Marx on the State, Proletarian Dictatorship and the Commune

This engagement with Marx is part of a much longer study of what happens to the state under socialism in power. Initially, I did not give so much attention to Marx’s observations on the state, for I had been told that Marx does not have a systematic theory of the state. To some extent this is true, especially if one focuses on the forms of the bourgeois (capitalist) or even absolutist state. However, once I began to examine what Marx did say about states, I found much more than might be expec...