ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the meaning of "revolution" for different schools and generations of Marxists and Leninists. It examines their views of and their operating assumptions about the conditions of "revolutionary situations," the actors in such situations, the stages of revolution, the possibilities of success or failure, the likely loci of revolutions, and their relation to levels of socioeconomic development. Marxism may be thought of as the last flourishing of bourgeois rationalism. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels focused on the dialectic under capitalism, when the state is an instrument of the ruling bourgeoisie. If class consciousness is a necessary precondition, no less important in the original Marxian scheme is the objective attainment of an economy of abundance as a prerequisite for successful communist revolution. While Marxism was gradually to be revised and divided into a multiplicity of variants, Lenin evolved a new doctrine and strategy based on his reading of Marx but in some essentials at variance with "orthodox" Marxism.
