Abstract
In this and similar observations on the political consequences of periodic economic crises in the mid-1850s, Marx clearly believed that the dislocations brought about by capitalist overproduction would have the effect of finally removing the archaic political alliances which were incapable of giving adequate expression to the major social forces of the capitalist mode of production — the industrial bourgeoisie and the working class. In other words, Marx considered that political relations would now more closely approximate the real material relations of society between the expropriators and producers of surplus value.
A few months more and the crisis will be at a height which it has not reached in England since 1846, perhaps not since 1842. When its effects begin to be fully felt among the working classes, then will that political movement begin again, which has been dormant for six years. Then will the working men of England rise anew, menacing the middle classes at the very time that the middle classes are finally driving the aristocracy from power. Then will the mask be torn off which has hitherto hid the real political features of Great Britain. Then will the two real contending parties in that country stand face to face-the middle class and the working classes, the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat and England will be compelled to share in the general social evolutions of European society.1
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Notes and References
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Britain (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962) p.426.
Philip Stanworth and Anthony Giddens, Elites and Power in British Society (Cambridge University Press, 1974) p. 100.
See, for example, the general thesis in Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1969)).
Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton University Press, 1965).
E.P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds) Socialist Register (London: Merlin, 1965)
Karl Marx, ‘The Elections — Tories and Whigs’ (New York Daily Tribune, 21 August 1852); See also ‘The Chartists’ (New York Daily Tribunne, 25 August 1852), both in T.B. Bottomore and Maximillien Rubel (eds) Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (London: Watts, 1956) pp. 191–200.
Frank Longstreth, ‘The City, Industry and the State’, in C. Crouch (ed.) State and Economy in Contemporary Capitalism (London: Croom Helm, 1979).
Nicos Poulantzas, ‘The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau’, New Left Review, 95 (January–February 1976) p.74.
Sam Aaronovitch and Ron Smith with Jean Gardiner and Roger Moore, The Political Economy of British Capitalism: A Marxist Analysis (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 1981) p.61. See David Cobham’s review in Politics and Power, 4 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)
See Leland Jencks, The Migration of British Capital to 1875 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1927).
See, for example, Robert Gilpin, US Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment (New York: Basic Books, 1975) especially ch. III, ‘The British Strategy of Portfolio Investment’.
See the data in Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation (London: Methuen, 1969) p.305,
and J.R. Sargent, ‘UK Performance in Services’, in Frank Blackaby (ed.) Deindustrialisation (London: Heinemann, 1979).
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© 1984 Geoffrey Ingham
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Ingham, G. (1984). British Capitalism, ‘Exceptionalism’ and Marxist Theory. In: Capitalism Divided?. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86082-1_2
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