Marxism a Progressive Doctrine

Who dares maintain that in face of the developments of the last decades, Marx, an out-and-out revolutionary thinker, would not have modified his conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat in accordance with the teaching of towering facts? If we assume Comrade Martoff to be right as to the theory Marx held more than forty years ago, can we not rest assured that Marx would have revised that theory had he been alive today. To Marx, theory was something greater than a means of elucidating the world; it was a means for transforming the world. But, for this very reason, he never regarded his theories as eternal and immutable truths to which reality must conform; for him, reality always remained the object of research, the thing to be conscientiously investigated, the thing from which his theories were acquired, and in accordance with which his theories must in case of need he modified. I am confident that at this juncture Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat would display remarkably little similarity with the meek and lowly ideal, the ideal of those who aim only at harmony and at the co-operation of all persons of “good will,” the ideal which bashfully simpers at us from the expositions of the adversaries of bolshevism. Marx’s revolutionary intelligence was as keen as a sword; his heart glowed with revolutionary fire; his revolutionary will was hard as steel. Marx was ever a revolutionary fighter, a man of action, and I cannot believe that he would be found to-day among the critics of bolshevism.

On paper “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and “the ideal of complete democracy” may be linked with the simple copula. In the world of reality, it is otherwise. The historic essence of dictatorship is dominion - stark, coercive dominion. Without infringing the rights and interests of minorities, it is as impossible as the quadrature of the circle. The historic justification of the dictatorship of the proletariat lies in this, that the dictatorship is exercised in the interests of the enormous majority of the population, and that it is no more than a means of transition, for it aims at suspending itself, at rendering itself impossible, at realising the ideal of democracy - a free people, in a free land, living by free labour.