The Nature of the Soviet Type of Society

Abstract

According to the ideas and theories set forth by Marx and Engels, after a proletarian revolution society will, and must, elevate the working class to the position of ruling class, promote thorough democracy, decompose the bourgeois relations of production, and nationalise, or make public, the ownership of land and the means of production. Then, in the course of the development of history, class distinctions will disappear, public power will lose its political character, the State will wither away, and an associational society will blossom, in which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (MECW, 6, p. 506). The entire process should also incorporate the principle of proletarian internationalism. The Soviet and other post-revolutionary ‘socialist’ countries, which contained about 35 percent of the population of the world, all started with such ideas and theories.