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“Proletarians of all countries, unite!”
– Fredrich Engels & Karl Marx 1848
The journey through revolutionary study starts with the most influential revolutionary theorist in the field, Karl Marx. His work influenced the proceeding conflict scholars, making his work inseparable from the study of revolution and political violence. Although many of his now-known Marxist theory applications failed to occur, the core ideas Marx introduced are still significant contributions to the field of political science. His work was one of the first to understand and account for the social conditions responsible for revolutionary situations and outcomes. By doing so, Marx created a foundation for proceeding scholars who would build on his ideas to explain why revolutions occurred. For this reason, it is essential to start with Marx when studying revolutions, as many core components of his theory will continue to reappear in the works of countless theorists after him. In this chapter, Marx’s ideas will be introduced and used to analyze two relevant case studies, the Algerian Revolution, and the Vietnamese Revolution. As two former French colonies, these revolutionary situations parallel each other in ways that align with Marx’s class conflict theories, dialectical materialism, and radical elites’ role.
Introduction to Marxism
At its core, Marxism attempts to understand society from a scientific perspective to create a predictive framework to analyze human history. In doing so, Karl Marx outlined his view of the human condition’s history through a rough timeline based on historical materialism. In the view of Marx, history divides into different eras, the era of primitive communism (10,000 BCE), slave society (7,000 BCE-500 CE), feudal society (500-1600 CE). Finally, he claimed capitalist society began in 1600 CE and would end in the early 20th century. From the era of “primitive communism” to the current era of global capitalism, Marxism maintains the fundamental assertion that history invariably contains opposing power differentials between classes of people (Hudson, 1959). Marx has even gone as far as to argue that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles” (Marx, 1848 p. 57). Marx argued this because Marxism is heavily rooted in the Hegelian dialectic.
Dialectics is a philosophical exercise that focuses on opposites’ unity through the conflict between two opposing groups, the thesis, and the antithesis. According to Hegel, the thesis and the antithesis can engage in conflict to form a new social paradigm. Hegel referred to this as the synthesis. When discussing dialectics, the thesis will represent a socially dominant group, while the antithesis represents a socially subordinate group. This concept is quite abstract, so it helps to look at an example. For Marx, the primary dialectic that affected him and his contemporaries most directly took place between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Since the bourgeoisie holds