Ohessa hieman perustietoa eräästä aatehistorian keskeisimmästä kehityskulusta:
The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions
Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers
Chicago, London
1998
s.345:
One of the reasons why Marx and Engels did not think that violent revolution would automatically occur in the most advanced countries was that in some of the advanced countries communism could come about by peaceful means. In 1872 Marx spoke of his belief in the possibility of a peaceful revolution in America, England and in Holland. He took the same line in 1879 when he wrote:
“A historical development can only remain “peaceful” so long as it is not opposed by the violence of those who wield power in society at that time. If in England or the United States, for example, the working class were to gain a majority in Parliament or Congress, then it could by legal means set aside the laws and structures that stood in its way.”
Were the proletariat to gain a voting majority, Marx continued, any violence would come from the other side. However, in 1871 he blamed the Paris Commune for not being willing to start a civil war, and declared at the Congress of the International in the same year: “We must make clear to the governments: we know that you are the armed power that is directed against the proletariat; we will proceed against you by peaceful means where that is possible and with arms when it is necessary.”
But however much both Marx and Engels may have thought that force was sometimes the midwife of revolution, they never (except briefly in 1848 and under tsarist conditions in Russia) approved of the use of revolutionary terror. They strongly criticized the use of terror by the Jacobins in the French Revolution; its use was for Marx and Engels a sign of the weakness and immaturity of that revolution, which had tried to impose by sheer force what was not yet inherent in society.
It should be noted that the word “dictatorship” did not have quite the same connotation for Marx and Engels that it does for us. They associated it principally with the Roman office of dictatura, where all power was legally concentrated in the hands of a single man during a limited period in a time of crisis. Although Marx and Engels seldom discuss the measures that such a government would enact, the fullest account is the ten-point program outlined in the Communist Manifesto, which is in many respects a fairly moderate program.
Engels survived Marx by thirteen years, and toward the end of his life the growing electoral success of the Social Democrats in Germany led him to stress the evolutionary rather than the revolutionary side of Marxism and to declare the tactics of 1848 to be outmoded in every respect. This view is encapsulated in the preface to a reprint of Marx’s Class Struggles in France, written by Engels in 1895 shortly before he died, where he portrays the growth of social democracy as a natural, organic, process that could be endangered by revolutionary hotheads.
David McLellan
Eliot College
University of Kent
The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions
Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers
Chicago, London
1998
s.345:
One of the reasons why Marx and Engels did not think that violent revolution would automatically occur in the most advanced countries was that in some of the advanced countries communism could come about by peaceful means. In 1872 Marx spoke of his belief in the possibility of a peaceful revolution in America, England and in Holland. He took the same line in 1879 when he wrote:
“A historical development can only remain “peaceful” so long as it is not opposed by the violence of those who wield power in society at that time. If in England or the United States, for example, the working class were to gain a majority in Parliament or Congress, then it could by legal means set aside the laws and structures that stood in its way.”
Were the proletariat to gain a voting majority, Marx continued, any violence would come from the other side. However, in 1871 he blamed the Paris Commune for not being willing to start a civil war, and declared at the Congress of the International in the same year: “We must make clear to the governments: we know that you are the armed power that is directed against the proletariat; we will proceed against you by peaceful means where that is possible and with arms when it is necessary.”
But however much both Marx and Engels may have thought that force was sometimes the midwife of revolution, they never (except briefly in 1848 and under tsarist conditions in Russia) approved of the use of revolutionary terror. They strongly criticized the use of terror by the Jacobins in the French Revolution; its use was for Marx and Engels a sign of the weakness and immaturity of that revolution, which had tried to impose by sheer force what was not yet inherent in society.
It should be noted that the word “dictatorship” did not have quite the same connotation for Marx and Engels that it does for us. They associated it principally with the Roman office of dictatura, where all power was legally concentrated in the hands of a single man during a limited period in a time of crisis. Although Marx and Engels seldom discuss the measures that such a government would enact, the fullest account is the ten-point program outlined in the Communist Manifesto, which is in many respects a fairly moderate program.
Engels survived Marx by thirteen years, and toward the end of his life the growing electoral success of the Social Democrats in Germany led him to stress the evolutionary rather than the revolutionary side of Marxism and to declare the tactics of 1848 to be outmoded in every respect. This view is encapsulated in the preface to a reprint of Marx’s Class Struggles in France, written by Engels in 1895 shortly before he died, where he portrays the growth of social democracy as a natural, organic, process that could be endangered by revolutionary hotheads.
David McLellan
Eliot College
University of Kent
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