Part 1:
The nature of revolution is a fundamentally complex phenomenon, comprising a number of sociopolitical, economic and cultural factors that would inspire a group of people to rise up in significant and affecting rebellion against a ruling force. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Huntington all have somewhat differing ideas as to the kinds of people who are prone to undertake revolution, but they all largely revolve around a poverty-ridden underclass rising up against the privileged upper class to regain or achieve rights that they felt were being withheld from them.
Karl Marx heavily favored the working class (the proletariat) as the group of people most prone to revolution. At its core, Marxism asserts that capitalism is inherently flawed, and produces the conditions for its own downfall through the increased division of labor and the accentuation of class struggle and ideological exploitation (Marx, p. 247). Marx believes that classes are able to be political actors through an increase in class consciousness. As capitalism’s increasing thirst for production increasingly polarizes the bourgeoisie and proletariat, the proletariat would form a violent revolution to overthrow the decadent upper-classes and institute a socialist governmental system.
Lenin’s ideas run very similarly to Marx’s, in that capitalism creates class divisions that cultivate resentment and disenfranchisement in the lower classes against the bourgeoisie, thus necessitating revolution to create a socialist government. Lenin regularly celebrated the revolutionary zeal and radicalism of Marx, and the inability of social democracy to provide an effective way to achieve revolution for the dictatorship of the proletariat. He particularly cemented the idea of the State as a tool for power that allowed one social class to disenfranchise another; that latter class would invariably be the one to revolt in order to achieve the political power they had been denied (Lenin p. 328).
However, Lenin has very specific ideas about what societies actually engage in these kinds of revolutions. Development is an incredibly important idea for Lenin, as he believes that revolutions can only occur in semi-developed countries, which can actually bring about the socialist governments that would stem from an overthrow of capitalism. Lenin also differentiates between revolution and reform, and denounces the latter as a half-measure, citing labor unions as a disingenuous attempt to address meager working class concerns without addressing the core problem of class conflict.
Trotsky, meanwhile, argues that revolutions only occur in semi-peripheral countries. These are nations in which there is both a highly polarized industry and a lack of a liberal democracy focused on expansion above all else; with these combined factors, the conditions for revolution can be found. This is very similar to Lenin’s arguments, as societies are either not advanced enough to have the tools or education for revolution, or are too advanced to accept a full revolution (choosing reformism instead). To that end, Trotsky put forth the idea of the “Permanent Revolution,” the ability for the proletariat to take over bourgeois democratic development and perform those tasks that capitalism and liberal democracy cannot (Trotsky p. 174). The proletariat would still comprise the individuals who would perform this revolution, being the only ones who could achieve these aforementioned tasks.
Huntington, however, has slightly different ideas about the revolutionary zeal of the working class, believing instead that modernization leads the middle class to revolt. According to Huntington, the very poorest people in a society are essentially “too poor to protest” (p. 52). They are more concerned with their immediate needs than the concerns of the larger society, and their own lack of exposure to revolutionary ideals and the broader culture will mean that they are not as attuned to revolutionary rhetoric and organization as the middle classes. As Huntington believes it is the transition towards modernity, not poverty, that fuels revolutions, he sees the middle class as those who see modernization as the greatest opportunity to seize power and assert themselves as political actors. The middle class are those most affected by the transition to modernization, as their comparative education, power and political activism would be accelerated and amplified by modernization. To that end, the middle class, rather than just the beleaguered proletariat, are the population most attuned to revolution.
All four major theorists agree that revolutions are prone to occur within nations in which the frustrated underclass rise up against a ruling class in order to receive those benefits and powers they feel they have been denied. Marx’s intellectually purer notions of the proletariat engaging in class warfare against the bourgeoisie are complicated by Lenin’s notions of semi-developed countries being more prone to revolution, as well as Trotsky’s ideas of semi-peripheral nations and the Permanent Revolution. Similarly, Huntington believes the middle class have the right combination of intellectual power, political engagement, and open time and energy to engage in the revolution. To that end, a picture of class revolution is formed in which the very poorest are not given the chance to overthrow the ruling classes, instead relying on slightly more active members of the proletariat to facilitate these socialist upheavals.
Part 2:
When discussing the prospect of class revolution in the context of writers like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Skocpol and Tilly, the conditions of the overthrow of the state are vitally important. While some writers believe that it is up to the proletariat to rise up against the classes in order to defeat the bourgeoisie and secure a better future for themselves, others believe that the inherently flawed nature of the state will invariably bring about its own collapse – with the revolution itself being just one factor in said breakdown.
Karl Marx believes that capitalism is an inherently flawed system, and his complaints about the system are not moral, but functional. The very nature of capitalism requires that the bourgeoisie engage in overproduction (as the nature of competition requires that actors produce more in order to compete with others). This, then, begins a cycle of decreasing the wages of the proletariat, which consequently leads to under-consumption as they cannot afford the very things they produce. In the end, the home market crashes for capitalism, the limitations of the system reach their apex, and a frustrated working class rise up in reaction to that. In fact, Marx argues that the working class act as the “grave diggers” for capitalism itself, not their killers. While the workers’ revolt is a fundamental component of the destruction of the capitalist system, their creation is baked into the nature of the system itself.
Lenin, meanwhile, places slightly more accountability on the rising proletariat for the collapse of the state. In The State and Revolution, Lenin points out that the State’s inherent nature is to facilitate class oppression, which is then the trigger that brings forth the desire to overthrow the state. The state is inexorably tied to capitalism, as it is structured around particular means of production that favor private property and the inherently fractious nature of the free market; this creates class conflict by its very nature. Rather than emphasize the structural failings of capitalism as an economic and developmental engine, Lenin is much more socially-focused, believing that the people would bring about the downfall of the state due to active revolution. Trotsky’s ideals fall more toward Marx’s perspective than Lenin’s, his idea of Permanent Revolution stemming from the inherent need for the proletariat to take over the developmental tasks of the failed bourgeoisie – a transition which will never truly be completed.
Skocpol’s notion of revolution contrasts with Marx’s in that she believes that the state will collapse in and of itself due to a state crisis, with little to no help from the class revolution: “No successful revolution has ever been “made” by a mass mobilizing, avowedly revolutionary movement” (Skocpol, p. 17). She refers to this as the ‘purposive image,’ a premise of many revolutionary theories that incorrectly supposes that the people will always rise up in order to overthrow a tyrannical government. Instead of the state collapsing because of a specifically revolutionary process, she argues that they fall apart due to incompatible differences and conflicts between inter-state groups with differing interests (p. 29).
Tilly takes a more separate and even-handed view of revolution with his contingent theory of history, arguing that there is no way to explain specific events, nor is there an underlying structure to the nature of revolutions (p. 7). While specific countries can have their own unique reasons for bringing about class revolutions, they are tied to those particular contexts and cannot truly be measured in any systemic way. To that end, Tilly would dispute the arguments of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Skocpol that the collapse of a state is universally the result of either class conflict or systemic problems within the state itself. Nonetheless, the relationship between those factors in revolution remains intriguing.
Works Cited
Huntington, Samuel P. Political Order in Changing Societies. Yale University Press, 1968.
Lenin, V.I. The State and Revolution. 1917.
Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. 1848.
Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and
China. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Tilly, Charles. From Mobilization to Revolution. Addison-Wesley, 1978.
Trotsky, Leon. Results and Prospects. Trotsky Internet Archive, 1996.
