Marx on the Proletarian Revolution

      Karl Marx did not believe that change could come without revolution.  This was one of the points of considerable dispute amongst Marxists.  Those Marxists who followed Lenin believed that the revolution had to be violent and complete, with the power of the capitalist class destroyed.  Capitalism would create the conditions for the revolution (the “seeds of its own destruction”).  It would make workers increasingly miserable.  It would bring large numbers of these unhappy, alienated workers under one roof.  It would make the working classes larger and larger, while the capitalist class became smaller and smaller.  It would generate continual wars that would only benefit the capitalists. However, the revolution would not happen all by itself.  Mobilizing the workers and instilling revolutionary consciousness in them was the function of the Communist Party – the vanguard of the proletariat!

                         “The communists … openly declare that their ends can be

                         attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social

                         conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic

                         revolution.  The proletarians have nothing to lose but their

                         chains.  They have a world to win.  Workers of the world,

                         unite.”     From the Communist Manifesto

     It should be noted that there have been no proletarian revolutions in history.  The revolutions in the Soviet Union and China were undertaken primarily by peasants and resulted from the chaos in each country following a world war.  Most of the other “communist countries” became communist due to the force of the Soviet army after World War II.  

For more on Karl Marx and Marxism:

Marx's Dialectical Approach and Materialist Interpretation of History
Marx's Class Struggle
Marx on alienation and freedom
Marx's Value and Surplus Value theory
Marx on The Reserve Army of Labor / Unemployed 
Marx's Law of Increasing Concentration of Capital
Marx on Contradictions of Capitalism
Marx on the Crises of Capitalism 
Marx on the state
Marx on Imperialism  
Marx on the dictatorship of the Proletariat -
Summary of the Communist Manifesto 
Summary of The German Ideology

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