In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a condition in which the proletariat, or the working class, holds control over state power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the transitional phase from a capitalist to a communist economy, whereby the post-revolutionary state seizes the means of production, mandates the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party, and institutes elected delegates into representative workers' councils that nationalise ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership.

Other terms commonly used to describe the dictatorship of the proletariat include the socialist state, proletarian state, democratic proletarian state, revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, and democratic dictatorship of the proletariat. In Marxist philosophy, the term dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is the antonym to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" was first used by Karl Marx in a series of articles which were later republished as The Class Struggle in France 1848–1850. The term dictatorship indicates full control of the means of production by the state apparatus. Friedrich Engels considered the Paris Commune (1871), which controlled the capital city for two months before being suppressed, an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There are multiple popular trends for this political thought, all of which believe the state will persist following the revolution for its enforcement capabilities:

In The Road to Serfdom (1944), the Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek wrote that the dictatorship of the proletariat likely would destroy personal freedom as completely as does an autocracy. The European Commission of Human Rights found pursuing the dictatorship of the proletariat incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights in Communist Party of Germany v. the Federal Republic of Germany (1957).

In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx stated "their [the Communist's] ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.". Also in the Manifesto, Marx explicitly describes the Dictatorship of the Proletariat:

We have seen above, 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. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State (in other words, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class) and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

In light of counter-revolutionary violence against Hungarian Revolution of 1848, Marx wrote that:

The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.