'The state is not "abolished". It dies out.'

State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not "abolished". It dies out.

Frederick Engels — Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science

Is the implication of this statement by Herr Engels that the dictatorship by the proletariat over all vestiges of class society will wither away? Surely, the dictatorship by the working class ensures its supremacy over all other classes of civil society thus becoming the ruling class of the nation, i.e. of humanity; not its atrophy.

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is a period of political overthrowing in which the state can be nothing other than the revolutionary dictatorship by the proletariat.

Extract from a letter of Karl Marx, written in early May 1875, to the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany.

Our dictatorship is affirmed, may temporarily be suppressed, but it will never die.

To summarise, in the former quote Engels is referring to the death of the bourgeois state apparatus, its withering away; in the latter, Marx is describing the present and future state of humanity.