"What is the dictatorship of the proletariat?"

ITAL from MIM's FAQ page: http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/ 
END

The proletariat is the group of people who are propertyless and 
thus have "nothing to lose but their chains." The proletariat is 
the least conservative element of society. The bourgeoisie is the 
class of people who appropriate the labor of wage workers through 
their control of the means of production. 

Dictatorship is organized force. According to Marxism, all 
governments are dictatorships. When classes are abolished, it may 
be possible to have no dictatorships because governments will be 
abolished and replaced by voluntary cooperation. We communists 
admit to having dictatorship governments until we achieve our goal 
of classlessness. It's a matter of accountability. 

Dictatorship of the proletariat is the government of socialism. 
Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is the government of capitalism. 

Concretely and with reference to North Amerikan ideas, 
dictatorship of the proletariat is government implementation of 
"survival rights" above "property rights." 

The realization that the right to life itself can not be 
negotiable favors the proletariat. Along with that realization 
comes the notion that a non-negotiable "right" implies the use of 
force to protect it from those who profit abusing those so-called 
rights. The use of force or law backed by force (government) to 
feed, clothe, shelter and otherwise protect survival rights is 
dictatorship of the proletariat. 

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the most central question 
of socialism. We do not water it down or evade it. The whole 
Cultural Revolution was about how to maintain and strengthen the 
dictatorship of the proletariat so that it would not be corrupted. 
We communists are not Liberal. We do not tolerate those who put 
profit or such goals above survival rights. We favor repression or 
control of such people until the causes of their twisted thought 
have been removed and bourgeois thought has become completely 
impossible to the whole people. That will only happen under 
advanced stages of communism.