The people at the top of the economic hierarchy making decisions for the rest of us to follow don't seem too smart either. Yes. I've worked many places. Ordinary workers are capable of impressive things but most of the time they have no incentive to really shine or be productive.
Basically you're proposing a false dilemma by creating the impression that ordinary workers aren't already running 90% of society. The difference between capitalism and socialism will be that workers will be working directly for their own benefit and society as a whole instead of CEOs and shareholders.
Lucas Allen
A state is an instrument of class rule. Right now we’re living under what is essentially the dictatorship of capital (the bourgeoisie). When the tables are flipped, it’s the dictatorship (class rule) of the vast majority of society – that is the DOTP
William Sanders
I've been thinking about this and the simplification of political and economic terms when talking about politics with fellow workers less educated them me, and I reached the conclusion: DON'T DO IT! First off, to limit your vocabulary necessarily implies limiting the ideas you can express. The transitional phase is called a DICTATORSHIP because it is a violent period of fighting counter-revolution, and repressing reactionary forces. Call it a transitional phase and you make it broad to the point of being unclear what it even is. Call it a democracy of workers and people will be fooled into believing the bourgeoisie should have their rights preserved, allowing the pork to plot against the interest of the people, like it always happens in social democracies.
Secondly, you're robbing the workers of the joyful and fulfilling process of learning. People like learning new words and gaining new insights. And to dedicate some time to educate workers is to have a more intelligent, more capable of resisting workers; dumber people have a more limited vocabulary, but fortunately the opposite is also true.
Lincoln Hall
Yes but mostly because the concept of the proletariat is obsolete and not the for cowardly reasons you list. The older definitions of 'dictatorship' can easily be explained in a sentence or two, this is no problem for anyone with a functioning brain.
There's nothing left to say and I have no idea why this thread has more than one reply to it.
Matthew Hill
It’s not being “afraid” of the word dictatorship per se, it’s a question of which language is the best to use and the least obscurant when spreading Marxist ideas, especially in places like America where people are spooked out of their minds and have been raised from birth on anti-communist propaganda and blatant lies. Of course the term can be easily be explained, and would be too. The person would obviously learn the terms anyway if they went and looked at any Marxist literature. This isn’t about concealing the fact that we’re Marxists or engaging in revisionism, it’s about which terms and language are most conductive to actually getting people to listen to our ideas and start seriously considering them. I don’t know if you’re American or not but if you start going around and preaching for a dictatorship (no matter what this means) you cannot tell me that you would not be ripped to shreds by right-wingers and bourgeois retards in the media and elsewhere if you started to get involved in serious politics and started getting attention. Of course they will do this regardless, but I still think it’s valid to raise questions about the terminology most fruitful for winning people over or when speaking to actual proles. It doesn’t matter that the DOTP is synonymous with proletarian / worker’s democracy, people will go nuts here in the US if you start talking about dictatorships of any form. I think having a discussion on what terminology is must fruitful for speaking to the less class concious is a needed thing. It’s not the language Marx and Engels used which is important, it’s the substance of their ideas, no matter the term used. I care about the substance rather than the forms of words themselves and if changing terminology while keeping the exact substance is needed of course I’ll do it. Think realistically here. I think back to my own anti-communist days. The DOTP in my mind was associated with totalitarianism, mass-killings, 1984-tier governments and anti-communist propaganda. Sure, it was a belief taken in ignorance but surely I did not deviate from the view of the average person in any truly significant way. How so? If we define the proletariat as those who live by selling their labor-power to the bourgeoisie I’d say most of society can accurately described as proles
