If we’re exhuming odious corpses, Lenin did say the first step would be to control the telegraph and telephone exchanges. Control over the spread of information was understood to be crucial even then. (Admittedly in Lenin’s case he was also talking about battlefield coordination inside a city, what with the absence of portable radios.)
As far as Marx, well, he didn’t provide a recipe for phase 2 either—he just kind of assumed that things would fall into place naturally after the revolution (that needed to be global! the whole communism-within-a-country thing was a later invention / post-hoc rationalization, lampooned masterfully by Voinovich’s Moscow 2042). The entirety of the nascent social sciences field (which Marx was performing to the contemporary standards of, however disastrously that turned out) was rather high on the whole natural law thing around that time. Turns out that, if you created a power vacuum, it would be filled by people who had most ruthlessly optimized for capturing power, as opposed to fairness, your preferred ideology, or anything else. Which at first meant Lenin and then ultimately Stalin, in whose purges died the last true (if at that point very, very bloody) believers. (Notice also how there are very few mentions in history of the eponymous soviets, councils [of workers and peasants], deciding anything whatsoever.) Also most of the intellectual backbone of the nation and the national liberation movements of multiple peoples, but who’s counting.
As far as Marx, well, he didn’t provide a recipe for phase 2 either—he just kind of assumed that things would fall into place naturally after the revolution (that needed to be global! the whole communism-within-a-country thing was a later invention / post-hoc rationalization, lampooned masterfully by Voinovich’s Moscow 2042). The entirety of the nascent social sciences field (which Marx was performing to the contemporary standards of, however disastrously that turned out) was rather high on the whole natural law thing around that time. Turns out that, if you created a power vacuum, it would be filled by people who had most ruthlessly optimized for capturing power, as opposed to fairness, your preferred ideology, or anything else. Which at first meant Lenin and then ultimately Stalin, in whose purges died the last true (if at that point very, very bloody) believers. (Notice also how there are very few mentions in history of the eponymous soviets, councils [of workers and peasants], deciding anything whatsoever.) Also most of the intellectual backbone of the nation and the national liberation movements of multiple peoples, but who’s counting.