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veiled, is present. Marxism recognizes, however, that every dictator–
ship, even when it is considered progressive with respect to expanding
the forces of production, is a form of oppression.
If
one takes Marx
literally, the elimination of all coercion from human relations, the
complete withering away of the state, is a Utopian ideal-but prag–
matically it can be interpreted as an ideal of diminishing coercion
and exploitation of human society.
If
one reads Marx in the light of modern sociology, one under–
stands that classes will continue to exist, class struggles will continue
to be fought, even though the role of classes will differ when dif–
ferent social relationships are introduced. A strike under socialism
is a struggle even though some terminological purist may balk at
calling it an expression of class struggle.
In
either case, or on either
interpretation, there is an imminent dynamic toward greater democ–
racy in the Marxist ideal, toward a permanent revolution against
whatever series of evils the social process generates. This tendency
is accentuated by the heritage of Utopian and anarchistic socialism
which Marxism accepted despite its scorn of it.
Marxism is a philosophically primitive system but it never iden–
tified the social system of the future with the end or process of his–
tory itself in the way in which Hegel identified the Absolute Idea
or the Way of God with the Prussian state. Because Communism is
a disease of idealism, if only it does not harden into the fanaticism
which makes a fetish of the instrument-the instrument of the Com–
munist Party-it may prove to be susceptible to the virus of political
liberalism.
Historically, in the Soviet Union the Bolsheviks took power
with the Left Social Revolutionists as a cover. They permitted other
socialist parties to exist for a time in a tortured way. On paper, but
only on paper, bourgeois parties could exist. On occasion, in order
to bring home the distinction between the dictatorship as a social
and economic instrument and dictatorship as a political weapon,
Lenin maintained that it is "quite conceivable that the dictatorship
of the proletariat may suppress the bourgeoisie at every step without
disenfranchising the bourgeoisie . . . while it is essential to suppress
the bourgeoisies as an [economic] class, it is not essential to deprive
them of their suffrage and equality."
What this meant with respect to bourgeois parties, and later all
