ABSTRACT
Classical Marxism, the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was formulated in an effort to explain why the modern world was host to poverty and oppression at a time when humankind seemed, to all appearances, fully capable of producing unlimited welfare benefits. For classical Marxism, revolution was a prospect for the advanced industrial nations of Europe and, ultimately, North America. For most of the century, Sinologists regularly divided China’s postdynastic history into that of the “reactionary” governance by Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang nationalists as opposed to the “truly revolutionary” governance of the “Marxists” of Mao Zedong. Revolution, for the founders of classical Marxism, was a product of the fact that, in the industrialized nations, the prevailing “relations of production” had begun to act as a “fetter” on the growing “productive forces.” In retrospect, at the close of the twentieth century, it seems reasonably clear what revolution has meant in our time.
