





You can see book details at the
OUP website.

Wednesday, 19 June 2013

On Socialism in One Country











Marx and the Educative Dictatorship

I've written a a looong review of Jonanthan Sperber's new biography of Marx over at Dublin Review of Books. Why not read and share!

There are lots of other reviews on-line: some very interesting, some a bit predictable. Richard Overy in Literary Review is very interesting (it's an omnibus discussion of Sperber and Hosfeld):

Neither Hosfeld nor Sperber brings out clearly enough the role of consciousness in Marx's theory. This he borrowed from Hegel and never lost sight of. Consciousness - Vernunft in Hegelian terms - was not mere understanding (Verstand), but a deeper appreciation of the existing reality of the material world whose actual conditions would determine the possibility of revolutionary transformation. Workers who developed this conscious apprehension of the real world were the communists of the Communist Manifesto, who saw further and more deeply than their proletarian peers. The whole purposes of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' (a term Marx first used in 1850) was not to impose the harsh dictatorship of characteristic of the 20th century. rather, it was a moment of transition while those with heightened consciousness educated those who had little or none.
I don't agree that Marx meant by the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' an 'educative dictatorship' (it's an argument made by Hosfeld - page 47 - which is maybe where Overy got it from). It seems clear to me that Marx wished to suggest an urban and plebeian intimidation of the counter-revolutionary soldiery and constitutionalist waverers. This comes across in his writings for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848. As I put it in my book:
Marx and Engels were concerned that the Frankfurt Parliament, being located in a relatively small city and thus isolated from the revolutionary crowd, would be timid in the face of counter-revolutionary aggression. In essence, they hoped that the urban revolutionary crowd would harass the Frankfurt assembly in order to counteract the pressure of the princely governments and armed forces: ‘Intimidation by the unarmed people or intimidation by an armed soldiery - that is the choice before the Assembly.’ (p. 72)
This is what Marx meant by popular 'dictatorship', and as the proletariat matured it would be 'proletarian dictatorship'. If education was to happen, it would be in the course of struggle. Take his rebuke to August Willich in 1850: "we say to the workers: you have 15 or 20 years of bourgeois and national wars to go through, not merely to alter conditions but to alter yourselves and make yourselves fit to take political power". Or his comments in Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875):
Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc. ... is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! ... the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.

I don't want to prettify 'dictatorship of the proletariat': it clearly implied the suspension of the rule of law. But the idea of an educative dictatorship was Blanquist rather than Marxist.

But my main point is that I'm very interested by Overy's distinction between Vernunft and Verstand. Does anyone know if Overy writes on this elsewhere? Or where else I might look?

Monday, 4 March 2013

He's Behind You!
