Is a Dictatorship of the Proletariat Doomed to Fail? | State and Revolution Ch. 2

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]The dreams of revolution in France that began in 1848 were dashed dramatically just 3 years later when the soon-to-be Emperor Napoleon III dissolved the National Assembly at gunpoint. And watching from London, a 33-year-old Karl Marx penned one of his most famous lines in the essay The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte where he said that historical events and personages appear twice, first as tragedy, then [music] as farce.

[00:00:30]Marx's text, this 1852 text, [music] proved utterly life-changing for one revolutionary who found himself sitting in a Finnish safe house 65 years later.

[00:00:42]We're going to talk about that today.

[00:00:44]Welcome to Champagne Anarchism.

[00:01:01]And welcome back to Champagne Anarchism.

[00:01:03]Today we are talking, of course, about State and Revolution Chapter 2. If you haven't seen the first two, the intro video or Chapter 1, I recommend you go watch those first, but Chapter 2 is a actually a very easy, uh breezy kind of chapter. It's pretty zippy. It's very short. Uh last week we talked all about Chapter 1 and all about specifically the state, the way that Lenin understands the state, and what he might not necessarily understand the state. We We went in and tried to understand and expand what we understand the state to be and why that might undermine a lot of Lenin's analysis. And this time in Chapter 2, we're going to go even further with that. In this chapter, we're going to talk about state power, and specifically why Lenin thinks that people need the power of the state. And then, we're also going to talk about the machinery of the state. And the machinery of the state section is also going to be preoccupied with this idea, which we're going to take up again, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. So, all of that is on the agenda today.

[00:02:05]Before we get into it, I do want to take a little mini step back and define a couple terms. Terms that I think we've been throwing around a little bit in this series, and you'll certainly see them all throughout this book. Uh I want to talk a little bit about the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the petite bourgeoisie. Uh you'll see these pop up in this book uh in this chapter as well. So, you know, we've been throwing them around a little liberally.

[00:02:31]I think we should uh talk about those classes and and what exactly we're dealing with here, especially if you haven't seen these terms before. So, classically, Marxism divides everybody up into roughly the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, right? Two classes, very simple. The bourgeoisie have all the stuff. They have all the capital. They are the capitalists with the factories and the money. And they are the ones who are sitting back and getting rich just purely off of their ownership of capital. The proletariat, meanwhile, is the laboring class. They only have their bodies and their labor to offer. They have no capital of their own. So, they can't just sit back and own a factory and get rich off of that kind of rentierism. They have to actually go to the factory, put in their labor hours, and get paid for it. And Marx goes into all of this stuff about the alienation, which happens when you start to do that, when you have to produce goods that are then sold by capitalists to other people. That kind of separation is very, very important. But for our purposes, Marxism is roughly those two categories.

[00:03:40]But there's more to it than that.

[00:03:42]There's necessarily more to it than that, because, you know, the proletariat are supposed to be the ones who, because of this alienation and because they feel themselves to be subjugated, they will combine together and they will rise up and overthrow the state, the bourgeois.

[00:03:56]And necessarily there has to be a little bit more to this because in the classical Marxist analysis, you have the proletariat who feels themselves to be subjugated and because of that they join together, they rise up. This is the course of history, right? They join together and they rise up and they overthrow the bourgeoisie and they take power and this leads to the withering away of the state and true liberation after that. But, if you've been watching and thinking about this story, you might go, "Well, okay, but there are more than just those two classes, right?"

[00:04:30]I know people in my life who work, but they do have a little bit of capital, right? They may not be billionaires, they might not own full factories or anything like that. They can't exactly just sit back with the land that they own and gain money from that as landlords, but they do have some money or they do own a shop or something like that and they still work. So, where do they fit in this taxonomy? In other words, what do we do with the people who do have to work and often work hard, but they're not just selling their labor?

