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Dictatorship of the Proletariat
The dictatorship of the proletariat refers to the temporary phase of democratic rule that the German theorist Karl Marx (1818–83) and many of his followers believed would need to follow the fall of capitalism in order to make the advent of a communist society possible. In The Communist Manifesto ([1848] 1967), Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) claim that the route from capitalism to communism is not direct but will necessarily go through several stages. First, capitalism will inevitably collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions as the condition of the oppressed and impoverished majority (the proletariat) becomes unbearable. In the wake of this collapse of capitalism, a battle for democracy would ensue between the desperate and dispossessed majority and the small class of ...
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