Time Proved the Anarchists Right: Social Revolution Broke Out in an Agrarian Country, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Was a Permanent Dictatorship of Nonworkers, and It Was Done by a Direct Assault on Government

The theories formulated by Marx and Engels provided the program of the International Workingmen’s Association, popularly known as the First International, which they founded in London in 1864 to prepare labor for the approaching crisis of capitalism. The organization was from the first riven by disputes between socialists and anarchists. Although the anarchists shared with the socialists a common goal—a classless and stateless society—as well as the means to the end—violent revolution—in three important respects they parted ways with them. The anarchists saw the revolutionary potential not in the industrial working class but in the landless peasantry and the unemployed. Secondly, the social-ists envisaged between collapsing capitalism and triumphant communism a transitional stage (sometimes called “dictatorship of the proletariat”), during which the new ruling class would use the coercive powers of the state to dispossess the bourgeoisie of its capital and nationalize productive assets. The anarchists rejected the state in all its forms, predicting that the “proletarian dictatorship” would turn into a new instrument of oppression, this time run by and for the benefit of intellectuals. Finally, while the Marxists relied on the natural progression of the capitalist economy to bring about a revolution, the anarchists called for “direct action,” that is, an immediate assault on the existing system.

Time proved the anarchists right on all three points: social revolutions broke out not in industrial countries but in agrarian ones, and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” did turn the communist state into a permanent dictatorship of nonworkers over manual laborers and peasants. The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 Russia also was the result of a direct assault on government in a country where capitalism was still in its early phase of development.

Thus, virtually every one of Marx’s predictions turned out to be wrong, as became increasingly apparent during his lifetime and incontrovertibly so after his death.

--Richard Pipes, Communism: A History, Modern Library Chronicles (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), e-book.