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Unit 13 Speech at the Graveside
of Karl Marx
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 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 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.
Mark
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 is the man to whom it
is
granted
to
make
even
one
such
discovery.
But
in
every
single
field
which
Mark
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,