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Dictatorship of the Proletariat

anecdote · Lenin · retold in 3 talks

Žižek redefines 'dictatorship of the proletariat' not as party rule, but as the recognition of the non-representational, unconditional excess of power inherent in the state.

2010: 1 talk 2018: 2 talks
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026

As told 2

“dictatorship means for me a non-representative functioning of politics”
“Marx's idea is that the truth was nonetheless in the form. The job they objectively did was to install a bourgeois republic.”

What it carries

one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)

Its cast and sources

populated by
alongside works

Every retelling 3

Žižek redefines 'dictatorship of the proletariat' not as party rule, but as the recognition of the non-representational, unconditional excess of power inherent in the state., illustrating dictatorship aspect of democracy
~1:21:57 Whither Left?2010-01-09 · 2:12:27
Lenin in 1922 openly admitted that Russia had a working-class party dictatorship without a working class, since the class had been destroyed in the Civil War, a sign of his tragic lucidity versus Stalin's self-deception., illustrating the Lenin-Stalin difference,revolutionary honesty
Marx's analysis of the French 'Party of Order' who privately mocked the Republic as royalists but objectively installed a bourgeois republic, illustrating that the 'truth' of ideology lies in the surface action, not private intent., illustrating Big Other functioning in an ironic mode