SOCIALISM AND LIBERATION
513
delivers even stronger attacks against those he calls revisionists, and
who really are democratic socialists of Western vintage, than against
the Stalinist dogmatists and conservatives. Gomulka taxes the re–
visionists with believing that socialism can be built without any class
struggle. The. accuracy of this characterization I regard as very ques–
tionable. The difficulty is to know what kind of class struggle can
be waged after the capitalists and great landholders disappear.
Struggles still go on, but if they are class struggles they are of the
kind that Kardelj describes- between the toilers, the workers and
peasants, and the state and party officialdom. More accurate is
Gomulka's charge against the revisionists that they are opposed to
the dictatorship of the Communist Party. This
is
true. But it is also
true of Marx.
As
everyone knows, "the dictatorship of the proletariat" as in–
terpreted by Lenin and Stalin is substantially the dictatorship of the
Communist Party
over
the proletariat and all other social groups.
That this represented a radical departure from the meaning Marx
gave to the rarely used phrase in his writings can scarcely be doubted.
Marx and Engels pointed to the Paris Commune as illustrating what
they meant by "the dictatorship of the proletariat." The Commune
was one in which several different political groups or parties parti–
cipated, and in which the followers of Marx were a tiny minority.
In the
Communist Manifesto,
Marx had said that Communists " do
not constitute themselves a special party over and above other
working-class parties."
The "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the corpus of Marx's
writings is not in the first instance a political concept but a social one.
The opposite of the phrase is the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie."
Since, according to Marxist theory, a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie"
is compatible with many political forms ranging from monarchy,
Bonapartism and other expressions of dictatorship through an entire
spectrum of parliamentary democracies, it is clear that the economic
and social content of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in theory at
least, is compatible with the existence of one or more political parties
and with political structures ranging from dictatorship to democracy.
Socialism declares itself opposed to
all
forms of exploitation and
oppression, to any kind of class society in which coercion, open or
