FREDERICK ENGELS
ARTICLES ON THE DEATH OF KARL MARX
INDEX:
DRAFT OF A SPEECH AT THE GRAVESIDE OF KARL MARX
Published in the newspaper La Justice
No. 27, March 20, 1883
FREDERICK ENGELS SPEECH AT THE GRAVE OF KARL MARX
Highgate Cemetery, London
March 17, 1883
KARL MARX'S FUNERAL
Der Sozialdemokrat
No. 13, March 22, 1883
ON THE DEATH OF KARL MARX
Der Sozialdemokrat
No. 19, May 3 1883
===***===
DRAFT OF A SPEECH AT THE GRAVESIDE OF KARL MARX
Published in the newspaper La Justice
No. 27, March 20, 1883
Scarcely 15 months ago most of us assembled round this grave, then about to
become the last resting place of a grand and noble-hearted woman. Today we have
it reopened, to receive what remains of her husband.
Karl Marx was one of those pre-eminent men of whom a century produces not many.
Charles Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature upon our
planet. Marx is the discoverer of the fundamental law according to which human
history moves and develops itself, a law so simple and self-evident that its
simple enunciation is almost sufficient to secure assent. Not enough with that,
Marx had also discovered the law [which] has created our actual state of society
with its great class-division of capitalists and wages-labourers; the law
according to which that society has become organised, has grown until it [has]
almost outgrown itself, and according to which it must ultimately perish like
all previous historical phases of society. Such results render it all the more
painful that he should have been taken from us in the midst of his work, and
that, much as he did, still more he left uncompleted.
But science, though dear to him, was far from absorbing him entirely. No man
could feel a purer joy than he when a new scientific progress was secured
anywhere, no matter whether practically applicable or not. But he looked upon
science above all things as a grand historical lever, as a revolutionary power
in the most eminent sense of the word. And as such he used, to such purpose he
wielded that immense knowledge, especially of history in all its branches of
which he disposed.
For he was indeed, what he called himself, a Revolutionist. The struggle for
the emancipation of the class of wages-labourers from the fetters of the present
capitalistic system of economic production, was his real element. And no more
active combatant than he ever existed. The crowning effort of this part of his
work was the creation of the International Working Men's Association of which he
was the acknowledged leader from 1864-72. The Association has disappeared, as
far as outward show goes; but the fraternal bond of union of the working men of
all civilised countries of Europe and America is established once for ever, and
continues to live even without any outward, formal bond of union.
No man can fight for any cause without creating enemies. And he has had plenty
of them. For the greater part of his political life he was the best hated and
best slandered man in Europe. But he scarcely ever noticed calumny. If ever man
lived calumny down, he did, and at the time of his death he could look with
pride upon the millions of his followers, in the mines of Siberia as well as in
the workshops of Europe and America; he saw his economical theories adopted as
the undisputed creed of universal socialism, and if he still had many opponents,
there was scarcely one personal enemy left.
La Justice adds its own editorial note:
"What Marx was in his private life, for his family and his friends -- I have
no force to express it at the moment. And there is no need to do so, because
all of you who have come here to tell him your last farewell know this.
"Farewell, Marx! Your work and your name will endure through the ages."
FREDERICK ENGELS SPEECH AT THE GRAVE OF KARL MARX
Highgate Cemetery, London
March 17, 1883
.
On the 14th of March, 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 for ever.
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 or 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,
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
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.
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 Brusseler 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 organisations 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 a 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.
KARL MARX'S FUNERAL
Der Sozialdemokrat
No. 13, March 22, 1883
On Saturday, March 17, Marx was laid to rest in Highgate Cemetery, in the same
grave in which his wife had been buried fifteen months earlier.
At the graveside Gottlieb Lemke laid two wreaths with red ribbons on the coffin
in the name of the editorial board and dispatching service of the Sozialdemokrat
and in the name of the London Communist Workers' Educational Society.
Frederick Engels then made the following speech in English:
"On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest
living thinker ceased to ...
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