[00:05:06]And when you say that, a Marxist will tell you, "Aha, that's not either one of those. This is a class that's also invented by Marx and Engels. This is the petite bourgeoisie. So, not the full bourgeoisie, but the mini, the small bourgeoisie. The petite bourgeoisie are shopkeepers. They're small business owners. They are merchants. Sometimes they're artisans, right? They don't have enough capital to just sit back and collect and watch the profits multiply, but at the same time they do have a little bit of capital. They're not exactly pure working class. Often they will employ people from the working class to work for them. And Marxists are very worried about the petite bourgeoisie because unlike the working class, they actually have something to lose here. Actually, they have quite a bit to lose here. A small business frequently needs, as well, credit from a bank. They need orders from a wealthy factory owner. They need any small number of things from the major capitalists. And so, they actively, in that case, depend on this little trickle of capital that comes down to them. And that might mean that the interests of the petite bourgeoisie look very similar to the interests of the bourgeoisie.

[00:06:19]They [clears throat] might identify with each other just a little bit. So, when Lenin comes in in this book and tells us that the proletariat need power to guide and manage the petite bourgeoisie economically, this is what he's talking about. But, there are two caveats here.

[00:06:34]The first thing is that this little bit that we're we're doing here in the intro section, where we're talking about the difference in classes, it does ignore a big part of class. And that big part of class is culture. Marx and Engels don't care all that much about culture and the identifying characteristics, the sort of cultural characteristics that each class might have. You know, the petite bourgeoisie may have cultural characteristics. They may be quite educated, whatever it is that make them feel like they are much more of the bourgeoisie than they are of the working class. Or sometimes vice versa. And this is a very complex thing that comes into class identification. And later Marxist thinkers will spend a lot of time worrying about these questions of culture. The other caveat here is uh that these class designations can be pretty simplistic. And this is something that Marx and Engels famously recognized, right? They They identify, as well, another class called the lumpenproletariat. And if you've watched along with any of the other videos on this channel, you might remember the lumpenproletariat from uh our coverage of The Wretched of the Earth, for example, because Frantz Fanon spends a lot of time worrying about the lumpen proletariat. The lumpen proletariat is the lowest class, beneath even our normal proletariat. These are people who are on the edge of survival, and they can't develop class consciousness because they are literally preoccupied with existing and continuing to exist.

[00:08:03]These are the extreme poor, the criminals, the vagabonds, the the people who are carved out of society, and often they will fight with the oppressor, and this is something that Frantz Fanon notes as well, because the oppressor can actually materially make their lives better very easily. But, that's also not the only issue here, because you might be thinking, "Wait, hang on. You know, there is a class that actually sits above the shopkeepers." But, they're still not exactly the billionaire rentier class.

[00:08:33]What is that little sliver? These are the people that are still working, but they have substantially more money.

[00:08:40]These are the lawyers, these are the management consultants, the college-educated professionals, the professional-managerial class, in other words. This is a term that we get in the '70s with Barbara and John Ehrenreich, who spent quite a lot of time thinking about this class, and it's a completely different subset. The professional-managerial class depends almost entirely on access to capital through the bourgeois, and that is a different thing. So, if we add in as well the fact that these classes are often very fluid and ultimately relational, they may also vary through your lifetime, moment to moment you may find yourself in a different class, and they also don't map neatly onto our ideas of privilege, right? How does class intersect with race? How does it intersect with gender or sexuality? These are big questions and not something we're going to nail down in 5 minutes at the beginning of this video. Class can be a really tricky thing to talk about, But, it is at least a nice starting point for this kind of analysis. Even if it's not completely developed, you can start to see, uh, you know, why this might not be so clear-cut, but it is still quite helpful. So, with all of that in mind, right? We know what these classes are now. We know what the petite bourgeoisie is. We know what Lenin is talking about when he talks about the petite bourgeoisie. Let us talk now about state power.

[00:10:01]Now, I said at the start, uh, Lenin is drawing a lot from one of the works that is written after the rise of mini Napoleon, Napoleon III, his nephew, in fact. The 18th Brumaire. But, he actually starts, uh, with two works in this chapter that were written before that event. The Philosophy of Poverty and The Communist Manifesto. If you've read any Marx, chances are you've read The Communist Manifesto. And from those two works, Lenin points out that Marx calls for the establishment of a state that is run by workers. He quotes this phrase, "The proletariat organized as the ruling class." And he goes, "Look, this is Marx saying that the workers need to harness state power. We cannot destroy exactly the machinery of the state. We need to take it because the workers need to do something with that state power, and they can only ultimately exercise that power through the state apparatus." And this is a very controversial thing if you talk to an anarchist. And we're going to get into the anarchist critique of this a little bit, uh, later. Now, there are plenty of people who think that Marx is being a little bit more rhetorical here when he says the proletariat organized as a ruling class, with with that particular phrasing. But, Lenin takes this very literally and very seriously. He writes, "The working people need the state only to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, and only the proletariat can direct this suppression, can carry it out.

