this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as envisioned by Marx, is not a literal dictatorship; it is meant to be democratic.
I've always thought Dictatorship BY the Proletariat gave a better impression of what the statement actually tried to say. From what i understood of it, its supposed to be that the rules are made by the Proles (working population) rather than the "upper classes".
"Democracy of the Proletariat" would be the most accurate descriptor, but no one ever accused 19th century writers of not being melodramatic enough.
Well, I suppose the Confiscation Of The Means Of Production could happen by majority vote if it was possible to get most people to agree to it ...
That said, I know of not a single example out the were the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat wasn't done by force, either at first or eventually.
I mean, every revolution is done by force, including democratic ones. Most successful communist revolutions were backed by the considerable resources of the Soviet Union, which put special emphasis on destroying all democratic-left opposition.
Revolutions where power gets centralized for long enough suffer from the problem that every asshole in the land now knows were to go to for maximum personal upsides (and there are lots of them with lots of different techniques and some are even smarter than the top revolutionary idealists, so you can't stop them all) and trying to create an utopia against natural human tendency is one of those cases where power has to be centralized for an infinite amount of time, so it will most assuredly end up corrupted no matter how pure the intentions of the original revolutionaries.
In the real world with real people even the most honest of idealists will end up overrun by the assholes if they've created and put themselves on a nexus of power. This is actually IMHO why Democracies have the concept of the 3 independent pillars (Judicial, Legislative, Press) - they're meant to be separate nexus of power watching each other - and even then just look around to how deeply subverted that stuff has been all over the World in supposed democratic nations thanks to how Capitalism makes sure Money is the 4th power, strong enough to overtly buy the Press and also to "buy" members of the Legislative and Judiciary.
Seizing the means of production and the dictatorship of the proletariat are totally different concepts, though.
Flipping through the Communist Manifesto for a few choice words and then using them totally wrong isn't really bolstering your case.