ABSTRACT
In Karl Marx's theory proletarians were to arrive at revolutionary consciousness, revolutionary solidarity, and finally revolutionary action through the collective experience of oppression in their everyday lives. Revolutionaries and their admirers have responded to the situations of various peasantries with very similar observations. Employing the modish argot of the social sciences, they have asked whether elites do indeed exercise "ideological hegemony" over the lower classes, which might account for the masses’ lack of revolutionism. The lack of a coherent ideology—conservative or radical—among the American masses has been confirmed by careful survey research into the political and economic concerns of the American population. Sartre argued that the Cuban revolution became possible when the peasants became rebels, which could only happen when the rebels became peasants. Trotskyists are distinguished from other Marxists by their categorical rejection of the growth of a centralized, bureaucratic state apparatus which becomes an organ for repressing the masses who made the revolution.
