1.08: Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Questions of the bourgeois state, democracy, and the proletariat’s conquest of state power were the subject of a number of debates and attempts at theoretical formulation in the Second International. In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the dissolving of the Constituent Assembly, the stakes of the debate became even more pronounced, with figures such as Lenin, Kautsky, and Luxemburg focusing especially on the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat.

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The Measures Taken is a project to survey and reconstruct the history of Marxism from the development of mass Social Democracy to our own moment.Recognizing that Bolshevism has lapsed as a living political tendency, those of us who remain committed to revolutionary communist politics and convinced by the Marxist critique of political economy are left searching for a past capable of orienting us in the present. Mindful of the threat of eclecticism and all too cognizant of the infelicities of sectarianism, the hosts of this podcast embrace a non-denominational Marxism.Our purpose is self-education, never the display of expertise. We hope that our listeners extend to us the same principled courtesy we do our forebears: not to judge too [email protected]