Dictatorship of the Proletariat
프롤레타리아 독재
The core concept of the Marxist theory of the state: in the transition after the revolution the working class must hold state power. Lenin made it concrete in The State and Revolution as the smashing of the bourgeois state machine and soviet power, and its interpretation later became central to every debate on the nature of the Soviet system.
In depth
Formation of the concept
Marx used the expression rarely, but its content is consistent from his early writings. The Communist Manifesto describes a transitional period in which the working class takes state power and centralizes the means of production, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) holds that between capitalist and communist society lies a political transition whose state form is the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Dictatorship in the usage of the time did not mean rule by one man. Originating in the Roman republican concept of emergency authority, the word named a condition in which a particular class exercises ruling power, and Marx used the symmetrical formulation that bourgeois democracy is likewise a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
The Paris Commune and Lenin's concretization
The Paris Commune gave the concept empirical content. In The Civil War in France (1871) Marx listed as the Commune's features the abolition of the standing army and the arming of the people, the election and recall of officials, the fusion of legislative and executive functions, and payment of public office at workers' wages. The point was not to take over the state apparatus but to replace its form.
Lenin reconstructed this account in The State and Revolution (1917). His formulation was that the bourgeois state machine must be smashed, that a new type of state, the soviet, takes its place, and that this state exists only insofar as it performs a function of class rule and withers away as classes disappear.
Interpretive dispute
The interpretation of the concept became central to left argument in the twentieth century. Luxemburg, commenting on the Russian revolution in 1918, argued that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be an extension of democracy rather than its abolition, while Kautsky attacked the soviet system as a dictatorship of a party rather than of a class.
In the USSR the concept served as justification for the existing regime, and after the 1936 Constitution it coexisted with the formulation of a state of the whole people. After the 1961 programme declared the dictatorship of the proletariat concluded, Western communist parties began deleting the expression from their own programmes. Whether that decision in the Eurocommunist current amounted to abandoning the concept or reinterpreting it democratically became a further dispute.