The biggest secret

“The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is a book I've been looking for…for almost 30 years. I assumed it would make an excellent addition to my private library of the good, the bad and the really ugly. I recently found it, free of charge, on the World Wide Web. Thank you.

Originally published in Colombia in 1978, “The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is an intra-mural Trotskyist polemical tract by one Darioush Karim directed against “Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, a resolution presented by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. Karim believed that the Fourth International had become soft on “bourgeois democracy” and fundamentally revised Lenin's and Trotsky's positions on the matter. Hence, his polemic.

The mysterious Darioush Karim was better known under an alternate pseudonym, Nahuel Moreno. An Argentine Trotskyist of some standing, Moreno headed a politically “orthodox” tendency within the Fourth International, known as the Bolshevik Faction. It left the international in 1979 and eventually created an international organization of its own, known as LIT-CI. The Morenoites had relatively strong groups in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Nicaragua. Their “sections” in the Western world were much smaller. When I tried to procure a copy of “The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from the local Morenista group in Sweden circa 1988, I got the distinct impression that they weren't distributing the text anymore, probably because the politics of LIT-CI had become more similar to those of the Fourth International on a number of points. LIT did their best to sound as “democratic” and anti-Stalinist as possible, making me suspect that Karim's book had become a liability. Meanwhile, it had acquired a kind of underground notoriety on the far left, supposedly being some kind of explicitly anti-democratic Über-screed.

Although Moreno-Karim's book doesn't sound as extreme as some of Lenin's and Trotsky's writings from the Russian Civil War period, the old chameleon doesn't disappoint either. He argues in favor of the traditional Bolshevik position on “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, clearly stating that it means the dictatorship of the most revolutionary sector of the working class organized in a Marxist party. While non-Bolshevik political parties shouldn't necessarily be banned, they shouldn't necessarily be allowed either. How much “workers' democracy” should exist is a purely tactical matter, and it's clear from his book that Moreno veers strongly towards the prohibitive side, again like the Bolsheviks during and after the Civil War. Due to the strength of world imperialism and capitalism, the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution will be violent, prolonged and global, making undemocratic forms of “proletarian” rule both inevitable and necessary. Red terror, extrajudicial struggle á la the Cheka against counter-revolutionaries, and plain old lynching of particularly egregious class enemies will be the order of the day. Collective punishment of the bourgeoisie and the taking of hostages among “innocent” class enemies are also necessary. In effect, Moreno is calling for a Morenoite one party state. He has some problems with Trotsky's more democratic formulations from the late 1930's, but argues that correctly interpreted Trotsky didn't really change his old position. More sensationally, Moreno claims that Trotsky revised the standard Marxist analysis of the Paris Commune, arguing that the Commune itself was “bourgeois” and that the dictatorship of the proletariat was represented solely by the “Central Committee of the National Guard”. Moreno says he supports Trotsky's revision of Marx and Lenin on this point.

Two other things strike me when reflecting on Moreno's tract. One is the author's constant attacks on the “labor aristocracy” of the Western nations, instead adopting an orientation to the workers of the Third World. This is surely unusual for a Trotskyist (but not necessarily opposed to Trotsky's own perspective), since most Trotskyist groups are to be found in North America and Western Europe, as if the world revolution would start in Blackpool, Quartier Latin or West Berlin. The other striking fact about “The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is the Stalinistic tendency. True, Moreno does call for a “political revolution” against the privileged bureaucracy of the Soviet Union, China and similar states. However, he also strongly emphasizes the other side of the Trotskyist equation: that these states are “workers' states”, that they have more (sic) “workers' democracy” than any capitalist nation due to their unions, people's communes and full employment, and that the bureaucratic deformations of these regimes should be blamed on imperialism. These arguments, of course, are taken straight from the arsenal of Stalinism, the same Stalinism Moreno otherwise opposes! He even claims that the Soviet Union and China are ruled by “workers”, since the “labor bureaucracy” and the “labor aristocracy” are part of the working class! Was Brezhnev a particularly privileged worker?

During the 1980's and the 1990's, LIT-CI (as already indicated) sounded just as “democratic” as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and arguably even more anti-Stalinist, so I can understand why the Morenoites turned Karim's book into esoteric lore. Admittedly, they did offer to photocopy the book for my benefit, but it sounded too complicated and too expensive, so I turned down the offer.

I'm not sure who would be interested in “The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” today, but if reading Trotsky's “Terrorism and Communism”, Lenin's “The Proletarian Revolution and the renegade Kautsky” or Bordiga's “The Democratic Principle” is your cup of vodka, this Morenoite truth kit may be an interesting digestif.