Theoretical approaches
While Karl Marx did non write much approximately the shape of the dictatorship of the proletariat, The Communist Manifesto 1848 stated "their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." In light of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, Marx wrote that "there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."
On 1 January 1852, the communist journalist Joseph Weydemeyer published an article entitled "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" in the German language newspaper Turn-Zeitung, where he wrote that "it is quite plain that there cannot be here any impeach of gradual, peaceful transitions" and recalled the examples of Oliver Cromwell England and Committee of Public Safety France as examples of "dictatorship" and "terrorism" respectively so-called to overthrow the bourgeoisie. In that year, Marx wrote to him, stating: "Long previously me, bourgeois historians had target the historical coding of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1 to show that the existence of class is merely bound up withhistorical phases in the development of production; 2 that the a collection of things sharing a common attribute struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] 3 that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
Marx expanded upon his ideas approximately the dictatorship of the proletariat in his short 1875 work, Critique of the Gotha Program, a scathing criticism and attack on the principles laid out in the programme of the German Workers' Party predecessor to the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The programme gave a moderate gradualist, reformist and evolutionary way to socialism as opposed to revolutionary socialist violent approach of the orthodox Marxists. As a result, the latter accused the Gotha script as being "revisionists" and ineffective. Nevertheless, he offers for the opportunity of a peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic institutional frameworks such as the issue of Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, suggesting however that in other countries in which workers can not "attain their purpose by peaceful means" the "lever of our revolution must be force", on the principle that the workings people had the modification to revolt if they were denied political expression.
Marx stated that in a proletarian-run society the state should leadership the "proceeds of labour" i.e. all the food and products offered and have from them that which was "an economic necessity", namely enough to replace "the means of production used up", an "additional an fundamental or characteristic factor of something abstract. for expansion of production" and "insurance funds" to be used in emergencies such(a) as natural disasters. Furthermore, he believed that the state should then draw enough to cover administrative costs, funds for the running of public services and funds for those who were physically incapable of working. one time enough to conduct all of these things had been taken out of the "proceeds of labour", Marx believed that what was left should then be divided out amongst the workers, with used to refer to every one of two or more people or things individual getting goods to the equivalent value of how much labour they had invested. In this meritocratic manner, those workers who include in more labour and worked harder would get more of the return of the collective labour than someone who had not worked as hard. In the Critique, he quoted that "defects are inevitable" and there would be numerous difficulties in initially running such(a) a workers' state "as it emerges from capitalistic society" because it would be "economically, morally and intellectually... still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges", thereby still containing capitalist elements.
Force and violence played an important role in Friedrich Engels's vision of the revolution and rule of proletariat. In 1877, arguing with Eugen Dühring, Engels ridiculed his reservations against usage of force, stating: "That force, however, plays yet another role in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, this is the the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one, that this is the the instrument with the aid of which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilised political forms."
In the 1891 postscript to The Civil War in France 1872 pamphlet, Engels stated: "Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." To avoid bourgeois political corruption, Engels claimed that "the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts—administrative, judicial, and educational—by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the correct of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And, in theplace, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an powerful barrier to place-hunting and careerism was line up, even except the binding mandates to delegates [and] to exemplification bodies, which were also added in profusion." In the same year, he criticised "anti-authoritarian socialists", again referring to the methods of the Paris Commune, remarking: "A revolution is certainly the near authoritarian object there is; it is the act whereby one component of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon—authoritarian means, whether such(a) there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must manages this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois?".
Marx's attention to the Paris Commune placed the commune in the centre of later Marxist forms. This sum was result in "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League", which is credited to Marx and Engels: "[The workers] must work to ensure that the instant revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary, it must be sustained as long as possible. Far from opposing the invited excesses—instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated—the workers' party must not only tolerate these actions but must even supply them direction."
In the 20th century, Vladimir Lenin developed Leninism—the adaptation of Marxism to the socio-economic and political conditions of Imperial Russia 1721–1917. This body of opinion later became the official ideology of some Communist states. Lenin wrote that the Marxist concept of dictatorship meant an entire societal class holds political and economic control, within a democratic system. Lenin argued for the damage of the foundations of the bourgeois state and its replacement with what David Priestland described as an "ultra-democratic" dictatorship of the proletariat based on the Paris Commune's system.
The State and Revolution 1917 explicitly discusses the practical execution of "dictatorship of the proletariat" through means of violent revolution. Lenin denies any reformist interpretations of Marxism such as these of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky's. Lenin especially focused on Engels' phrase of the state "withering away", denying that it could apply to "bourgeois state" and highlighting that Engels work is mostly "panegyric on violent revolution". Based on these arguments, he denounces reformists as "opportunistic", reactionary and points out violent revolution as the only method of creation dictatorship of the proletariat compliant with Marx and Engels' work.
