 To the extent that the Amoralist interpretation includes an account of the motivation (as opposed to the justification) of proletarian revolution[7], it is simple and rationalistic: eventually the workers will realize that overthrow of the capitalist order is in their interests and will act accordingly. There are two apparently fatal problems with such a view. First, according to Marx’s own thinking, the proletariat will mobilize against the capitalist order only when the capitalism has reached such a pitch of alienation, exploitation, and immiseration that the workers have nothing to lose but their chains (Capital, Volume 1, 1894, in MER: 329–343; Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, in MER: 500). Marx believes that this is bound to occur because the capitalist system gives every capitalist an overriding incentive to keep squeezing as much labor out of his workers as possible, even if every capitalist reads Capital and can foresee that that the aggregate effect of such behavior will result in the overthrow of the system. But this means that Marx assumed that the capitalists as a class were afflicted by a collective action problem they could not solve—that even though it is in their collective interests to avoid the immiseration of the proletariat, each will find it rational to act in a way that will contribute to immiseration. On the contrary, it can be argued that the capitalists solved their collective action problem by the creation of the modern welfare state—a device that sufficiently alleviates the plight of the workers to thwart mobilization for revolution, but without destroying the dominance of the bourgeoisie. Second, while Marx gives us no good reason to think that the capitalists will succumb to an insoluble collective action problem, he fails to take seriously the collective action problem faced by the proletariat (Cohen 1978, Elster 1985). As with revolutions generally, each individual may reason that either enough others will mobilize to enable a successful revolution or they will not, that her own participation in revolution is likely to come at a significant cost, that she will reap the benefits of the revolution if it succeeds, and that therefore the rational course of action is to abstain from participation. The key point here is that the workers lack the resource for solving their collective action problem that the capitalists can use to solve theirs: control over the state and hence access to enforcement of rules that can change incentives for refraining from contributing to a public good. Marx not only fails to take the proletariat’s collective action problem seriously; his theory of alienation implies that it will be severe, because one of the effects of capitalism is to turn workers against each other in the competition for employment and produce among them the egoistic psychology typical of all people living under capitalism (Buchanan 1979). In brief, the Amoralist Marx’s attempt to side-step the question of whether or under what conditions revolution is morally justified fails, because his interest-based account of revolutionary motivation makes the revolution depend upon the immiseration of the proletariat, wrongly assumes that the capitalist class will not be able to act collectively to avoid immiseration, and wrongly assumes that if the proletariat come to see that their interests require the overthrow of the system they will in fact revolt.