Didn’t Marx say to run over the proletariat with tanks if they oppose the state right before he drank the hemlock, or am I misremembering something?
Marx’s ideal government structure was something more like the Paris Commune: a progressive, socialist commune with feminist, communist, and anarchist influences.
It lasted two months.
It lasted two month because the gouvernement de Versailles (3rd French Republic) decided to kill people en masse. They killed so much it was called la semaine sanglante.
Yes, I know. The point is, the Paris Commune failed because it couldn’t protect itself. That was a lesson that future Marxist revolutionaries took to heart. They knew that the dictatorship of the proletariat was not going to be given to them freely, that it was something that would require brutally violent acts to achieve, and defend.
I’m not trying to defend all the crimes committed by Marxist-Leninists over the years. I’m not an ML and I don’t necessarily share their goals, but I think a lot of ML critics fail to fully recognize the context. Any Marxist who didn’t want to suffer the same fate as the Communards of Paris or Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and the Spartacists of Germany in 1919, knew they would have to take drastic action.
As Marx once said, “One-man management [is] the most important principle of the organisation of socialist economy.”
Wait, no, that was the Soviets, my bad
“What is to be done about these damn peasants” - Lenin probably
