All people's state

The all people's state or socialist state of the whole people was a theory of socialism promoted in the USSR from Khrushchev onwards that is criticized as revisionist for abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat (DotP).

Lenin moved from the pure DotP to the joint dictatorship of the proletariat and working peasantry. Stalin advocated that the Soviet state was (should be) a joint dictatorship of the socialist working class, collective peasantry, and working intelligentsia.

The Stalin Constitution called the state a "state of workers and peasants". ("Workers" probably meant both physical working class and mentally working intelligentsia.)

Those classes technically made up the whole people. But the "all people's state" is criticized for ignoring class divisions entirely, an obfuscation which allows corrupt bureaucrats or parasitic intelligentsia to present themselves as rightful constituents of the socialist state.

Mao Zedong launched an anti-revisionist criticism of the Khrushchevite "all people's state", as did Enver Hoxha. The CCP has continued today to criticize the all people's state.

"Since the state is a product of class struggle, the state cannot be supra-historical, supra-class, and all-people, but has to have a class basis."

- Wang Weiguang, President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences from 2013 to 2018 and member of the 18th CCP Central Committee

The CCP supports the People's Democratic Dictatorship. Mao Zedong explained that "the People" in his usage does not refer to the entire people, but to the progressive classes. The progressive classes of proletariat, working peasantry, urban petty bourgeois, and national bourgeois are represented by the four small stars on the flag of the PRC.