@strypey @jeffcliff Marx didn't think that power would whither away. The socialists of his time saw what happened to the Paris commune and concluded that to succeed there would need to be a "dictatorship of proletarians" as a transitionary step to communism. Only if the social revolution believed to be immanent could be actively defended could it survive in an environment of hostile imperialism. This frames the thinking of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union which followed.