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.
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