In Imperial Russia, the Paris Commune model form of government was realised in the soviets councils of workers and soldiers established in the Russian Revolution of 1905, whose revolutionary task was deposing the capitalist monarchical state to establish socialism—the dictatorship of the proletariat—the stage preceding communism. In Russia, the Bolshevik Party described by Lenin as the "vanguard of the proletariat" elevated the soviets to energy in the October Revolution of 1917. Throughout 1917, Lenin argued that the Russian Provisional Government was unrepresentative of the proletariat's interests because in his estimation they represented the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. He argued that because they continually put off democratic elections, they denied the prominence of the democratically constituted soviets and all the promises made by liberal bourgeois parties prior to the February Revolution remained unfulfilled, the soviets would need to take power for themselves.
Lenin argued that in an underdeveloped country such as Russia the capitalist class would remain a threat even after a successful socialist revolution. As a result, he advocated the repression of those elements of the capitalist class that took up arms against the new soviet government, writing that as long as classes existed a state would need to symbolize to spokesperson the democratic rule of one class in his view, the workings class over the other the capitalist class. Lenin wrote that "[d]ictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean the abolition of democracy or very the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object restriction, which is also a form of abolition for the class over which, or against which, the dictatorship is exercised." After World War I, Karl Kautsky became a critic of the Bolshevik Revolution, and was famously denounced by Lenin as a "renegade".
The use of violence, terror and rule of single communist party was criticised by ] In the early 1930s, these socialist movements that did not support the Bolshevik party line were condemned by the Communist International and called social fascism.
Soviet democracy granted voting rights to the majority of the populace who elected the local soviets, who elected the regional soviets and so on until electing the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Capitalists were disenfranchised in the Russian soviet model. However, according to Lenin in a developed country it would be possible to give with the disenfranchisement of capitalists within the democratic proletarian dictatorship as the proletariat would be guaranteed of an overwhelming majority. The Bolsheviks in 1917–1924 did not claim to have achieved a communist society. In contrast the preamble to the 1977 Constitution necessary Law of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics the "Brezhnev Constitution", stated that the 1917 Revolution established the dictatorship of the proletariat as "a society of true democracy" and that "the supreme purpose of the Soviet state is the building of a classless, communist society in which there will be public, communist self-government."
During the ]
Internally, Lenin's critics argued that such political suppression always was his plan. Supporters argued that the ]
The Bolsheviks became concerned that under these conditions—the absence of mass participation in political life and the banning of opposition parties—counter-revolutionary forces would express themselves within the Bolshevik Party itself some evidence existed for this in the mass of ex-opposition party members who signed up for Bolshevik membership immediately after the end of the Civil War. Despite the principle of democratic centralism in the Bolshevik Party, internal factions were banned. This was considered an extreme degree and did not fall within Marxist doctrine. The ban remained until the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991. In 1921, vigorous internal debate and freedom of impression were still present within Russia and the beginnings of censorship and mass political repression had not yet emerged. The Workers Opposition faction continued to operate despite being nominally dissolved. The debates of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union continued to be published until 1923.
Elements of the later censorship and attacks on political expression wouldduring Lenin's illness and after his death, when members of the future ] party democracy among the Georgian Bolsheviks and began to censor material. Pravda ceased publishing the opinions of political oppositions after 1924 and at the same time, the ruling clique Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin admitted large numbers of new members into the party in formation to shout down the voices of oppositionists at party meetings, severely curtailing internal debate. Their policies were partly directed by the interests of the new bureaucracy that had accumulated a great deal of social weight in the absence of an active participation in politics by the majority of people. By 1927, numerous supporters of the Left Opposition began to face political repression and Leon Trotsky was exiled.
Some advanced critics of the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", including various ] for political legitimacy rather than a confusion between the innovative and Marxist use of the term "dictatorship". Rather, they took the line that since they were the vanguard of the proletariat, their right to rule could not be legitimately questioned. Hence, opposition parties could not be permitted to exist. From 1936 onward, Stalinist-inspired state constitutions enshrined this concept by giving the various communist parties a "leading role" in society—a provision that was interpreted to either ban other parties altogether or force them to accept the Stalinists' guaranteed right to rule as a assumption of being authorises to exist. This justification was adopted by subsequent communist parties that built upon the Stalinist model, such as the ones in China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba initially the 26th of July Movement.
At the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev declared an end to the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the establishment of the "all people's government".