DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 5

DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

Sir,-Mr. Scott says my recent letter does not contribute to the serious study of the Marxist theory of the state. I had no intention of doing so. I merely allowed Lenin, Stalin, and Vyshinsky to speak for themselves and would not presume to know, better than they did, what they meant. He says I wrenched quotations from their context. I did not. Indeed, Sir, you were so generous as to afford me half a page of your valuable space so that I might be able to avoid doing just that. In his penultimate paragraph Mr. Scott accuses me of having ideas which I certainly did not claim to have. I did not say "the Soviet people are to be led against the bourgeoisie of the capitalist countries." I quoted Vyshinsky, whom Mr. Scott chooses to ignore, and summarised his expressed ideas. Is there still a bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union? If there be not, where is the justification for even Mr. Scott’s dictatorship of the proletariat in that country? Mr. Scott evidently realises there is neither Communism nor Socialism in the Soviet Union, for he writes that all that Lenin and Stalin said of the need of the dictatorship of the proletariat is applicable to the transition state from capitalism to socialism. In this he is right, for in the Soviet Union today we find nothing but state capitalism, controlled, during my years of residence there, by Stalin, and today by a directorate of five men headed by Malenkov. The millions express themselves by voting, with one name on the ballot paper, for the members of the Supreme Soviet which sits for a fortnight a year. This institution is elected, on the principle of Hobson’s choice, ostensibly to direct, in a fortnight, the affairs .of "tens of millions of people who will introduce socialism when they have learned to do everything for themselves," as Mr. Scott quotes Lenin. It is worth. while to quote from Mr. Scott’s letter this sentence: "Allow me

to quote the classic definition of Lenin which has been used many times by Stalin: ‘the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a special form of class alliance between the proletariat, the vanguard of the toilers, and the numerous nonproletarian strata of the toilers, the small proprietors, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, the intelligentsia, etc., or the majority of these-.’" Quite! Does not this admit that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a dictatorship of the proletariat? "Who is the potter, pray, and who the pot?" I had, and have, no wish to enter into a controversy with Mr. Scott on the merits or demerits of either Marxism or Stalinism. I wrote to give the opinions expressed lucidly by Lenin, Stalin and Vyshinsky on the connotation of the term dictatorship of the proletariat. I stand by what I wrote, but because of my intrusion into a controversy I feel that courtesy compels me to answer him -hence this letter.

CHAS. W.

BOSWELL

Auckland),