The Utopian Collectivist Vision: Theory in Theory

Abstract

As Vladimir Lenin (1961 [1901]) said in 1901, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.”* By that time, Bolshevik theory already indicated that coercion would be necessary in order to bring about their vision. Bolshevik Utopian collectivists all agreed with Karl Marx that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would be necessary in the transition period between capitalism and communism, during the socialist (or “lower phase of communism”) period. Marx wrote this most succinctly in his “Critique of the Gotha Programme”: “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” (Marx, 1970 [1875]: chapter 4).† However, what was this dictatorship to look like?