The "dictatorship of the proletariat" from Marx to Lenin /

Draper must be counted the foremost contemporary authority on Marx's political writings. The first three (of a projected five) volumes of his encyclopedic study, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (1977-), demonstrated unrivaled command of the sources and a unique ability to combine analytic sophistication with clear, uncluttered, witty, and unpretentious writing. The present title is an offshoot of the third volume of the large work in which Draper examined the way Marx and Engels understood the phrase ``dictatorship of the proletariat.'' The near universal misinterpretation of its meaning (which, he argues persuasively, can only be construed as equivalent to ``rule of the working class'') derives largely from a 20th-century counterposing of dictatorship and democracy that was foreign to much 19th-century usage, including Marx's. This earlier argument is summarized in the first chapter; the remaining four take the history of the phrase from Engels's death to the consolidation of Stalin's regime in the 1920s. Confused and conflicting usage within the Second International is sketched in Chapter 2, the term's history in the Russian movement from Plekhanov to Lenin is outlined in Chapters 3 and 4, and its place in the post-1917 international socialist debate is described in Chapter 5. Although brief and perforce sketchy, Draper's survey is extraordinarily illuminating. No university collection can afford to overlook it. Upper-division and graduate students.-A.P. Simonds, University of Massachusetts at Boston