[00:11:36]And this is what we saw from the first chapter, right? Lenin believes that a state run by the oppressed cannot be oppressive because who is there to oppress, right? The oppressed have risen up. They've taken over from the oppressors. How could the oppressed oppress? There's nobody out there to oppress. So, he says that the oppressed, when they take power, when they take the state apparatus, they're just going to use it to stop the elite from coming back into power. That's the only thing that they're going to do with the state. Well, and actually one more thing because Lenin says, "The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population, the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians in the work of organizing a socialist economy." This is Vladimir Lenin trying to do two different things. First, he's saying, "We need to harness state power." And second, and this is pretty clever, but he's taking on Karl Kautsky again. So, he's saying, "We need to harness state power, but also the state has to be run exclusively by the workers. You cannot have this kind of mixed system where you have elites in state power and German Social Democrats, for example, with state power. You need to smash the state and replace it with something. You cannot work with the people that are your enemies. You can't work with the ruling power structure. You need to smash it and bring in the dictatorship of the proletariat." And so, if Karl Kautsky is out here saying, "We can work with the ruling class." No, Lenin is here to tell you, "No, absolutely not. We must first abolish the state that is set up for and by the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, before we can create some kind of transitional state, a state that's going to let itself wither away. And this is something that I have a lot of sympathy with, right? It is very, very tough to work with those in power to dismantle those tools, right? It's As Audre Lorde would say, you can't uh dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. That's not going to happen. So, Lenin is telling us, if you want the state to wither away, this German Social Democratic position is not going to work for that. This democratic parliamentarian process is not going to take us there. We need a revolution.

[00:14:03]And that's something that it's very easy to have a lot of sympathy with because we've seen these pushes fail repeatedly.

[00:14:09]And it is going to feed into the second part of this, but let's not get there quite yet.

[00:14:15]But, before we go on, I want to be a little bit fair to Karl Marx here, uh fairer than I was last week. Uh and and before we talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat too much, I want to draw your attention to a work that was written in 1987 by Hal Draper. That's a really interesting look at this term dictatorship. And by the way, the first chapter of this work is on marxists.org for free. I will link it on the Patreon channel, but Draper goes, "Okay, this language, right? The dictatorship of the proletariat, it's wildly unpopular to many, many people." And you can kind of see why because dictatorship, the word, has changed a lot since the time that Marx was using it. And even between the work of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, this word changes quite a bit. So, Draper says the the earlier dictatorship idea has much more to do with the dictatura, the dictatura of ancient Rome, specifically the Roman Republic.

[00:15:15]The dictatura was an institutional way to give a citizen what amounted to emergency powers. So, you pick a citizen and the citizen becomes a dictator at given tremendous power for a period of time, usually no more than 6 months. And the Roman dictator is a way to deal with emergencies. It's modern equivalent is something like martial law, roughly, right? But it is constitutionally derived, it's there in the constitution, and it comes with a time limits. It is, in other words, temporary. So, the dictatorship that Marx is talking about, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is this kind of dictatorship. That's roughly the idea.

[00:16:01]It is temporary and it's derived from, well, not a constitution in this case, but the people. Now, you might notice that this still does not deal with the anarchist critique of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is to point out that, you know, as we covered last week, a dictatorship is still a dictatorship even if it's supposed to be temporary. And moreover, power corrupts.

[00:16:21]And you will notice that the last self-appointed dictator of the Roman Republic declared himself dictator for life. And that, of course, was our friend Julius Caesar. But let's leave that for now and let's talk about the machinery of the state. With this section on the machinery of the state, we are often largely dealing with section three of this second chapter.

[00:16:44]And you might have noticed, if you've been paying attention to the footnotes here, that section three wasn't there originally. Section three was added afterwards, after the October Revolution in 1919.

