Writing about the wave of strikes in late nineteenth century Russia, Lenin states that "the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness"; that is, combining into unions, etc. Socialist theory, however, in Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, was the product of the "educated representatives of the propertied classes", the intellectuals or "revolutionary socialist intellectuals". Lenin states that Marx and Engels themselves, the very founders of modern scientific socialism, belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia.[6]