 Abandoning the Amoralist Marxian account of revolution would mean ignoring the numerous “scientific realist” passages in Marx’s writings and ignoring his scorn for moralistic socialists. But there would still remain two problems, one internal to the Marxist view and the other independent of it. The first problem is that it is hard to see, given Marx’s views on ideology, how the proletarian masses could, while subject to the consciousness distorting forces of capitalism, come to rally around a perfectionist ethic or form allegiance to any moral principle that would require the complete overthrow of capitalism. Marx apparently thought that the curtain of ideology would be torn aside by the immiseration of the proletariat—that when they reached the full depths of deprivation and degradation they would come to see that capitalism had to go. But Marx was wrong in his prediction that immiseration would occur: in most societies under capitalism, real wages have risen and the welfare state has alleviated the plight of the workers--just enough. The second problem is that recent empirical work on revolutions indicates that in many cases—perhaps most—what determines whether an individual will participate in the revolution or even support it in any way is whether the regime or the revolutionaries control the area in which the individual lives (Kalyvas 2006, Weinstein 2007). If that is so, then it appears that in many cases moral motivation is causally irrelevant; it is the interest in avoiding the costs imposed by those who wield coercive power over the individual, whether they be agents of the regime or those already committed to the revolution, that determines participation or nonparticipation in revolution. But if that is so, then the topic of the morality of revolution cannot be avoided, because it will always be appropriate to ask whether those who possess coercive power ought to use it and if so how they ought to use it.