The State and Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Rather than undergoing the exhausting process of evaluating, analyzing, and reviewing Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ masterpiece, The Communist Manifesto, I’ve taken it upon myself to scrutinize (constructively of course) in a Marxist nature some of the most fundamental (and often times overlooked) principles of the philosophy. The nature of the state in which Marx (and his subsequent successors) is an important question of class antagonisms that are just as prevalent today as they were over 150 years ago. In regarding the questions of the state it’s imperative to identify another key tenet of Marxism, and that is the dictatorship of the proletariat. These concepts, as well as the other numerous points of particular importance, require a significant amount of study as well as putting things into context, and this is the ultimate aim of my work (Marx 382).

Before we begin, it is understood that when describing the state, Marx is actually talking about two important stages in the development of society. Marx defines the state in the following context: 

The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the    battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. (Karl Marx 384)