Write write the contribution of philosophers in developing the ideology of socialism in europe
Answers
Marx’s greatest contribution to socialism was giving it scientific rigor. The socialists before him were Utopian (e.g., Owen, Fourier, Cabet) and Conspiratorial (e.g., Babeuf, Blanqui). His contemporary, Bakunin, was both at the same time! Contra Bakunin, Marx’s economic and political analysis of the actual material conditions of society provided socialism with a stronger foundation for revolutionary action.
*Because of misunderstandings (and misrepresentations on Quora) of one of Marx’s contributions to socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, I will focus on it alone.*
Marx started his political life as a radical liberal democrat in the early 1840s. But it did not take him long to see that liberalism, at its very best, offered political freedom. His goal was human emancipation. For humans to truly be free, Marx thought a social revolution was necessary.
In the CM, he theorized the unique revolutionary class character of the proletariat.
“All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.” https://www.marxists.org/archive...
“But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” The Civil War in France
The workers’ government of the Paris Commune of 1871, after seizing control of the state, began the deconstruction of the “machinery” of class rule, and thereby the necessary condition for the state itself:
“The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.”The Civil War in France
This was an example of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” par excellence. Studying history and the failures of contemporary revolutions led Marx to see the need for the working class to take governmental responsibilities during the period after a social revolution. Rome was not built in a day, neither will be socialism, despite anarchist daydreams. Every post-revolutionary period has proven to be precarious:
“so long as the other classes, especially the capitalist class, still exists, so long as the proletariat struggles with it (for when it attains government power its enemies and the old organization of society have not yet vanished), it must employ forcible means, hence governmental means. It is itself still a class and the economic conditions from which the class struggle and the existence of classes derive have still not disappeared and must forcibly be either removed out of the way or transformed, this transformation process being forcibly hastened.” Conspectus of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy
During this transitional period, from a bourgeois to a socialist society, Marx believed a workers’ government was necessary; that is, a dictatorship of the proletariat, which:
“acts, during the period of struggle for the overthrow of the old society, on the basis of that old society, and hence also still moves within political forms which more or less belong to it, it has not yet, during this period of struggle, attained its final constitution, and employs means for its liberation which after this liberation fall aside.” Conspectus of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy
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. Critique of the Gotha Programme-- IV
It should be clear that Marx believed the dictatorship of the proletariat was both necessary and temporary. Necessary because of, though not limited to, capitalist counter-revolutionary violence. Temporary because the state ceases to be an instrument of class rule once every member of society becomes a worker (i.e., if everyone is of the same class, with the same powers, then there are ipso facto no classes; and no need for a state as an instrument of class rule).