There is, as we all know, no immediate, unified will of the people, but a diversity of opinions. Even those who exalted a “will of the people” did not entirely succeed in securing a monopoly on legitimacy for democracy. These terms had a connotation of illegitimate rule, much closer to what we mean by “dictatorship” today. However, its legitimacy was by no means taken for granted, as it is today.Īfter the French and American revolutions, a common fear among enlightened liberals, like Alexis de Tocqueville or Immanuel Kant, was that democracy would result in a tyranny or despotism of the masses. In the course of the various revolutions against monarchy, democracy had emerged from its ancient Greek basis to become a key point of discussion in modern European political thought. Why would Marx, an advocate for many of the things we now describe as “civil liberties,” use a phrase like “dictatorship of the proletariat”? The answer is inextricable from the developments in the language and political thought of the 19th century, of which Marx was both a participant and an avid observer.
To understand the word “dictatorship” as we do now – as the opposite of democracy, an authoritarian regime in which an individual or minority group exerts violent and absolute power – is an anachronistic projection which totally distorts Marx’s usage. This un-American idea of the “People” bears more than a passing resemblance to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the force that scientific Marxism once predicted would run the world.īut as it is used by handwringing anti-communists like Applebaum today, this troublesome phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” is a messy lump of several poorly defined concepts. and giving it back to you, the American People” - as if the capital city had until 2017 somehow belonged to foreign occupiers. In his dark, nihilistic inaugural address, much of it written by Bannon and Miller, the president announced that he was “transferring power from Washington D.C. Schwartz claim that “Most socialists are committed to a political project built around fulfilling the promise of liberalism - liberty, equality, and solidarity - that capitalism precludes.” Attempting to take their distance from this terrifying word, socialists like Joseph M. In a hallucinatory article in the Washington Post, Pulitzer-prize winning militarist Anne Applebaum warns of the rise of a new threat to American liberal democracy: the “neo-Bolsheviks.” Pointing to Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, she laments that “neo-Bolshevik language has so far enjoyed unprecedented success in Britain and the United States, two countries that have never known the horror of occupation or of an undemocratic revolution that ended in dictatorship.”Īpplebaum is not the only one to understand the Russian Revolution, whose centenary we celebrate today, as an event marred by the legacy of dictatorship.