formation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. . . . Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with the capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.18

Where

These passages also answer the question Where the Socialist Revolution is to take place. The place is that of the most "advanced" civilization and capitalism.

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century. . .

19

Addressing himself to the question whether the Socialist Revolution could succeed in a backward country like Russia, Engels wrote:

no more in Russia than anywhere else would it have been possible to develop a higher social form out of primitive agrarian communism unless that higher form was already in existence in another country. . . . That higher form being, wherever it is historically possible, the necessary consequence of the capitalistic form of production and of the social dualistic antagonism created by it, it could not be developed directly out of the agrarian commune.

20

Who

On the question of Who makes the revolution, Marx leaves no doubt: the proletariat as a class:

the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, and, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class. . . .21

19 Marx, "Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation" (1867), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 460.

19 Marx and Engels, "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" (December 1847January 1848), Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 65.

20 Engels, in a letter "Engels to N. F. Danielson" (Oct. 17, 1893), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. II, p. 503.

"Marx and Engels, "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" (December 1847– January 1848), Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House 1955), vol. I, p. 54.

What is more, at the time of the revolution, this class comprises the vast majority of all people:

The lower strata of the middle class . . . sink gradually into the proletariat.... Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.22

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.28

How

And How would, according to Marx and Engels, the revolution be made? This turned out to be a complicated matter in which it is difficult to detect clear lines of thought in Communist ideology. A few things about Marxist thought on the manner of the revolution are, however, quite clear. It is clear, above all, that Marx envisaged the revolution as a violent event, an act of force.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.24

Or again:

... we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.25

The establishment of proletarian rule, however, is not the end of the use of brute force. Rather, it is the beginning of a period in which the government would be used as an instrument of force against the "exploiters."

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.26

And what happens then?

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the Bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.27

B2 Ibid., p. 41.

23 Ibid., p. 44. 24 Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 53.

In other words, the mission of the proletarian power is not to satisfy human aspirations and needs, but to bring about the destruction of the old society and the development of the means of production.28 It was realized from the beginning that this could not be accomplished except by lawless force.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.29

Marx here recognizes that the beginning of "despotic inroads on the rights of property" will lead to "further inroads upon the old social order," that these measures will "appear untenable" but are nevertheless "unavoidable." What he envisages is dictatorial government apart from popular consent and from the restrictions of law, the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.80

Marxists are taught that the rule of force after the seizure of power is the most important phase of the Socialist Revolution:

.. A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon-authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.81

4. Effects of the Revolution

There is a widespread misconception to the effect that communism is based on the blueprint of an ideal society. In actual fact, the advocates of a blueprint of a future society were bitterly criticized by Marx as "Utopians." He accused them of substituting their "personal inventive action" for "historical action," of thinking in terms of "fantastic

28 Cf. also above, p. 58.

20 Marx and Engels, "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" (December 1847January 1848), Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 53.

80

Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Programme" (May 1875), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. II, pp. 32, 33.

81

Engels, "On Authority" (October 1872), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 638.

conditions of emancipation" rather than "historically created ones," and of looking to an "organization of society specially contrived by these inventors." They are, to him, dreamers of ideals and not students of history.

...

Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans. 32

The objection of Marx and Engels to this "utopian" socialism is that it overlooks the struggle itself, the development of which is bound to lead to as yet unpredictable conditions.

The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. . . . It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda. . . . These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian.

33

By contrast, Marx and Engels dwelt above all on the continuing struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. To conduct this struggle energetically, effectively, and victoriously, was their concern. Out of the triumph of Communists in this struggle a new society would arise by way of economic and social development, rather than as the result of a blueprint.

While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible . . . it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position.

34

Out of the continuing struggle of the classes would, "in the course of development" (rather than by an attempt to realize the blueprint of an ideal order!) grow a society without classes and without a state.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. . .

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.35

*2 Marx and Engels, "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" (December 1847– January 1848), Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 62.

83

Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" (1877), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. II, p. 121.

"Marx and Engels, "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" (March 1850), Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 110.

85

Marx and Engels, "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" (December 1847January 1848), Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,

5. The "Period of Transition"

One delicate question in Communist ideology is how long this "course of development" will take. While the Communist Manifesto and other writings by Marx refer to a "period," Engels commits himself to the confident prediction of an almost immediate change of social order as a result of the seizure of power:

...

. . . As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production . . . are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. . . . The state is not "abolished". It dies out.36 ... We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of . . . classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them, the state will inevitably fall. The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.37

Marx, more cautious, predicted that after the seizure of power there would be a slow development, in which he distinguished two phases. The first one would be a society in which everyone obtained a fair share of the total product, corresponding to the labor which he had put into it. The distribution of goods in this phase would still be based on rights and could therefore not do justice to all the factual inequalities of individual persons. The second phase would not longer rely on rights as a basis of distribution, because material abundance would allow everyone to have as much as he needed. (In later Communist ideology, the first phase came to be called "socialism" and the second, "communism.")

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society. . . . Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society-after the deductions have been made-exactly what he gives to it.

88

*

Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" (1877), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing. House, 1955), vol. II, pp. 150, 151. The more familiar translation of the last sentence says: It withers away. Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" (MarchJune 1884), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. II, p. 321.

87