Would Karl Marx have supported the actions of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc? I am talking about their harsh actions, not about the dogma they believe in.
I’m no expert in Marx the man, so take this as a rough hypothesis:
Pol Pot, no. Stalin and Mao, eh, maybe some of the “revolutionary” stuff, but not all the abuses and callousness once in power.
Ok, I am no expert either I am just curious as to the answer to the question. Thanks for your reply.
The Marxian idea of the Dictatorship of the Workers was more like the American Labor Union system, where the workers made their own rules regarding safety, hours, production schedules, etc, rather than have the bosses tell them what they had to do.
He wasn’t envisioning immense totalitarian intrusions like the Cultural Revolution of the starving of the farmworkers.
Also, he envisioned the dictatorship of the workers to fade away as unnecessary, as the Philosopher Kings – uh – enlightened communists made decisions with faultless wisdom.
It’s sort of like asking if Jesus would have approved of the Holy Inquisition. A strong centralized hierarchical Catholic Church…maybe. Burning people alive, not so much.
wow, thanks for such a great answer 
Knowing what Marx thought of Robespierre, Hébert and the Terror would give us a good idea of what he would have thought about the longer, bigger scale versions in the USSR and China. I don’t know myself but he must have written about it.
He would be starting from a different viewpoint from most of us, in that he would have been thinking much more of historical determinism, i.e., people didn’t necessarily have an entirely free moral choice about such matters. Apparently, while for a time in 1848 he thought a period of terror as in the original French revolution was the only way to settle the issue between the revolutionary and reactionary sides, and supported violent tactics under the Tsars, he appears to have thought terrorism as we know it today to be counter-productive in most circumstances. But he remarked, in writing on the Paris Commune of 1870, that "After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief. ", and that with every attempt by the old system and classes to pull back some of their privileges and power in such a way - and not least in the way the conservative forces in the new National Assembly sought to isolate and overrule the Paris Commune - “Would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by affecting to keep all the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace?”. But that was remarking on the suppression of newspapers, dismissing civil servants of the old regime from their jobs and removing state support and privileges from the church.
I doubt if he would have foreseen entire totalitarian systems, established as such for permanence; he might have seen a theoretical justification for Leninism, as a temporary measure in the circumstances of the Russian Civil War. But the paranoia of the late 20s and early 30s in Russia, let alone the intra-Party purges of the 30s and their use as a means of providing slave labour for rapid industrialisation? Not, I suspect, within his mental framework. And he must surely have regarded Pol Pot’s “back to the land” fantasy as profoundly anti-historical.
Marx thought that violence was a necessary part of the revolution. In writing about the failure of the revolution of 1848 in Vienna he wrote" there is only one means to shorten, simplify and concentrate the murderous death throes of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new, only one means – revolutionary terrorism."
He thought that violent revolution was the only way to achieve communism. He thought after the revolution the only way to keep it was violent repression of the counter revolution.
I don’t thing he would have supported the back to the land policies of Pol Pot but the violence and the massacre of enemies, he would have supported.
A violent war may be necessary to overthrow an old regime, but the idea of instituting a political dictatorship in the hope that those in power will peacefully abandon it once a new society has been established is a pipe dream. When Marx advocated permanent revolution, he regarded dictatorship as an unavoidable means to achieve a just and right society. He probably hoped that the more equitable treatment of workers would make up for the lack of freedom.
That’s an interesting idea that I’ve never seen discussed. Certainly the flag of the soviet union was the hammer and the sickle. But did Cambodia have any industrial workers? I’d thought that Pol Pot was aiming at educating/eliminating the reactionary class, and it just happened that the cities didn’t contain anything else?
The major inconsistency between Marx and the putative Marxist states is that Marx was very clear that communism would only emerge from an advanced industrial capitalist society, which does not at all describe any of the countries where communist revolutions took place. While Marx undoubtedly would have been broadly sympathetic to the 20th century communist revolutionaries, he would not have agreed with their various modifications of Marxist thought that would allow them to leapfrog over the industrial capitalism phase of history straight to communism.
Marx would likely have viewed the excessive violence and other atrocities of those states as a direct consequence of their attempts to impose communism in societies where the proletariat was not sufficiently advanced. He would have likely condemned it not because he was opposed to revolutionary violence, but because he would have believed it was futile in that context.
IIRC, Marx believed that communism was more likely to happen somewhere like Germany, or Britain than Russia.
Marx opined that in some countries, such as Britain and Holland, people might have be able to use the electoral process to move to socialism without violence. In the last years of his life, he was very interested in developments in Russia and suggested that the peasantry would be an important factor in any transformation to socialism. By the “dictatorship of the proletariat” Marx meant nothing like Stalin or Pol Pot, more like workers using the state–the judicial system, armed forces–the way capitalists use it to protect themselves. Any violence, he argued, was essentially in self-defence, and likely to result because those in power would be reluctant to give it up. The difference, in Marx’s view, is that workers make up the vast majority of the population, and so their use of the state would be more democratic than its use by capitalists. That is, for the first time, the state would be used by the majority to enforce the will of the majority, not the small minority of capitalists. And it would be decentered and localized: see his writings on the Paris Commune, which he argued was the model for socialism. It makes more sense to see Marx as someone who believed democracy should be extended to all spheres of life, especially work, than as a proto-dictator.
But the fact is, Marx wrote very little on what socialism would look like or how it would come to be. Mostly he criticized economists for justifying capitalism and the exploitation of workers and presented another way to understand how the economy worked, a way that justified workers’ resistance.
Well, there was Pinochet…
IIRC, Pinochet’s regime ended when he was arrested for human rights violations while he was in Britain, not because he was interested in a peaceful transformation to democracy.
Pinochet was actually voted out of office in 1988, and accepted the results.
He was arrested in Britain in 1998, but had been out of office all the time between.
You remember incorrectly.
Last day as president of Chile: 11 March 1990: Augusto Pinochet - Wikipedia
Indictment: 10 October 1998. Arrest: 16 October 1998 Indictment and arrest of Augusto Pinochet - Wikipedia
“Aylwin won the December 1989 presidential election with 55% of the votes,[49] against less than 30% for the right-wing candidate, Hernán Büchi, who had been Pinochet’s Minister of Finances since 1985 (there was also a third-party candidate, Francisco Javier Errázuriz, a wealthy aristocrat representing the extreme economic right, who garnered the remaining 15%[49]). Pinochet thus left the presidency on 11 March 1990 and transferred power to the new democratically elected president.”
Augusto Pinochet - Wikipedia
A better example is the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who were the first Marxist regime to give up power voluntarily when they lost a democratic election.
But neither the Sandinistas nor Pinochet gave up power because they believed that their image of a “new society” had been firmly established.
Exactly. I meant to make this precise observation but then I decided to let it go lest I engaged in a futile argument. I regard the idea of a communist ruler and oligarchy giving up their power simply because the new society has successfully been established as one of the biggest flaws in Marx’s reasoning.
Oh, and by the way. A real dictatorship never collapses as a result of democratic elections.
Agree on that.