(On the occasion of his 42nd death anniversary.)

The proletarian party is the political expression of the workers’ movement, in that it reveals through its program the values and goals of the proletariat. The more powerfully its foundation unfolds and the more comprehensively its influence grows, the more effectively it will be able to act and fulfill its appointed task. Karl Marx dealt extensively with organizational questions, and his position on trade unions is well known. The trade unions should not content themselves exclusively with current, day-to-day work; on the contrary, they should become the core and focal point of the proletarian efforts arising from the process of social upheaval, and work toward the swiftest possible abolition of capitalist society. According to Marx, the most effective means of achieving this goal is the conquest of political power. With this power, the proletariat consciously carries out the transformation of capitalist into communist society. This transformation “also entails a political transitional period, whose state can be nothing other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

Karl Marx did not consider himself the originator of the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1852, he wrote to his friend Weydemeyer in New York: “As for myself, I do not claim the credit of having discovered the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle. What I did that was new was to demonstrate: that the existence of classes is only bound to particular historical phases of the development of production; that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; that this dictatorship itself constitutes only the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.” (Neue Zeit, Vol. XX, Issue 2, p. 164)

Marx already outlined the basic lines of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Communist Manifesto (1847–48), when he wrote: “The first step in the workers' revolution is the elevation of the proletariat to the position of the ruling class. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state — i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class — and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. This can of course only be effected by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.”

The dictatorship, according to Marx, is therefore a state in which the proletariat rules and, through its representatives (we would say workers’ councils), has the task of implementing socialism and bringing about a classless society, or economic equality. Whether such an achievement should be called "the conquest of democracy," as the Social Democrats like to call it, is clearly out of the question. Marx expressed himself quite unambiguously on this point. Marx also answers the question: How should the revolutionary working class behave if, in a revolution, not it but the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois-social-reformist democracy comes to power first? For this case, Marx gives the following instructions: No alliance with them, but struggle against them. He says (Address to the Communist League, March 1850): “It goes without saying that in the coming bloody conflicts, as in all previous ones, it will be the workers who, through their courage, determination, and sacrifice, will mainly win the victory. As before, the petty bourgeoisie will, in this struggle, behave hesitantly, indecisively, and passively for as long as possible—only to seize the victory for themselves once it has been won, calling on the workers to return to peace and to their jobs, to prevent so-called excesses, and to exclude the proletariat from the fruits of the victory. It is not in the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this, but it is within their power to make it harder for them to succeed against the armed proletariat and to dictate such conditions that the rule of the bourgeois democrats carries within itself the seed of its own downfall, making their later displacement by proletarian rule significantly easier. The workers must ensure that the immediate revolutionary movement is not suppressed right after the victory. On the contrary, they must maintain it for as long as possible. During and after the struggle, the workers must raise their own demands. In a word: from the very first moment of victory, distrust must no longer be directed only against the defeated reactionary party, but also against the former allies — against the party that seeks to exploit the common victory for itself alone.”

Karl Marx then goes on to speak about the arming of the workers and says: 'But in order to be able to confront this (betraying) party, the workers must be armed and organized. The arming must be enforced immediately. Weapons and ammunition must not be surrendered under any pretext; any attempt at disarmament must, if necessary, be thwarted by force. Workers must not allow themselves to be misled by democratic talk of municipal freedoms, self-government, and so on...Their battle cry must be: The revolution in permanence!'

However, the working class must not expect its immediate liberation from its political victory. ‘In order to work out its own emancipation — and with it that higher form of life toward which present-day society, driven by its own economic development, irresistibly tends — it must go through long struggles, a whole series of historical processes, through which both people and circumstances are thoroughly transformed. It has no ideals to realize; it merely has to set free the elements of the new society that are already developing within the womb of the collapsing bourgeois society.’ (from The Civil War in France)

The means of production are to be socialized, production is to be placed on a cooperative basis, and education is to be combined with productive labor, in order to transform the members of society into producers. As long as the transitional period lasts, the communist principle — “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” — cannot yet be immediately applied. For this period is, in every respect — economically, morally, intellectually — still marked by the birthmarks of the old society, and law can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural development of society which it presupposes." (from Critique of the Gotha Programme)

Marx, who consistently thought in economic terms and regarded the liberation of the working class as the highest goal—to which all other political and economic movements are subordinate—did not deny the nation as an economic, political, and historical reality. This is evident in the Communist Manifesto, where the creation of the nation-state by the bourgeoisie is acknowledged. He mocked the young enthusiasts who thought they could simply discard the nation as an outdated prejudice (see Marx-Engels Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 323), yet he significantly underestimated the culturally restrictive power of national feeling. He divided civilized humanity into opposing classes and assumed that the economic dividing line would prove more effective than national and political boundaries. He was therefore a thoroughgoing internationalist. Marx demanded that national workers’ parties act internationally as soon as the opportunity for overthrowing capitalist rule presented itself. He reproached the original Gotha Programme for having borrowed the phrase of “international brotherhood of peoples” from the bourgeois League for Freedom and Peace, when what was actually needed, he insisted, was to emphasize the international unity of the working class in its common struggle against the ruling classes and their governments.