d every insurgent
economist and political theorist from William Godwin to Bronterre
O'Brien, is shown in "Capital." In fact, not a single phase of insurgent
thought seemed to escape Marx and Engels, nor any trace of revolt
against the existing order, whether political or industrial. In Germany
they were schooled in philosophy and science; in France they found
themselves in a most amazing fermentation of revolutionary spirit and
idealism; and in England they studied with the minutest care the
cooeperative movement and self-help, the trade-union movement with its
purely economic aims and methods, the Chartist movement with its
political action, and the Owenite movement, both in its purely utopian
phases and in its later development into syndicalist socialism. This
long and profound study placed Marx and Engels in a position infinitely
beyond that of their contemporaries. Possessed as they were of unusual
mental powers, it was inevitable that such a training should have placed
them in a position of intellectual leadership in the then rapidly
forming working-class organizations of Europe.

The study of English capitalism convinced Marx of the truthfulness of
certain generalizations which he had already begun to formulate in 1844.
It became more and more evident to him that economic facts, to which
history had hitherto attributed no role or a very inferior one,
constituted, at least in the modern world, a decisive historic force.
"They form the source from which spring the present class antagonisms.
These antagonisms in countries where great industry has carried them to
their complete development, particularly in England, are the bases on
which parties are founded, are the sources of political struggles, are
the reasons for all political history."[3] Although Marx had arrived at
this opinion earlier and had generalized this point of view in
"French-German Annals," his study of English economics swept away any
possible doubt that "in general it was not the State which conditions
and regulates civil society, but civil society which conditions and
regulates the State, that it was then necessary to explain politics and
history by economic relations, and not to proceed inversely."[4] "This
discovery which revolutionized historical science was essentially the
work of Marx," says Engels, and, with his customary modesty, he adds:
"The part which can be attributed to me is very small. It concerned
itself directly with the working-cla