ABSTRACT
Socialist representative government has been neither necessarily fixed nor stagnant and, within its historical context, has been subject like any other system to evolution, development, and change. Much of what Karl Marx wrote regarding representative government, especially in 1843-1844, appears to have been influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideas on equality, the unity of civil and political society, and the importance of the political realm. Lucio Colletti traced to Rousseau Marx's "critique of parliamen tarism, the theory of popular delegacy and even the idea of the state's disappearance." Marx and Engels's notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat found its concrete expression in the Paris Commune of 1871. In the words of the French historian Henri Lefebvre, "This utopia, this alleged myth, became fact and life for a few days. The need for a working-class party was to become a central question for Marx and Engels after the defeat of the Commune.
