Marxist theory envisions that a new democratic society would rise through the organized actions of the international working class, enfranchising the entire population and freeing up humans to act without being bound by the labour market. There would be little, if any, need for a state, the goal of which was to enforce the alienation of labour; as such, the state would eventually wither away as its conditions of existence disappear. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels stated in The Communist Manifesto (1848) and later works that "the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy", and universal suffrage being "one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat".

As Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), "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". He allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic institutional structures (Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands) but suggested that in other countries in which workers can not "attain their goal by peaceful means", the "lever of our revolution must be force" on the grounds that the working people had the right to revolt if they were denied political expression.

In response to the question "What will be the course of this revolution?" in The Principles of Communism (1847), Friedrich Engels wrote: "Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat." While Marxists propose replacing the bourgeois state with a proletarian semi-state through revolution (dictatorship of the proletariat), which would eventually wither away, anarchists warn that the state must be abolished along with capitalism. Nonetheless, the desired end results (a stateless communal society) are the same.

Marx criticized liberalism as not democratic enough and found the unequal social situation of the workers during the Industrial Revolution undermined the democratic agency of citizens. Some argue democratic decision-making consistent with Marxism should include voting on how surplus labor is to be organized. Marxists differ in their positions towards democracy; in the words of Robert Meister, "controversy over Marx's legacy today turns largely on its ambiguous relation to democracy." The stance on political violence varies among Marxists; while Marx saw peaceful means possible, Lenin affirmed political violence and political terror.

In the 19th century, The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels called for the international political unification of the European working classes in order to achieve a communist revolution. It also proposed that since the socio-economic organization of communism was of a higher form than that of capitalism, a workers' revolution would first occur in the economically advanced industrialized countries. Marxist social democracy was strongest in Germany throughout the 19th century, and the Social Democratic Party of Germany inspired Vladimir Lenin and other Russian Marxists.

During the revolutionary ferment of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and 1917, there arose working-class grassroots attempts of direct democracy with soviets (Russian for council). According to Lenin and other theorists of the Soviet Union, the soviets represent the democratic will of the working class and are thus the embodiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw the soviet as the basic organizing unit of society in a communist system and supported this form of democracy. Thus, the results of the long-awaited 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election, which Lenin's Bolshevik Party lost to the Socialist Revolutionary Party, were nullified when the All-Russian Constituent Assembly was disbanded in January 1918.

Russian historian Vadim Rogovin attributed the establishment of the one-party system to the conditions which were "imposed on Bolshevism by hostile political forces". Rogovin highlighted the fact that the Bolsheviks made strenuous efforts to preserve the Soviet parties such as the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and other left-wing parties within the bounds of Soviet legality and their participation in the Soviets on the condition of abandoning armed struggle against the Bolsheviks. Similarly, British historian E. H. Carr drew attention to the fact "the larger section of the party (the SR party – V.R) had made a coalition with the Bolsheviks, and formally broke from the other section which maintained its bitter feud against the Bolsheviks."

Functionally, the Leninist vanguard party was to provide the working class with the political consciousness (education and organisation) and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism in Imperial Russia. After the October Revolution of 1917, Leninism was the dominant version of Marxism in Russia; in establishing soviet democracy, the Bolshevik régime suppressed socialists who opposed the revolution, such as the Mensheviks and factions of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Leon Trotsky argued that he and Lenin had intended to lift the ban on the opposition parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries as soon as the economic and social conditions of Soviet Russia had improved.