It’s a nice paradox that all successful revolutions were led by the bourgeoisie, whereas the poor underclass led all the utterly tragic and failed revolutions. The middle class dictated the French Revolution from the storming of the Bastille to the founding of the Committee of Public Safety – Robespierre and Danton were lawyers, Marat a physician; Lenin (Ulyanov) studied physics and spent holidays at a rural manor, Trotsky (Bronstein) was a rich farmer’s son, only Stalin (Jugashvili) son of a cobbler fitted the description “worker” although he went to a seminary; Fidel Castro was the son of a lawyer and Che Guevara the son of a rich Spanish farmer.
Perhaps the Pareto principle applies to the workers and the poor so that the 10% of achievers have escaped to a higher plain (also WEB du Bois’ emerging 10% black leaders). The most famous of the failed revolutions was the Spartacus revolution of 70 BC. Spartacus was a Thracian slave gladiator who escaped from the training school and with two Celtic slaves, Crixus and Oenimaus led a rebellion which attracted as many as 40 000 slaves and families but ended with 10 000 crucifixions lining the Via Appia from Capua to Rome.
The German Peasants Revolt 1524-5 in which 100 000 died, gathered together pitchforked peasants, much to the chagrin of very middle class intellectuals like Martin Luther who wrote a book condemning the revolt Against the Murderous Hordes of Peasants. The peasants sought to be liberated from serfdom and had 12 modest demands but had no bourgeois leadership, except Müntzer who was burnt at the stake.
In South Africa, poor benighted 10-year-old Nongqawuse convinced the Xhosa to kill their cattle, burn their houses and crops whereafter the spirits would sweep the white man into the sea. As a result about 80 000 were displaced or died and 300.000 head of cattle killed from April 1856 to June 1857. The 1922 miner’s strike or the Rand Rebellion also had no bourgeois leadership or planning (unless you count the labour Party MP Jimmy Green) and Jan Smuts ferociously put it down with 20.000 troops, cannon, tanks and the nascent SAAF bombers.
Has the bourgeoisie always been at war with itself? On the one hand, the stalwart burgher who pays his taxes, keeps his environment clean and neat, protects himself, supports the arts, sends his children to school, builds his home and is the pillar of society remains the mainstay of an ordered community. On the other hand, this same group produces the restless souls who take on the role of representing and promoting the poor. The disastrous and baneful results of these bourgeois-led revolutions which caused tens of millions of guillotinings, starvations, executions and shootings gave the world greater poverty, the very opposite of what the revolutions apparently set out to achieve.
Do these bourgeois leaders actually have the interests and welfare of the poor at heart? The opposite seems to be the case. George Orwell pondered over the bourgeois character of the British Labour Party. He had a spark of inspiration – it was not the interests of the poor that motivated them. In The Road to Wigan Pier he puts his finger on the nub of the problem. The so-called representatives of the poor find their motivation in resentment – they are resentful of the better-off and it is this resentfulness and malice and spite that drives them.