No parliamentary elections could then simply elect a Workers' Government, given that the workers represented a minority, as against peasants, let alone as against the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. That did not mean, as the Lassalleans had claimed in The Gotha Programme, that all of these other classes constituted one single reactionary bloc as against the workers, because the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, as transitional classes, were themselves in the process of differentiation into a bourgeoisie and proletariat.
“On the other hand, the proletariat is revolutionary relative to the bourgeoisie because, having itself grown up on the basis of large-scale industry, it strives to strip off from production the capitalist character that the bourgeoisie seeks to perpetuate. But the Manifesto adds that the "lower middle class" is becoming revolutionary "in view of [its] impending transfer to the proletariat".
From this point of view, therefore, it is again nonsense to say that it, together with the bourgeoisie, and with the feudal lords into the bargain, "form only one reactionary mass" relative to the working class.”
(ibid)
In all those societies, where the peasantry remained a majority, or even large proportion, of society, therefore, the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, could only be replaced by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, and any corresponding government could only be a Workers and Peasants' Government, not simply a Workers' Government. But, as Lenin sets out in The April Theses, these formulations are algebraic. They do not establish what the proportions of workers and peasants this represents, and nor does it specify the particular form of government, or political regime this represents. This latter point becomes relevant following the establishment of the Paris Commune, and of the 1905 Russian Revolution, because both of these events bring forth a new type of political regime, and form of government, and of state – that of the workers' council or soviet.
This new type of government and political regime answers some of the questions that history had posed at the time of the Revolutions of 1848. In 1848, the workers necessarily lined up behind the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie against the landed aristocracy. As Marx put it in The Critique of the Gotha Programme,
“In the Communist Manifesto it is said:
"Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product."
The bourgeoisie is here conceived as a revolutionary class – as the bearer of large-scale industry – relative to the feudal lords and the lower middle class, who desire to maintain all social positions that are the creation of obsolete modes of production. thus, they do not form together with the bourgeoisie "only one reactionary mass".”
In other words, the landed aristocracy, together with the lower peasants, formed a reactionary opposition to both the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, and the richer peasants and petty-bourgeoisie that was becoming more bourgeoisified, as its capital accumulated. We see something similar in later periods, whereby, the poorer elements of society rather than being driven towards progressive solutions are driven into the camp of reaction, as they try to hold back, or even turn back, the process of social development that is passing them by. That is the case, for example, with the support for Brexit, not just from the petty-bourgeoisie, but also amongst those backward sections of workers that have been left behind in precarious and unskilled jobs in dying industries, in decaying old urban towns.
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