dictatorship of the proletariat
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.89 in modern English
44
Scrabble Score
28
Letters
7
Syllables
13
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A socio-political power characterized by a struggle to achieve a communist society, as opposed to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "If a revolution is to be victoriously carried through, it will require a concentrated power, a dictatorship at its head. Cromwell's dictatorship was necessary in order to establish the supremacy of the English bourgeoisie; the terrorism of the Paris Commune and of the Committee of Public Safety alone succeeded in breaking the resistance of the feudal lords on French soil. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat which is concentrated in the big cities, the bourgeois reaction will not be done away with."
- "What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
- "Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat."
- "Only after it was all over did I learn of their plan to seize me on board the Chungshan when I was to take it to go back to the Military Academy at Whampoa from Canton. They would then send me as a prisoner to Russia via Vladivostok, thereby removing the major obstacle to their scheme of using the National Revolution as a medium for setting up a "dictatorship of the proletariat.""
- "Leading members of the CCP core group of Haihsi Mongol-Tibetan-Kazakh Autonomous District said: To continue the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is necessary to increase class feeling in the course of the struggle between the two lines."
Etymology
Calque of German Diktatur des Proletariats. Initially worded as Diktatur der Arbeiterklasse “dictatorship of the working class” and Klassendiktatur des Proletariats “class dictatorship of the proletariat”, both attested earliest in Karl Marx's series The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 [1850]. Two early appearances of the precise wording Diktatur des Proletariats “dictatorship of the proletariat” are in: * Joseph Weydemeyer's article “Die Diktatur des Proletariats” [1 January 1852]; and * Marx's letter to Weydemeyer [5 March 1852].