As Marx and Engels, and later Lenin, described, the bourgeois revolution does not arise as a product of conscious will. It arises, largely, behind Men's backs. The bourgeoisie do not arise as a class as an act of conscious self-will, but as a result of the fact that a section of a completely different class, the serfs, are released from the land, and, thereby, their means of subsistence, which, in turn, drives them into the towns to become independent commodity producers, which both expands the size of towns, as market places, and expands commodity production and exchange itself.
It is this change in material conditions, as commodity production and exchange expands, relative to direct production, that makes visible and significant the quantitative differences already existent within the class of petty producers. Those quantitative differences meant that previously the more efficient were simply more affluent. Each must, now, compete in the market, and, as Lenin explains in detail, this applies not only to the independent commodity producers in the towns, but also to the domestic industrial production of the peasant, who produces commodities in exchange for money, to pay rents and taxes, etc.
The more efficient, independent commodity producers become the winners in the competition between them, and thrive. But, now, the losers, instead of becoming slaves or paupers, see their competitors simply employ them as wage-labourers, and their own means of production taken from them becoming, thereby, transformed into capital. What were previously only quantitative differences are now transformed into a qualitative difference. The victors become a new bourgeois/capitalist class, the losers a new, industrial proletariat.
Engels notes Duhring's comment, in relation to the stages of life of the individual, and appreciation of different stimuli, relevant to each successive stage.
“The method whereby total interest in life can be kept active” (a fitting task for philistines and those who want to become such!) “consists in allowing the particular and so to speak elementary interests, of which the total interest is composed, to develop or succeed each other in accordance with natural periods of time.” (p 149)
Applied to society, this succession of stages, and the interests relevant to it, can be seen in the “stages theory” of the Mensheviks, and adopted by the Stalinists and other reformists.
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