Page 28 - summer 22

owned by bourgeois (middle class) men with the money (capital) to invest in factories

and employ workers for wages. Lords were elbowed aside. The bourgeoisie became
the new ruling class. Peasants became factory workers. Society ceased to be
agricultural and became industrial. Capitalism was born. Workers (the proletariat)
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became the new exploited class. This was the new shape of the 19 century.

Marx predicted that the next big change would be when the exploited workers
united and launched a revolution to destroy capitalism. They would rise up, seize the
means of production (the factories), destroy the bourgeois ruling class and bring in

communism. This would be the first society in history to be classless, equal and free
of exploitation. It wouldn’t just be the next stage in history’s class war; it would be
the end of class war; in a sense, the end of history.

Marxism was a very big deal for intellectuals, socialists, workers, historians and
economists. It seemed like a big theory of everything. But what about his
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predictions? To 19 century thinkers, not just Marxists, the rise of the working class
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seemed inevitable, the wave of the future. But well before the end of the 19
century, the first seeds of doubt began to emerge. Workers didn’t get poorer and
poorer as Marx predicted. Wages gradually rose. Hours of work fell. Living standards
and public health gradually improved. Some skilled workers even got the vote. Many
workers and socialist parties grew cool at the idea of revolution. Reform and trade
union organisation seemed a better alternative. The failure of Marxist revolution to
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materialise in the late 19 and 20 centuries was its first big setback; the inevitable
revolution that never was.

What did happen
Yet revolution did eventually come; not however in the developed industrial
economies of the west where Marx predicted it, but in the relatively undeveloped
east, where peasants not workers were the majority; in Russia, then China*. In
October 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. They were a

ruthlessly disciplined band of Marxist revolutionaries who exploited widespread
worker and peasant discontent over Russia’s poor wartime performance. They staged
a coup and grabbed power from the Tsar under the noses of their political rivals. The
new Soviet Russia (soviets were revolutionary councils of workers and peasants loyal
to the Bolsheviks) managed to survive, and became the best new hope of people all
over the world who were discontented with the status quo.

*Technically, the first communist regime was in 1871, the Paris Commune, set up during the Siege
of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, but it only survived for ten weeks.