ABSTRACT
Few issues have become as controversial in the Marxist movement as that concerning the function and form of leadership in the proletarian revolution and the socialist state. This chapter deals with Marx’s thoughts about leadership in capitalist society. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were strangely ambivalent about leadership in the proletarian revolution. They praise the spontaneous heroism, wisdom, and leadership of nameless activists in the Paris Commune or the German peasant war, and they pay homage to similar qualities in numerous leading figures of these and other revolutionary events. A number of controversies that troubled Marxism around the turn of the century arose over divergent interpretations of the confusing legacy concerning the role of leadership. The communist state proclaimed itself a dictatorship of the proletariat, and by the very terminology sanctioned authoritarian patterns of leadership and the routine application of coercion and terror as methods of government.
