F. 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.
 
 
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