ABSTRACT

The conventional notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" has immobilized Marxist thinking about the state, democracy, and political strategy to the extent that a simplistic, outmoded formula became a substitute for real theoretical discussion and analysis. The failure of the most successful Marxist currents to elaborate a coherent approach to either bourgeois or socialist democracy is all the more striking given the strong commitment of both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to democratization. When Karl Kautsky argued for a merging of socialism and democracy, it was always parliamentary democracy that he had in mind; one does not encounter a discussion of socialist democracy anywhere in his work, or even an extensive critique of the bourgeois state. Talk of socialist democracy was regarded by Bernstein and the Social Democratic party right as romantic gibberish; references to the "withering away of the state" were seen as hopelessly utopian.