[T]he redemptive role attributed by Marx to the united workers of the world was taken over by the rich, formerly stigmatised as grinders of the faces of the poor...So argues Jeremy Seabrook. Never mind about 'redemptive'. It suggests a saviour role for the workers of the world and I prefer to think about these issues in non-religious terms. The question I wish to address, though, is this one: why did Marx think it would be the working class that would act as an agent of revolutionary change, change to create a more just society than capitalism?
It's not because the workers were poor and oppressed. That Marx thought of the modern working class as having 'nothing to lose' may have been for him a necessary condition of socialist change; but it wasn't a sufficient one. Had the latter been his assumption, he could have envisaged socialism as a possible product of peasant revolt or of the uprising of a slave class. But this wasn't his line of thought. One reason why it wasn't was that he saw capitalism as creating the material preconditions for socialist economy. He wasn't thinking of a socialism of shared indigence and hardship. There is, however, a second reason which is companion to that first one. The kind of society that Marx envisaged emerging from capitalism would require a populace that had been organized and educated by capitalism itself to be able to run an advanced modern economy. In this sense, what mattered to him about the working class was not so much its (relative) impoverishment or oppression, but its capacity. I mean its political capacity: the result of characteristics it possessed - geographical concentration, trade union and political organization, literacy, technical competence, political and economic experience - through being integral to the running of capitalist society itself, at the same time as it mobilized its forces to oppose and reform certain features of that society.
Marx got many things wrong. But some he got right. Such hope as there is today for achieving a world in which there is less systemic injustice, more freedom, less poverty, greater equality, rests in significant part on the kind of populations that developed capitalist economies increasingly put in place (this despite every countervailing tendency encouraging selfishness, greed, and so forth): populations educated, increasingly aware, competent - and not well-shaped for tolerating being dictated to.