When Marx and Engels developed their theory of communism, they promised that a period of violent world revolution, followed by a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (really, a dictatorship by Communist theoreticians on the supposed behalf of the proletariat) would be followed by a long-lasting or even eternal reign of infinite prosperity, individual freedom, permanent peace, and an end to oppressive factory labor. Instead, with “administrative” supervision of the means of the production, all human beings would be free to do their own thing, as Marx forecast in The German Ideology: instead of boring factory work or other manual labor, everyone would be free to “hunt in the morning, rear cattle in the afternoon, write poetry after dinner,” and be a literary critic in the evening, according to his present inclinations, without ever being limited to a single occupation against his will.
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