# The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels/Chapter 9

​ Fighting Illusions of the Democratic Refugees
Here, in London, they started intensive practical and theoretical work. Their first efforts were directed to perfecting, and as far as possible extending, the organisation of the Communist League; and not a little of their energy had to be given to explain to the large number of foreign refugees then in London that for the time being the counter-revolution had won the upper hand and it was useless there and then to appeal for an immediate violent revolution. In a monthly review established by them, and published in Hamburg,they endeavoured to find the economic reason for the failure of the February revolution; and they found it in the discovery of the Californian Goldfields, which gave: a fillip to world production and commerce that could not lightly be brushed aside and would not speedily exhaust itself. Just as the commercial world crisis of 1847 was the mother of the revolution so the industrial prosperity ushered in by the discovery of the Californian Goldfields was the mother of the counter-revolution. The period was one, therefore, for agitation and education, not for revolution. In the fifth and sixth numbers of their review they published a survey of political and economic events of the 'forties, in which they show that the 1847 depression was followed by a period of prosperity, which had not yet reached its zenith in 1850. "The prosperity of England would rise still further by the newly successful opening up of the Dutch Colonies, by the prospective establishment of new means of communication on the Pacific Ocean, and by the great industrial exhibition of 1851 … this exhibition is a striking proof of concentrated power, by means of which modern great industry breaks down national barriers and obliterates local peculiarities in production, the social relations and character of the separate nations. …" This prosperity in England would, of course, react on the Continent. "In the midst of such general prosperity, when the productive forces of bourgeois society are developing as luxuriantly as is possible at all within the limits of bourgeois society, there can be no question of any real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in periods when the two factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois modes of production, come into conflict. The various quarrels in which the different factions of the party of order now indulge are, on the contrary only possible because of the security of the basis of their immediate relations and, ​what the reaction does not know, just because these relations are so bourgeois. In face of this, all bourgeois attempts at restraining reaction are as impotent as all the moral indignations and all the exalted proclamations of the democrats. A new revolution will only be possible as a result of a new crisis. And the one is as inevitable as the other." The last words of their review was a crushing denunciation and merciless criticism of a proclamation by Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Ruge, and Daraz, who had constituted themselves a European central committee, to the whole of the European refugees to unite under one flag, and in which the failure of the revolution was explained with bland simplicity—i.e., as the result of quarrels and jealousies of the various leaders!
Of course, Marx and Engels denounce this as pure philistinism, and show that the bourgeois sentimentalists who think that the enthusiasms and ideals of a few are sufficient to induce a revolution at will in any desired direction, have simply put the cart before the horse, and, therefore, will never get any "forrarder."
In this same review, Engels wrote a number of other articles and series of articles, such as on the Ten Hours Bill, and on the German Peasants' War, which was later published as a pamphlet, and is the first historical description of pre-capitalist relations from the point of view of the materialistic conception of history.
The views held by Marx and Engels on the impossibility of making revolution at any time at will, necessarily caused great dissensions in the ranks of the Communist League. The older members, such as Eccarius, Pfander, Seiler, Freiligrath, Ferdinand Wolff, and Bauer, all with the exception of Schapper and Willich, followed Marx and Engels. The younger, with exceptions here and there, such as Wilhelm Liebknecht and Conrad Schramm, followed the general current of the refugees against them.
The crisis came to a head in the sitting of the central executive committee, September, 1850, in which, although the Marx-Engels tendency had a majority, it became evident that no compromise was possible between the two sections. As a result, both Marx and Engels were unable to do much practical work for some time, and they withdrew themselves into their theoretical works.