Communist Party of Czechoslovakia - Function

Function

According to Marxist-Leninist theory, the communist party represented the working class — the revolutionary proletariat — whose interests it championed against those of the capitalist bourgeoisie. The period between the fall of a bourgeois state and the attainment of communism is a subject on which Marx was reticent, describing only in general terms the establishment of a democratic socialist state, which would eventually begin to "wither away" (slowly turn into a form of direct democracy) until a communist society was achieved. Several decades later, Vladimir Lenin, facing a real revolution and the possibility that the communist party might be able to seize power, put theoretical subtleties to the side. He suggested that the fall of the bourgeois state (a label of questionable accuracy when applied to tsarist Russia, if one forgets the February 1917 revolution) would be followed by a transitional state characterized by socialism, soviet democracy and communist party rule – the "dictatorship of the proletariat."