Page:Karl Marx The Man and His Work.pdf/59

Rh published in 1852, and its completion in the Manifesto or Address of the Executive Committee of the International Workingmen's Association on the Paris Commune, and better known under the title of "The Civil War in France."

However, the rejuvenated revolution which Marx and his associates so confidently looked forward to, was, as stated before, not to materialize. Subsequent economic and historical studies now showed Marx that the revolutionary year of 1848 had been but the legitimate child of the terrific industrial panic of 1847. And as prosperity gradually surged in upon the troubled sea of European social and political conditions, the revolutionary vitality born by industrial depression ebbed out. An economic era of expansion and plenty had set in, more so intensified by the discovery of gold in California. The anticipation of a rich harvest of profits exterminated the last spark of rebellion in the bourgeoisie. As already dwelled upon above, henceforth the capitalist class was to be guided by only one precept in its political conduct, namely: to harmonize and compromise with feudality and absolutism, in order to jointly exploit the proletariat. The proletariat, however, was as yet weak in numbers, or, to be more exact, weak in organization, and practically entirely lacking in the conscious perception of its historic mission as a class. The collapse of Chartism in England, the June massacre in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the results of the revolutions and struggles in Germany, Hungary and Italy had so physically and morally weakened the workers that for the moment no revolutionary action was to be expected of them. However, the interminable circle of capitalist production, the anarchical features of this production, already foreshadowed the advance of another economic crisis: a crisis that was but the natural child of an economic system based upon the appropriation of surplus-value, and a crisis which in its multiplied form actually portended the inevitable downfall of the capitalist system and the expropriation of the expropriators. These facts Marx conceived with the as yet