stances of the petty-bourgeois socialism that had been defeated at the I International, from the ideological point of view with The Capital and the practical point of view with the Commune of Paris. Ferdinand Lassalle was a bourgeois democrat who, in the beginning of the 1850, approached Marx, still in the effervescence of the German democratic 1848 revolution. Lassalle helped with the advertising and popularization of Marx’s economic discoveries in Contribution on a Critique of the Political Economy; as a Hegelian he helped the workers in the understanding of determined economic reasonings but as a good Prussian he forged the revolutionary conclusions of Marx’s thinking. Politically, Lassalle defended the Unification of Germany carried out by the Prussian Empire that consisted in the annexation of other German kingdoms, without any important economical change in the social relations in the countryside. After Lassalle’s death, in 1865, it was comproved his secret relations with the imperialism of Bismarck and his positions pro-Prussia in the German unification.

It was with the unification of the German State, consummated in 1871, under Prussia’s hegemony, that the political and tactic divergences between the Social Democratic Working Party and the Lassallian Association have apparently diminished. Marx and Engels in their previous letters to the Gotha Programme said that the tendency would be the dissolution of the Association and the incorporation of most part of the members in the Party. However, as we have seen, what happened was, in a certain way, the opposite, since the Lassalians entered and transformed the Party programme, dragging back decades in their positions.

In Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx will always seek the confrontation to the mentioned programme with the Manifest of the Communist Party and the Statutes of the International. Marx demonstrates how these documents were the principal reference for the elaboration of the party programmes in each country. To go backwards in relation to them would be to fall in the mass grave of the petty-bourgeois socialism, at the time in full decline, becoming in most of the countries  mere appendages of the liberal bourgeois parties. Marx emphasises three questions in this setback: a) the reassertion of the “bronze law”, a “classical” Lassalle’s formulation; b) the assertion that besides the proletariat all the other classes were a “reactionary mass”; c) defence of the creation of cooperatives with the support of the old State as a transition pathway to socialism.

The “bronze law” consisted in the reformulation of a thesis originating of the bourgeois political economy that the salary of the worker could never be exceed a certain measutre since the salary would be regulated by the excess population of the proletarian reserve army. In fact, as Marx shows, the Lassalle’s “bronze law” was the application of the Malthus’ reactionary theories disguised as socialism. The scientific characterization of the salary as the price of the labour force had already been made by Marx, in 1859, and in a popular form, in 1865, in Salary, price and profit, and later, in a complete way, in 1867, in The Capital. The “bronze law” was in fact a pseud theory to justify Lassalle’s reformism and his stance of no exacerbation of the class struggle. That is why Marx becomes indignant with the setback of the Programme of Gotha because it had been a theoretical problem totally solved and largely accepted by the ICM. As to the cooperatives Marx stresses that the productive cooperatives would only have any importance for the revolutionary struggle if organized in a completely independent way and contrary to the old State intervention.

Among these particular issues, the most important is concerned the problem of class revolutionary character which  is seen by Marx like this:

”In the Communist Manifest it is affirmed : “Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The bourgeoisie is here conceived as a revolutionary class – as the bearer of large-scale industry –, relative to the feudal lords and the lower middle class who desire to maintain all social positions that are the creation of obsolete modes of production. Thus, they do not form together with the bourgeoisie “only one reactionary mass”. On the other hand, the proletariat is revolutionary relative to the bourgeoisie because, having itself grown on the basis of large-scale industry, it strives to strip off from production the capitalist character that the bourgeoisie seeks to perpetuate. But the Manifesto adds that the “lower middle class” is becoming revolutionary “in view of its impending transfer of the proletariat”. (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, bold from the author).

It is presented here, in a clear way, the dialectical materialist position on the social classes. The revolutionary role and condition of a class follow the historical conditioning, that is why Marx shows how in the Manifest, although it dealt with the working class struggle against bourgeoisie, this one was considered as revolutionary while fighting against the feudal lords. Likewise, it stresses the role of the peasantry that is not seen as part of a reactionary mass but a revolutionary class when in the eminence of decaying to the proletarian condition, i. e., to have its means of production expropriated , or to have prevented the way to access them. In this regard, even Marxism-leninism in its precise formulation on the worker-peasant alliance and the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants, and soon with Marxism-leninism-maoism with the joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes in the complete formulation of the new-type democratic revolution, could gather what it was as the most precious and universal in Marx’s critique to the petty-bourgeois positions of Lassalle and his followers in his supposed “ centrality in the working class”.