Breaking Up the State and Lopping off The Parasites: Lenin’s ‘Dictatorship of The Proletariat’ As The State That is Ceasing to be a State

This article examines the key features of the dictatorship of the proletariat as theorised by Lenin in the heat of Russia’s revolutionary process in 1917 and stresses its special character as a ‘state that is ceasing to be a state’. The dictatorship of the proletariat represented a new form of the class struggle, the turning of centralised coercive power against the few by the many, the dissolution of the centralised force of the state through its subjection to popular sovereignty, and the emancipation of the growing state from private relations of production through the ‘lopping off ’ of parasitic monopoly capitalists.