REMEMBERING KARL MARX ON THE DAY OF HIS 203 RD DEATH ANNIVERSARY
FREDERIC ENGELS SPEECH AT THE GRAVESIDE OF KARL MARX
On the 14 th of March , ( 1883 ) at a quarter to three in the afternoon , the greatest living thinker ceased to think . He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes , and when we came back we found him in his armchair , peacefully gone to sleep – but forever .
An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America , and by historical science , in the death of this man . The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt .
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature , so Marx discovered the law of development of human history : the simple fact , hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology , that mankind must first of all eat , drink , have shelter and clothing , before it can pursue politics , science , art , religion , etc .; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions , the legal conceptions , art , and even the ideas on religion , of the people
March , April - 2021 concerned have been evolved , and in the light of which they must , therefore , be explained , instead of vice versa , as had hitherto been the case .
But that is not all . Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created . The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem , in trying to solve which all previous investigations , of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics , had been groping in the dark .
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime . Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery . But in every single field which Marx investigated – and he investigated very many fields , none of them superficially – in every field , even in that of mathematics , he made independent discoveries .
Such was the man of science . But this was not even half the man . Science was for Marx a historically dynamic , revolutionary force . However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage , he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry , and in historical development in general . For example , he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez .( 1 )
For Marx was before all else a revolutionist . His real mission in life was to contribute , in one way or another , to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being , to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat , which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs , conscious of the conditions of its emancipation . Fighting was his element . And he fought with a passion , a tenacity and a success such as few could rival . His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung ( 1842 ), the Paris Vorwarts ( 1844 ), the Deutsche-Bruseler-Zeitung ( 1847 ), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ( 1848-49 ), the New York Tribune ( 1852-61 ), and in addition to these a host of militant pamphlets , work in organizations in Paris , Brussels and London , and finally , crowning all , the formation of the great International Working Men ’ s Association — this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else .
And , consequently , Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time . Governments , both absolutist and republican , deported him from their territories . Bourgeois , whether conservative or ultra-democratic , vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him . All this he brushed aside as though it were cobweb , ignoring it , answering only when extreme necessity compelled him . And he died beloved , revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers — from the mines of Siberia to California , in all parts of Europe and America — and I make bold to say that though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy .
His name will endure through the ages , and so also will his work ! March 17 , 1883 .
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