Moreover, it is quite clear that he was still thinking, in 1875, of dictatorship by this _immense majority_ as a temporary measure. Of course, the word “dictatorship” is a misnomer when it is so used, but not more so than when used to describe rule by any class. Strictly speaking, dictatorship refers to a rule by a single individual who is bound by no laws, the absolute supremacy of an individual dictator. Friedrich Engels, who collaborated with Marx in writing the _Communist Manifesto_ and in much of his subsequent work, and who became his literary executor and finished _Das Kapital_, certainly knew the mind of Marx as no other human being did or could. Engels has, fortunately, made quite clear the sense in which Marx used the term “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In his _Civil War in France_, Marx described the Paris Commune as “essentially a government of the working-class, the result of the struggle of the producing class against the appropriating class, the political form under which the freedom of labor could be attained being at length revealed.” He described with glowing enthusiasm the Commune with its town councilors chosen by universal suffrage, and not by the votes of a single class. As Kautsky remarks, “the dictatorship of the proletariat was for him a condition which necessarily arose in a real democracy, because of the overwhelming numbers of the proletariat.”[66] That this is a correct interpretation of Marx’s thought is attested by the fact that in his introduction to the _Civil War in France_ Engels describes the Commune, based on the general suffrage of the whole people, as “the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” [66] Kautsky, _The Dictatorship of the Proletariat_, p. 45. Of course, the evolution of modern industrial nations has proceeded upon very different lines from those forecasted by Marx. The middle class has not been exterminated and shows no signs of being submerged in the wage-earning class; the workers are no longer disfranchised and outside the pale of citizenship; on the contrary, they have acquired full political rights and are becoming increasingly powerful in the parliaments. In other words, the wage-earning class is, for the most part, no longer “proletarian” in the narrow sense in which Marx used the term. Quite apart from these considerations, however, it is very obvious that the theory of Lenin and his followers that the whole political power of Russia should be centered in the so-called industrial proletariat, which even the Bolsheviki themselves have not estimated at more than 3 per cent. of the entire population, bears no sort of relation to the process Marx always had in mind when he referred to “proletarian dictatorship.” Not only is there no sanction for the Leninist view in Marxian theory, but the two are irreconcilably opposed.