KARL MARX

1 JO KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
imminent upheavals on the Continent would give to the latter a 'pronounced
socialist character'. 46 In Britain the crisis would drive from power
both Whigs and Tories to be replaced by the industrial bourgeoisie, who
would have to open Parliament to representatives of the proletariat, thus
'dragging England into the European revolution'. 47 A note added later just
as the Revue was going to press admitted that there had been a slight
betterment in the economic situation in the early 1850s but declared,
nevertheless, that 'the coincidence of commercial crisis and revolution is
becoming ever more unavoidable'. 48 As the months went by, however, this
short-term optimism was more and more difficult to sustain. It was to be
entirely dispelled by the systematic study of the economic history of the
previous ten years that Marx undertook in the summer of 1850.
In June of that year Marx obtained the ticket to the Reading Room
of the British Museum that he was to use so often in the years ahead.
His reading there in July, August and September consisted mainly in back
numbers of the London Economist. The main conclusion, as Engels put it
later, was that 'the industrial prosperity, which has been returning gradually
since the middle of 1848 and attained foil bloom in 1849 and 1850,
was the revitalising force of the newly-strengthened European reaction'. 49
The results of this study were set down in detail in the long currentaffairs
comment written in October for the last number of the Revue.
Marx declared bluntly: 'The political agitation of the last six months is
essentially different from that which immediately preceded it.' 50 The 'real
basis' for this change was the period of prosperity that had begun in
Britain in 1848. The crisis of 1845-46 had been due to overproduction
and the accompanying overspeculation in railways, corn, potatoes and
cotton. With the economic stabilisation of 1848, additional capital tended
to be invested, and speculation was less easy. The most striking evidence
of this temporary prosperity was the plans for the 'Pantheon in the
modern Rome'," the Great Exhibition of 1851. This prosperity was
paralleled in the United States, which had profited from the European
depression and the expanding market in California. Newly prosperous
Britain and America had in turn influenced France and Germany, both
of which were dependent on the economic situation in Britain, 'the
demiurge of the bourgeois universe'. 52
The conclusion of this detailed discussion was:
With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois
society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois
relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution
is only possible in the periods when both these factors, the modern
productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms, come into collision
with each other. The various quarrels in which the representatives