The theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, presented in the Communist Manifesto (1848), was yet another theory of progress so popular in the nineteenth century, along with Darwinism, Positivism and nationalism. Marxism was popular with the proletarians created by the Industrial Revolution, because it predicted that they would one day win a successful proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie all over the world, one whose success was the inevitable product of class conflict between the two classes. For the same reason, the middle class hated this theory and fought the rise of the proletariat. The theories of Marx and Engels would never be borne out or live up to their predictions. BUt it was a major fear factor that explains much about the politics of the middle class in the late nineteenth century and the birth of social welfare legislation, which Marx had never foreseen or predicted.
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