ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the theory of revolutionary subjectivity in the thought of Karl Marx, both individually and in his collaborative works with Fredrick Engels. According to Marx the development of the capitalist mode of production required two transformations, whereby the means of subsistence and production are turned into capital and the immediate producers turned into wage labourers. To some extent Marx's emphasis on the development of the productive forces sought to highlight the revolutionary, subversive side to the proletariat's increasing condition of social poverty. According to Marx the objective tendency of capitalist development would be an increased propensity and increased intensity of economic crisis, the most prominent of which he believed would be a long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Vladimir Lenin's modification to Marx's theory of revolutionary subjectivity was to emphasise the tactics of organisational form, in the sense that the latter must always suit a specific time, context, and composition of the working class.
