IIRC, revolutionaries in Russia didn't wait for the proletariat class consciousness to arise on it's own, as it had been predicted by Marx.
The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually.
The fact that the article, and many of the commenters here are mentioning this again makes me wonder if socialist movements have always been primarily middle class movements.
> The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually.
That resulted in several decades of false starts by what Krein would call the Russian "secondary elite", in the form of the Narodniks, in the 1870s and 1880s. They had almost zero experience with the real "narod", only an idealized mental picture, and when they moved out of the big cities into the countryside (where the majority of the poor, Russia being vastly unindustrialised, lived), most of them got homesick and went back again.
Have a look at the cadres of the early Bolsheviks. Stalin - the supposedly uneducated thug - quit seminary school through disillusionment and decided the join a revolutionary party instead.
At a time where the majority of people in Georgia got 4 years of part time schooling at best he spent over 10 years in education.
The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually.
The fact that the article, and many of the commenters here are mentioning this again makes me wonder if socialist movements have always been primarily middle class movements.