 Following the 1871 Paris Commune, the anarchist movement, as was the whole of the workers' movement, was decapitated and deeply affected for years.Communists, left-wing socialists, anarchists, and others have seen the Commune as a model for, or a prefiguration of, a liberated society, with a political system based on participatory democracy from the grassroots up.Marx and Engels, Bakunin, and later Lenin, tried to draw major theoretical lessons (in particular as regards the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "withering away of the state") from the limited experience of the Commune.