Proletarian revolution

"[...] Capitalism is pregnant with revolution, whose mission is to replace the existing capitalist ownership of the means of production by socialist ownership."

— Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Historical Materialism

A proletarian revolution, communist revolution, or socialist revolution is a type of social revolution in which the proletariat, the working class of capitalist society, overthrows and suppresses the bourgeois ruling class. Like all social revolutions, while a proletarian revolution has proletarian objectives and a proletarian character, other classes in society also play a crucial role in its success, including peasants and the petty and national bourgeoisie. Anarchists may vary on whether an anarchist revolution should be led by and for the industrial working class or should be led by, for example, the peasantry or the lumpenproletariat.

Karl Marx argued that the forcible overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the workers would itself constitute the formation of a dictatorship of the proletariat; however, anarchists disagree with this characterization of the nature of the coming social revolution.

Dozens of proletarian revolutions have been attempted in the two centuries since the dawn of developed industrial society. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels considered the European Revolutions of 1848, particularly in France, to be the first attempt at proletarian revolution. The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first success, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first to continue to hold power for more than a few months. Such revolutions are only high points in the continuous process of class warfare that occurs in every capitalist state around the world and colors every political movement: even fascism as it was forced to co-opt socialist rhetoric, and Islamism, which in Iran relied on the proletariat to overthrow the Shah. As Marx and Engels predicted in 1848, "none but a proletarian revolution is any longer possible" in capitalist countries.