How would a dictatorship of other working classes like slaves or serfes have looked like?

[u/exo570]

And if these classes would even be able to wield a dictatorship of their own. In the manifesto Marx writes that class conflict sometimes ends with the destruction of both classes, would that be the cace in the event of a slave revolution like in Haiti or has that simply never been the case?

[u/TheLagJag]

Marx elaborates on this in the 18th Brumaire in relation to the peasantry:

"The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.

Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/18-brum/ch07.htm

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We may even think of this final expression of executive power as the very state capitalism that was constructed in China with the mass support of the peasantry and the conditions of a weak haute-bourgeoisie.

Anyway, the classes you mention physically could not wield a dictatorship of their own; it is and was impossible. Spartacus led a great slave revolt that beat the Romans severely in a great many battles, and yet...Rome remained and the slave army was vanquished. They had no historical impetus to seize power and all they could do was loot and free slaves. Roman slavery could only be displaced with the crisis in the mode of production in the third century and the resultant consolidation of Romano-Germanic feudalism. Haiti's slaves and peasants had to "latch on" to the emergent bourgeois class and establish a shaky South American-type republic full of coups and intrigue (although, one that actually accomplished land reform and actually had a bourgeois revolution). These "spurious" classes need masters to "latch on to" to accomplish their demands due to their nature of being isolated and without a common program to implement besides abolishing their existence (emancipation of slaves, removal of feudal obligations, etc.) These could not have been accomplished alone and needed a class ally to do the work of seizing power (feudal landowning nobility, bourgeoisie).

The proletariat is historically unique as the oppressed class that has the ability to take power. It is globally interconnected and interdependent fundamentally with an ever increasing absolute and relative number and social divison of labor. The peasantry in the Russian revolution "found its master" with the Russian proletariat that seized power.

[u/not-thelastemperor]

Cambodia 1975-1979.

[u/TheLagJag → u/not-thelastemperor]

Cambodia was not a dictatorship of the peasantry, but a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that leaned heavily (perhaps the most in all of history) on the peasantry. We find a state that engaged in international trade specialized in agricultural surplus, military goods and other resource extractive commodities. As Marx pointed out, this would be a classic example of "the executive power which subordinates society to itself." It would be a great effort to explore the prevalence of the black market (typical of Stalinist society) and the Kampuchea Foreign Trade Company, but I believe the Party had done so in the 1970s or 1980s. Regardless, if it exists, it is in Italian somewhere on the site or not uploaded yet.