and to aclassless society.”¹⁹In his 1875 critique of the Gotha Program, the found-
ing document of the SPD,Marx insists that dictatorship of the proletariat refers
onlytothe temporary suspension of democratic rule duringthe initial transfor-
mationfromacapitalistto acommunist (i.e., classless) society.Against contem-
porary misreadings of the term as despotism of the people, which for manycon-
servativeswas simply another name for the tyrannyofdemocracy,Marx
emphaticallyinsists on its original meaning asakind of popular sovereignty
based on the long overdue conquest of political power–apoint of particular
relevance for understanding later configurations of socialism, nationalism,
and totalitarianism developed around the overdetermined figure of the worker.
The adaptable meaning of the proletariat asatheoretical concept can be
measured by its continuing revisions since theWilhelmineyears. As the main
protagonist in the narrativesofprogress promoted in the name of scientific so-
cialism,the proletariat appeared across the entirerangeofsocialist literary, mu-
sical, and visual practices and playedakey role in the imagination of the work-
ing class as an emotional community.Yet in socialist theory and political debate,
references to the proletariat often amounted to little more than empty formulas
and clichés. Responding to these developments,EduardBernstein (1850–1932),
the main proponent of what became known asrevisionism, questioned the his-
torical inevitability of revolution and the status of the proletariat as the revolu-
tionary class. The frequent descriptions of the proletariat as the largest and most
unifiedsocial class, in his view,attested aboveall to the self-delusions of Social
Democracy,with the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat amounting to little
more than“the dictatorship of lecturers and literati.”²⁰Along similar lines, inDie
Diktatur des Proletariats(1918,TheDictatorship of the Proletariat), Karl Kautsky
(1854–1938), the most influential Marxist thinker after Engels’sdeath, usedthe
comparison of dictatorship and democracy as forms ofgovernance to formulate
acritique of the Leninistmodel of revolution and to arguefor ademocratic road
to socialism in western democracies and advanced industrial societies; this pro-
Karl Marx, Letter toJosephWeydemeyer in NewYork, 5March1852,MECW39:58. Foracrit-
ical assessment,see MehmetTabak,“Marx’sTheory of Proletarian Dictatorship Revisited,”Sci-
ence and Society64.3 (Fall2000): 333 – 356.Anoverview of the concept in the writings of Marx,
Kautsky,Lenin,and others can be found in Hal Draper,The“Dictatorship of the Proletariat”from
Marx to Lenin(London: MonthlyReview,1987).
EduardBernstein,DieVoraussetzungen des Sozialismus und dieAufgaben der Sozialdemokra-
tie(Stuttgart:J. H. W. Dietz, 1899), 183.
60 Chapter2