Discussion on Marx's ideas of the DOTP.
As there is no discussion on this and it's got to be the place to start (after all Marx claimed that his only contribution to political theory was the notion of the DotP) then this quote (critique of the Gotha Programme Pt IV) - http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...gotha/ch04.htm - seems apposite: "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." That seems fairly self-explanatory to me; it may do to others too, but we may all have different views that are hidden under our agreement with words we interpret differently. It seems to me that Marx's schema here implies that the DotP is a phase of capitalism. I know may comrades would dispute that.
It's more difficult because it is a transition, but, from reading that, I always gauged that the DOTP atleast started in capitalism and would end in communist society ( But at what point would that definitively happen, etc). Marx also said that the Paris Commune could not be socialism. That suggests socialism and the DOTP are separate, and/or that the conditions were simply not there.