[00:16:58]So, the original version of this book is written in 1917, it comes out in 1918, and in 1919, Lenin goes back and adds section three. And so, when Vladimir Lenin says in this section that building the dictatorship of the proletariat is essential to being a Marxist, this isn't 1917 Lenin talking. This is 1919 Lenin talking trying to justify and defend his actions. It's not going to change much with how we read this chapter, but just know in the back of your mind as you go to read this that the relevant context here is that Lenin has already begun to do the things that we have criticized so loudly when we talk about this book. He's already begun to do his secret police and the purges and all of this. And so he's trying to defend himself and his attempt to install a dictatorship of the proletariat. So we are with section three, we're outside the realm of pure theory. Now we're talking about something very specific that's a defense. Anyway, that's just something I wanted to flag. The roots of this, though, start in section two.

[00:18:06]Uh and that's where Lenin looks at Marx's writing after the ascension of Napoleon the third. And this for Lenin is what unlocks Marxism. And that's because Lenin picks up this very specific line in Marx. And it's actually pretty simple, but it means everything for the revolutionary Lenin. So Marx draws on the French revolutionary experience and says that all revolutions perfect this machine instead of smashing it. I want to go through that one more time. All revolutions perfect the machinery of the state instead of smashing it. And you can see why that might appeal to Vladimir Lenin. Here's Karl Marx looking at France and going, all this revolutionary hope and all of our experience in revolution and revolutionary action, what did all that get us? Well, it got us a much more powerful French military, a much more sophisticated bureaucratic state, something that was much more expansive. Lenin extends this analysis a little bit as well and mentions the further accelerating effect of things like imperialism and finance. And if we step back to modern times, we can see that this is absolutely true. You know, we are more than 100 years out of the October Revolution and what do we have now? Only more accelerated, more powerful, and more entrenched states. And there have been multiple attempts as well at dislodging them and they just seem to sharpen the power of the state every time. So, is it true what Marx and Lenin are saying here that each revolution only strengthens the ruling class and expands the power structure of the state? Well, maybe. And honestly, the experience of the Soviet Union after Lenin takes over falls directly into this trap that Lenin himself identified.

[00:20:01]This is one of those things where you might say here that Lenin's actions betrayed his words or maybe his words already had a fundamental issue embedded in them and we were just seeing that thought being brought out into practice.

[00:20:16]And the real issue here is that Lenin has not thought through what's going to come after the revolution. He has only a vague and nebulous idea of what the dictatorship of the proletariat even looks like. But if we turn to Lenin's defense of his actions here, there's one quote that I want to read. Lenin says, "Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists. They may be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. A Marxist is one who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat." This for Lenin is what separates real Marxists from Kautskyites, from the reformists, maybe even the anarchists. A real Marxist believes in Lenin's understanding of the revolution, in Lenin's revolution, in fact, in the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional regime. Lenin says, if you don't believe in this, you are not reading Marx right, you are not a true Marxist. And of course, it bears repeating that Mikhail Bakunin, and we're going to keep returning to Bakunin throughout this series, but Bakunin makes this point that the proletariat as a class won't actually be ruling. That's kind of functionally impossible for them to do. The people who will be ruling are most likely the self-appointed intellectual vanguard. And actually, this vanguard is something that Lenin refers to himself. Not so much in this book, you get hints of it, but really in his earlier work, What Is to Be Done?

[00:22:02]And Lenin's preoccupation with the vanguard is something that Bakunin looks at and goes, "Well, the proletariat isn't going to be dictating anything.

[00:22:11]Those self-appointed leaders, the vanguard of the proletariat, they are the ones who are going to be dictating, and that is a trap that you are going to fall into. You're not actually establishing anything like a dictatorship of the proletariat, you are establishing a dictatorship very much like the one that came before. That vanguard ruling party is easy to corrupt, it is easy to co-opt, and it comes at the expense of working people who are simply told now that they're in charge. And if you look at history, and you you look specifically at the history of the Soviet Union, this is exactly what happens. But, that's maybe enough on chapter two for today, that we will get much more into this as we go along, of course, but you know, this, as I said, pretty short, pretty zippy chapter, and and a pretty easy read. Often quite an enjoyable read, even though there is so much more to it. So, thank you so much for watching this video. As always, please check out the Patreon channel if you're not there already, patreon.com/champagneanarchism.

[00:23:11]And I'll be back next week for chapter three. We're going to talk much more about Karl Kautsky next time. So, thank you so much for watching. I will see you then. Goodbye.