Nathan Levin

“For Lenin the premise was that a Marxist is someone “who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat”. This term dictatorship has been repeatedly seized on by the defenders of capitalism to insist “dictatorship” is what Marxists aim at all the time (and, of course there was Stalin wasn’t there?). But the term dictatorship when used by Marx stems from the material fact that this is really what the state is in any class society, whatever democratic institutions it clothes itself in. Thus the bourgeoisie today exercises a dictatorship over society by virtue of the parliamentary regime which gives an appearance of openness, but which in fact is easily dominated by those who control the means of production (and hence the means of production of ideas).

In this sense the dictatorship of the proletariat would be no different. It would also be an instrument of class rule but against the bourgeoisie and their allies. The main difference would be that this new dictatorship means a vast extension of democracy “which, for the first time, becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags.”
― Jock Dominie, Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left

“Douglass keenly grasped the plight of the white poor. In their “craftiness,” wrote Douglass, urban slaveholders and shipyard owners forged an “enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks,” forcing an embittered scramble for diminished wages, and rendering the white worker “as much a slave as the black slave himself.” Both were “plundered, and by the same plunderer.” The “white slave” and the “black slave” were both robbed, one by a single master, and the other by the entire slave system. The slaveholding class exploited the lethal tools of racism to convince the burgeoning immigrant poor, said Douglass, that “slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Derby described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more. Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives and needles and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.

A lot of people were being wounded or killed. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves.”
― Frederick Douglass , My Bondage and My Freedom