Rosa Luxembourg & the dictatorship of the proletariat.

 

Louis Auguste Blanqui

It was the nominal President of the Paris Commune, Auguste Blanqui, who coined the term the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to mean rule on behalf of the common people. But most of the Communards were not socialists. 

The Paris Commune of 1871, was Marx's main model for popular self-government, but it only lasted three months until it was suppressed by the regular French army. Lenin used phrases like "all cooks shall govern" and "all power to the Soviets" but I don't think that he believed a word of it. He wasn't even in favour of workers' control. 

Rosa Luxembourg warned Lenin that revolution can move swiftly from the dictatorship of a class to the dictatorship of a party, to be followed by the dictatorship of a committee of the party and eventually by the rule of a single man who will soon enough dispense with that committee. Her Cassandra like prediction and warning, is exactly what occurred in Soviet Russia. Before Rosa Luxembourg, the Russian socialist Alexander Herzen, had said that communism was just Russian autocracy turned upside down. 

The Marxist German SDP preached international working-class solidarity but when war broke out in 1914, they supported the war and became jingoistic. The Marxist, Karl Liebknecht, was the only member of the Reichstag to vote against Germany's participation in the war and he campaigned against the war. As a punishment, he was sent to the front, despite his immunity as a member of parliament.