A crucial difference between Hegel and Karl Marx is that unlike Hegel, who provided a well-developed theory of the State, Marx did not develop a blueprint either for the process of socialist revolution or of the socialist State. From the internationalist class struggle of the Communist Manifesto (1848) and the relative autonomy of the State which he developed after the abortive revolutions of 1848 in many countries of Europe, most notably France, he veered to a broad and sketchy notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This significant omission of a lack of a well developed theory of the State on the part of Marx allowed various interpretations. Bakunin predicted that the dictatorship of the proletariat would become dictatorship on the proletariat and Bernstein dismissing it as relevant only to lower civilization. Lenin declared in the summer of 1916 that it formed the core of Marxism. Such confusion and conflicting interpretations arose because Marx pitched his observations on a general level.
Russia’s backwardness, the lack of a coherent theory of post-revolutionary society in Marxism, and Marx’s personal fascination with the possibilities of absolute power, attenuated the Blanquism in Lenin and Stalin. If Stalinism was an offshoot of Leninism, then Leninism itself was inspired by Marxism, for Lenin repeatedly affirmed his commitment and faith in Marxist ideology. The distortions in Soviet Communism could be attributed to the shortcomings and inadequacies in Marx’s world-view, the fact that Marx had pointed out, according to Avineri, that historical developments are always open to several possibilities.
Yet Marx disregarded the possibilities open to his own theory; and here lies its major intellectual blunder. He overlooked the possibility that one of the alternatives to which the future development of his own theory was open might be the combination of his philosophical and historical theory with the Jacobin tradition of merely political, subjectivist revolutionary action. Thus, if Marx’s point of departure was Hegelian, so was his blind spot: like Hegel himself he did not subject his own theory to a dialectical critique.
Dahl asserted that Marxism could not be accepted “as an adequate political theory” on the basis of the basic propositions on democracy which were agreeable to all political parties and defended zealously by them. These were: (a) inevitability of a conflict of interests and articulation of wants as a matter of choice in a complex society; (b) resolution of such conflicts by majority rule, but with due concern for minority rights; and (c) freedom to form political parties, and recognition of free competition. The emphasis on harmony in Socialist society was inconsistent with the first proposition of the democratic theory.
Marxism did not offer any clue to the distribution of political power in a Socialist society and was equally ambiguous on the concept of majority rule. The introduction of universal adult franchise in Germany in 1866, the electoral reforms in England in 1867 and 1884, and the mushrooming of socialist parties, weakened the essential proposition of the State as an instrument of oppression, controlled by the bourgeois minority exploiting and oppressing the proletarian majority.
The reforms gave the workers an opportunity to control the State by winning the majority of votes, and thereby seats in Parliament. “Marx’s politics is based on particular qualities of the bourgeois State in the nineteenth century”. Marxism in theory and practice could never provide a primer for Constitution- based representative democracy. The important fact to note was that “neither Marx nor Lenin spoke of a law governed State because they considered that the State would inevitably wither away”.
Marx never addressed himself to the issue of rights, political freedom, power and the role of authority in a socialist society. For all his libertarian vision, he was riveted to the idea of having absolute, total, concentrated State power, unrestrained and unlimited. He had very little faith in the Constitution or law, dismissing them as covers to conceal bourgeois oppression and domination. The attack on formal democracy by promising substantive democracy resulted in reducing formal democracy to the point of nonexistence.
Marx overlooked the protection that constitutional representative democracy and rule of law gave against arbitrary rule, and the freedom it ensured against physical harm. He failed to understand the dynamics of democracy in empowering people being more revolutionary than a bloody, violent revolution itself. “He profoundly underestimated the capacity of democratic societies to correct or mitigate the injustices that seemed to him built into capitalism. The concept of the ‘class struggle’ which is central in the thinking of all Marxists seems largely irrelevant in America and Western Europe”.
Berlin’s last observation about the obsolesce of class struggle in advanced industrialised countries can now be extended to the developing world. There is no more talk of revolutionary transformation of society, or that the “East is Red”. Moreover, the possibility of using democracy as a means of realizing socialism never moved to the centre stage of his analysis of future society.
“The overall sweep of the Marxist historical scheme,” according to Harding, “relegates democracy to a subsidiary role in the drama of human development”. This was where the Social Democrats scored over Marx, for they, and in particular Bernstein, insisted on the need to combine democracy (representative parliamentary institutions with universal suffrage) with socialism, bringing about a breach that could never be closed, as stated by Plamentaz, between German Marxism and Russian Communism.
The idea of a Communist society being classless and equal remained a myth. Djilas, in the New Class (1959) mentioned the presence of the nomenklatura in the former Communist societies, namely those which enjoyed privileges and special status because of their position within the hierarchy of the Communist Party, thus confirming the fears of Bakunin that the dictatorship of the proletariat would create fresh inequities and new forms of oppression and domination.
Perhaps no one has captured the myth of a classless society better than Orwell in his Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. As Orwell observed succinctly “The so-called collectivist systems now existing only try to wipe out the individual because they are not really collectivist and certainly not egalitarian; in fact they are a sham covering a new form of class privilege”.
An examination of the development of the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat revealed a degree of tension between the concept’s organizational necessity and the larger Marxist hypothesis of enlargement of human freedom. The idea of delineating and working out a participatory model of democracy was never completed by Marx. This was also compounded by his inadequate handling of the crucial role of the theory of the State.
In tackling the complexities of the modern State, the general descriptions of the ideal as realizing true democracy and Communism have proved to be extremely simplistic in providing the essential institutions of a modern democratic State.
Marx’s aversion to Utopian blueprinting made him ignore the details that were necessary for managing a society based on equity, just reward and freedom. The terms “true democracy” and “Communism” hardly dealt with the complexities of modern times.
The post-communist world we live in is rooted in this basic inadequacy within the Marxist project. In the background of Victorian optimism, he forgot that a thinker, even if one is an activist-theoretician, has to have a limited objective, to interpret the world and not to change it.
The writers are respectively Associate Professor of Political Science, Jesus & Mary College, New Delhi, and retired Professor, Dept of Political Science, Delhi University.