Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/17

 November 1st, 1850, they demonstrated that in trade and industry general prosperity ruled. "In the midst of this general prosperity," they wrote, "here the productive powers of the bourgeois society are developing as luxuriantly as is possible within bourgeois relations, it is impossible to talk of an economic revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in a period when these two factors—the modern productive powers and the bourgeois form of production—come into conflict. The various quarrels into which the representatives of the different Continental factions are now engaged, so far from giving rise to new revolutions, are themselves only possible because of the security of the immediate relations, and further—which the reaction does not know—just because these relations are so bourgeois. In the face of these relations all bourgeois efforts at reactionary restraint are as helpless as all the moral indignation and the spiritual proclamations of the earlier democrats."

"We know to-day that Marx and Engels were right. But to proclaim bitter truths is not the task of every one.

All those who believed that nothing is necessary for a revolution but a proper amount of enthusiasm, and that a revolution can be made at will whenever there is a desire for it—in short, the great majority of the revolutionary fugitives in England, who at that time represented the radical industrial opposition to the European reaction—rose up against Marx and Engels. The "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" lost its readers and was compelled to discontinue publication. There was a division in the Communist League. Its most active members in Germany were thrown into prison. With the prospect of an immediate uprising the socialist propaganda for a time went to pieces.

The political work was postponed still longer. From 1850 on every kind of literary activity in Germany was cut off for both Marx and Engels. The ban of the Democrats, as well as that of the government, rested upon them. No publisher would undertake any of their work. No paper would accept their writings. Marx went back to the British Museum and began again his historical and economic studies, laying the foundation for his great work, "Capital." In the meantime he wrote for the "New York Tribune," whose European editor he actually was for nearly twenty years. In 1850 Engels went into the Manchester woolen mill of which his father was a part owner, became himself associated in the business in 1864, and in 1869 legally severed his connection with it.