"Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat"

Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher and revolutionary socialist who composed extensively about the Paris Commune. In this quote, Engels is describing the Paris Commune of 1871, an innovative government that was established in Paris after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The Paris Commune was an extreme experiment in direct democracy and workers' control of the economy, and it is frequently viewed as a precursor to modern-day socialism. Engels believed that the Paris Commune was an example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," a term he coined to describe a form of federal government in which the working class holds political power. Engels argued that the Paris Commune was a model for how a socialist society might be arranged, and he believed that it revealed the capacity of the working class to take control of their own fate.