Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Proletarian revolution
Summary
A proletarian revolution or proletariat revolution is a social revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie and change the previous political system. Proletarian revolutions are generally advocated by socialists, communists and anarchists.
The concept of a revolutionary proletariat was first put forward by the French revolutionary socialist and radical Auguste Blanqui. The Paris Commune, contemporary to Blanqui and Marx, being viewed by some as the first attempt at a proletarian revolution.
Marxists believe proletarian revolutions can and will likely happen in all capitalist countries, related to the concept of world revolution. The objective of a proletarian revolution, according to Marxists, is to transform the bourgeois state into a workers' state. The traditional Marxist belief was that a proletarian revolution could only occur in a country where capitalism had developed.
The Leninist branch of Marxism argues that a proletarian revolution must be led by a vanguard of "professional revolutionaries", men and women who are fully dedicated to the communist cause and who form the nucleus of the communist revolutionary movement. This vanguard is meant to provide leadership and organization to the working class before and during the revolution, which aims to prevent the government from successfully ending it. Vladimir Lenin believed that it was imperative to arm the working class to secure their leverage over the bourgeoisie. Lenin's words were printed in an article in German on the nature of pacifism and said "In every class society, whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, on wage-labour, the oppressor class is always armed." It was under such conditions that the first successful proletarian revolution, the Russian revolution, occurred.
Other Marxists, such as Luxemburgists, disagree with the Leninist idea of a vanguard and insist that the entire working class—or at least a large part of it—must be deeply involved and equally committed to the socialist or communist cause for a proletarian revolution to be successful.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.