Marx identified industrial workers as the class certain to destroy capitalism.

Evidence

Marx and Engels had argued that the alienation intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production, the contradictions arising between that mode and the social relations accompanying it, and the extension of expropriation could result in a socialist revolution led by the industrial working classes. Though the revolution itself was not inevitable (that would have amounted to economic determinism), the role of this specific kind of worker in such a revolution was certain. The historical dialectic identified the industrial worker—the proletariat—as the negation of capitalist society; the force produced by capitalism that could finally destroy it. Capitalism pitted one class, the bourgeoisie, against another, the proletariat. This was the specific character of the class struggle in capitalist society. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1100

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Establishes the precise Marxian class schema Du Bois then works against — the load-bearing foil for the Black radical tradition.

Related

• Marx treated the proletariat and class struggle as ideological constructs (similarity 0.85)
• Marx held the industrial bourgeoisie must rule before proletarian revolution (similarity 0.83)
• Marx saw the lumpen-proletariat as parasitic and a source of state coercion. (similarity 0.82)
• Working-class movements accommodated capitalism while theory idealized a revolutionary proletariat (similarity 0.82)
• Du Bois positioned slaves rather than industrial workers as revolutionary. (similarity 0.82)
• The Black bourgeoisie’s class interests diverged from Black labor during Reconstruction (similarity 0.81)
• Marxist theory was built by bourgeois thinkers studying bourgeoisies, not proletarians (similarity 0.81)
• Marxism was a theory about the proletariat, not a theory produced by proletarian intellectuals (similarity 0.80)
• Du Bois insisted Black people’s historical significance lay in their labor, not enslaved status. (similarity 0.80)
• Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction revised capitalism, consciousness, and organization theory. (similarity 0.80)
• Marx’s novelty was siding with workers, not recognizing class exploitation (similarity 0.80)
• Almost no Reconstruction Black leaders proposed empowering the Black laboring class (similarity 0.80)
• Plantation slavery’s gang labor approximated proletarian conditions for revolution (similarity 0.80)
• Marx classified the peasantry as a backward class usable against socialist revolution. (similarity 0.79)
• The Black radical movement’s dialectical matrix was capitalist slavery and imperialism (similarity 0.79)