3. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat as Transition
Marx proposed a temporary “dictatorship of the proletariat” where workers would control the state to dismantle capitalism. He saw this phase as transitional, not permanent. “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other,” Marx wrote in Critique of the Gotha Program. This intermediate stage would gradually dissolve as class distinctions faded, eventually leading to a stateless, classless society where coercion was unnecessary.
