The Proletarian State

MARX and Engels thought the state would disappear in the higher phase of the communist society, but in the transitional lower phase of communist society—society as it would exist in the aftermath of proletarian revolution—the state would survive as a dictatorship of the working class. The Communist Manifesto thus speaks of the proletariat constituting itself as the ruling class. In The Class Struggles in France, written in 1850, Marx proclaimed “the class dictatorship of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the inevitable transit point to the abolition of class differences generally, to the abolition of all the productive relations on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social connections.”¹ Returning to the theme in a letter of 1852 to Joseph Weydemeyer, Marx declared that “the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat” and that “this dictatorship itself constitutes only the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”² Finally in his unpublished notes of 187$ on the Gotha Program, Marx wrote: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”³