Karl Marx and Simon Bolivar

[Anonymous]

https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1968/winter/bolivar.htm

CONTEMPORARY POLITICS is FAMILIAR with the moot issue of the justification for authoritarian dictatorships in developing countries, where the economic and political backwardness of the people and society is taken to prove the undesirability of democratic institutions for popular control from below. Generally speaking there are two schools of apologia: one defending only those authoritarian regimes that orient toward dependence on American power and that protect foreign capital investments with adequate enthusiasm; and the other vindicating only those dictatorships that replace the old property-holding classes with a new class of bureaucratic-collectivist rulers, or seem to be on the way to do so. While the first type of dictatorship automatically becomes a member of the Free World, in Washington’s slang, the latter type may adopt a sobriquet like “Communism” or “African Socialism,” etc. with appropriate references to a hyphenated or unhyphenated Marxism.

The subject of this study is not the line of argument used to justify “progressive” authoritarianisms today, but only the relation of Marx’s views to this question, since his name is so often taken in vain. It is true Marx did not have an opportunity to express an opinion on the regimes of Castro, Nkrumah, Mao, Nasser and their similars; but as it happens, he took up a case which would seem to be a far less disputable example of a “progressive” authoritarian who led a great national-liberation movement. This was Simon Bolívar, the “Liberator” of northern South America.

The case is sharpened by the fact that Marx does not question the progressiveness and legitimacy of that national-independence movement itself; and by the fact that, over a century ago, justification-by-backwardness had a better prima-facie case than in the modern world, which on an international scale is rotten-ripe for socialism from the Marxist point of view.

[ALB]

Interesting article. Draper wrote some good stuff, for instance on what Marx meant by “dictatorship of the proletariat”, a term we have never thought much of. Must better to speak of “working class rule” while capitalism is abolished, the temporary use of political power by the working class to abolish capitalism and bring in socialism.

But Marx’s article does weaken one of the arguments we have used — that in his day “dictatorship” had not yet acquired the meaning it has today and simply meant a strong government. As Marx described Bolivar as a “dictator” this suggests that it did then have the meaning of an individual exercising unrestrained power.

Still a good reason for not using the term “dictatorship of the proletariat”. No need to use another term that we have to explain all the time what it doesn’t mean, especially as we want to emphasise the necessarily democratic nature of the socialist revolution.

[Anonymous]

What you have written is totally correct in regard to the term: Dictator or Dictatorship, Marx took the term from the Roman society and it meant strong government, but the Chavistas did not know the real meaning of the term and tried to put dirts on Marx and that he never wrote anything about colonialism which is false

Both Marx and Engels wrote extensively about colonialism and Marx was also working on the Asiatic Mode of Production, the problem was that the Institute of Marxism and Leninism of Russia did not want to go deeper on Marx research because in some way the despotic asiatic mode of production was similar to the Russian state capitalism.

Lenin was the one who distorted completely the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Karl Kautsky and Martov did a much better job than him in regard to the DOP and the concept of the state, the real founder of Leninism was not Stalin, it was Lenin himself. Lenin wrote that the central idea of Marxism was the dictatorship of the proletariat and it is a false statement too, it was only a temporary measure

Personally, I think that Marx should not have used that term because it had created too much confusions and it has been used by many opportunists to discredit Marx and Engels and to propagate a distorted view on socialism/communism and the so called workers state

Draper also translated Marx ethnological notebooks but others groups tried also to distort it by saying that Marx supported the concept of socialism on economically backward society. I am working on the asiatic mode of production and it is a very interesting field of anthropoloical research

[Author]

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