ABSTRACT
Politically, psychologically, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were bound to fine-tune their theories so as to allow proletarian revolutions in Germany and France. They indicated furthermore in their March 1850 address to the League of Communists that the democratic revolution would have to escalate quickly into a proletarian revolution, in order ‘to make the revolution permanent’. The Communist Manifesto defined the proletarian revolution as a ‘movement of the immense majority’. However, it is extremely difficult to find either Marx or Engels defining a workers majority as a requirement of the revolution in so many words. Again, alliance with the peasantry did not solve the problem of Germany’s socio-economic backwardness. In 1848 Engels and Marx believed that, regardless of the country’s industrial backwardness, German capitalism had already exhausted its developmental potential. In the early 1850s Marx and Engels famously warned against rash, premature revolutionary plans, but such warnings had nothing to do with the lack of capitalist industrialisation in Germany.
