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Origins of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
A "Dictatorship of the proletariat" was first proposed during the French revolution in the left-wing of the Jacobin party. The Jacobins were revolutionary Republicans who played a major role in overthrowing the Aristocracy and beheading the Monarchy. Marxists consider them bourgeois (capitalist) revolutionaries. In the later part of the revolution, when things were going wrong, some left-wing Jacobins proposed a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a solution to the problems. A guy called Babeuf formed a "conspiracy of equals" to overthrow the government and implement this dictatorship. His conspiracy was discovered and they had their heads detached. This idea of a dictatorship of a proletariat survived and was picked up by 19th century revolutionaries. This included a guy called Blanqui. He believed in forming a secret society which would stage a coup and installed the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Some of his followers played a signifigant role in the Paris Commune. Marx inherited the "dictatorship of the proletariat" from these 19th century revolutionaries. The theory was half a century old by the time Marx started advocating it.
Results of the Dictatorship
"Dictatorship of the proletariat" inevitably leads to "dictatorship of the bureaucracy." We have seen this over and over again in Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Laos, etc. If we do it again we'll get the same results as the last time around. Leninists whine about imperialism, civil war, etc. but any revolution is going to have to face those kinds of threats. If your revolutionary strategy cannot handle them without turning into a totalitarian hellhole then it's not a very good strategy. Lenin claimed that a "workers state" was necessary in order to defeat the armed resistance of capitalists. If that armed resistance causes the dictatorship to degenerate then it is not a very good way to deal with it. We can't just hope against hope that the resistance of the capitalists will somehow magically be less sometimes, we need a revolutionary strategy that can defeat them without replacing the current set of tyrants with a new set.
In the end: How many Anarchist revolutionary groups have been sucessful in comparison to Workers Marxist-Leninist vanguardist revolutionary groups?
Marxist-Leninist groups have been a complete failure. Every time they came to power they resulted NOT in the liberation of the working class but a state-capitalist dictatorship. And they weren't even able to stay in power - the USSR collapsed and liberal capitalism reigns triumphant. For most of the 20th century Marxism dominated the left, anarchism was marginal. Leninism has had numerous mass movements and countless opportunities to implement it's ideas. Every time it has resulted in state-capitalist tyranny and it has completely failed at defeating market capitalists. Anarchism has only really had 3 opportunities to implement it's ideas - and each time we were stabbed in the back by Marxists. Leninism has completely failed to liberate the working class or even defeat the west, it is an utter miserable failure. It's time to try something different.
In spring 1918 the Bolsheviks lost the elections to the soviets. The Bolsheviks responded by disbanding soviets and implementing a one-party state. See
Soviet Elections in Spring 1918
In 1921 Trotsky criticized the Workers' Opposition, a dissident faction within the Communist party, saying:
"They come out with dangerous slogans, making a fetish of democratic principles! They place the workers' right to elect representatives above the Party, as if the party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy. It is necessary to create amongst us the awareness of the revolutionary birthright of the party, which is obliged to maintain its dictatorship, regardless of temporary wavering even in the working classes. … The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy."
In CH. 7 of Terrorism & Communism Trotsky said, "the dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. … In this “substitution” of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class." In 1937 he said "The revolutionary party (vanguard) which renounces its own dictatorship surrenders the masses to the counter-revolution ... abstractly speaking, it would be very well if the party dictatorship could be replaced by the ‘dictatorship’ of the whole toiling people without any party, but this presupposes such a high level of political development among the masses that it can never be achieved under capitalist conditions." In "Stalinism and Bolshevism" Trotsky said:
"A revolutionary party, even having seized power … is still by no means the sovereign ruler of society. … The proletariat can take power only through its vanguard. In itself the necessity for state power arises from the insufficient cultural level of the masses and their heterogeneity. In the revolutionary vanguard, organised in a party, is crystallized the aspiration of the masses to obtain their freedom. Without the confidence of the class in the vanguard, without support of the vanguard by the class, there can be no talk of the conquest of power. In this sense the proletarian revolution and dictatorship are the work of the whole class, but only under the leadership of the vanguard. The Soviets are the only organised form of the tie between the vanguard and the class. A revolutionary content can be given this form only by the party. … Those who propose the abstraction of the Soviets from the party dictatorship should understand that only thanks to the party dictatorship were the Soviets able to lift themselves out of the mud of reformism and attain the state form of the proletariat."
Trotsky was not the democrat Trotskyists make him out to be but an unabashed advocate of party dictatorship.
Revolutionary Consciousness
In "What is To Be Done?" Lenin said:
"The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia."
Lenin's theories were disproven even in his time. Workers can achieve revolutionary consciousness without the vanguard. The anarcho-syndicalist movment is a perfect example of this. It was literally created by the workers and at one point quite big. The process of class struggle itself leads to radical consciousness. Workers do not like being dominated, eploited and living in poverty. This leads to revolutionary working class movements. And even if revolutionary consciousness could only come from intellectuals as Lenin claimed his vanguardism would not follow. The intellectuals could just spread revolutionary ideas in the working class. The working class could then organize itself for revolution and run things itself, non-hierarchically.
When the Soviets first appeared in the 1905 Revolution they were not the creation of theorists, they were created by workers who hadn't read much theory. The initial position of the "vanguard" was opposed to the Soviets. In the February revolution & July days the "vanguard" was again left behind. Workers have repeatedly left the vanguard in the dust and been more revolutionary than it.
Arguing that workers don't have the "education" or "consciousness" to run things ourselves is the same as saying wer'e stupid. It has been proven over and over that workers' are fully capable of running production ourselves. Wev'e done it before, and some workers in Argentina are doing it right now. Leninists' anti-proletariat prejudice is virutally identical to the crap from the Libertarian Party.
The Alternative
At present in Argentina more than a hundred workplaces, including factories and others, are run by the workers. It took a day to take them over. The early phases of the Spanish, Russian, Iranian & other revolutions & rebellions all saw workers taking over factories and implementing worker self-management. These all prove that workers are fully capable of taking over production in a short period of time. The workers are the ones actually in the factories who do the production - we have a much better idea of how to run things than some stockbroker in new york or central planner in Moscow whov'e never even seen our workplace. If workers are capable of choosing who our representatives are then we are capable of directly making decisions ourselves, without electing masters. Leninist rhetoric that workers are too stupid to run things themselves is anti-proletarian. I hear the same crap from members of the Libertarian Party. Workers aren't stupid.
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