ABSTRACT
It was the year 1848 when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto in which they proclaimed that the historical moment had arrived for the revolution of the proletariat and the overthrow of the capitalist system and the bourgeois state, declaring the latter to be ‘no longer compatible with society’. Yet the revolutions which spread through much of Europe in that year and the next resembled much more the events of 1789 than they anticipated those of 1917. Outside England a recognisable ‘proletariat’ could hardly be said to exist anywhere in Europe, and nowhere did it yet form a majority of the population of a country. A few large cities such as Paris, Naples and Vienna contained hundreds of thousands of the classic ‘urban poor’ who could usually be counted upon to take to the streets when their chronic desperation was sufficiently exacerbated by a worsening of their economic conditions and by appropriate demagoguery, but the political awareness of the great majority of the population, even in the most economically advanced countries was still rooted in an archaic imagery of retributive justice against tyrants rather than being a reflection of a programme for the transformation of the existing social and economic order into something qualitatively superior. The exploited class in every country except England was still predominantly the peasantry, whose capacity for rebellion could never be overlooked but which was still far from being culturally prepared to understand and apply the message of the Communist Manifesto.
