Der Sozialdemokrat.  
No. 13, 22 March 1883

The Funeral of Karl Marx.

On Saturday, 17 March, Marx was laid to rest in Highgate Cemetery, in the same grave in which his wife had been buried fifteen months earlier.

At the grave, G. Lemke placed two wreaths with red ribbons on the coffin, in the name of the editorial board and the dispatch department of the *Sozialdemokrat* and in that of the London Communist Workers’ Educational Association.

Then F. Engels spoke approximately as follows in English:

“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.

What the militant European and American proletariat, what historical science have lost in this man is quite immeasurable. The gap that has been left by the death 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 ideological overgrowths, 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 religious ideas of the people concerned have 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. With the discovery of surplus-value, light was suddenly shed, whereas all previous investigations, both of bourgeois economists and of socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

Two such discoveries should 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. For Marx, science was a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the pleasure 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 a different kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry and in historical development in general. Thus he followed closely the development of the discoveries in the field of electricity and, most recently, those of Marcel Deprez.

For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. To collaborate in this or that way in the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to collaborate in the emancipation of the modern proletariat, to which he was the first to give a consciousness of its own position and its needs, a consciousness of the conditions of its emancipation — that was his true life’s calling. The struggle was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. First *Rheinische Zeitung* 1842, *Pariser Vorwärts* 1844, *Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung* 1847, *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* 1848–49, *New-York Tribune* 1852 to 1861 — and in addition a host of fighting pamphlets, work in associations in Paris, Brussels and London, until finally the great International Working Men’s Association came into being as the crowning achievement of the whole. Truly, this was a result of which its founder might well have been proud, even if he had had nothing else to his credit.

And consequently Marx was the best-hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolute and republican, expelled him, bourgeois, both conservative and extreme-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. He brushed it all aside like cobwebs, ignored it, and only answered when utmost compulsion demanded it. And he died, honoured, loved, mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers — from the mines of Siberia, over all Europe and America, to California — and I make bold to say: he may have had many opponents, but hardly a single personal enemy.”

Der Sozialdemokrat. Zurich. No. 13, 22 March 1883. Title page with Engels’ article “The Funeral of Karl Marx”.

The Funeral of Karl Marx

“His name will live on through the centuries and so too will his work!”

Marx’s son-in-law, Longuet, then read out the following addresses, which had been received in French:

I. “Placed on Karl Marx’s grave by the Russian socialists:

In the name of all Russian socialists I send a last farewell to the outstanding master among all socialists of our time. One of the greatest minds has fallen asleep, one of the most energetic fighters against the exploiters of the proletariat is dead.

The Russian socialists bow before the grave of the man who sympathised with their strivings throughout all the vicissitudes of their terrible struggle — a struggle they will carry on until the principles of the social revolution have finally triumphed. The Russian language was the first to possess a translation of *Capital*, that gospel of contemporary socialism. The students of the Russian universities were the first to whom it was granted to hear a sympathetic exposition of the theories of the mighty thinker we have now lost. Even those who stood opposed to the founder of the International Working Men’s Association on questions of practical organisation had always to bow before the comprehensive knowledge and the lofty power of thought that were able to fathom the essence of modern capital, the evolution of the economic forms of society, and the dependence of the whole history of mankind on these forms of development. And even the most passionate opponents he found among the ranks of the revolutionary socialists could not but obey the call that he, together with the friend of his life, sent out into the world 35 years ago:

‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’

The death of Karl Marx is mourned by all who were able to grasp his ideas and to appreciate his influence on our times.

And I take the liberty of adding that he is mourned still more deeply by those who knew Marx in intimate intercourse, especially by those who loved him as a friend.

Paris, 15 March 1883. P. Lavrov.”

II. Telegram.

“The Paris Section of the French Workers’ Party expresses its grief at the loss of the thinker whose materialist conception of history and whose analysis of capitalist production have created scientific socialism and the present-day revolutionary communist movement. It furthermore expresses its veneration for the man Marx and its full agreement with his teachings.

Paris, 16 March 1883. The Secretary: Lépine.”

III. Telegram.

“In my own name and as delegate of the Spanish Workers’ Party (Madrid Section) I share in the immense grief of the friends and daughters of Marx at the so cruel loss of the great socialist who was the master of us all.

Paris, 16 March 1883. José Mesa y Leompart.”

Liebknecht then spoke in German as follows:

“I have come from the heart of Germany to express to the unforgettable teacher and faithful friend my love and gratitude. The faithful friend! His oldest friend and fellow-fighter has just called Karl Marx the best-hated man of this century. That is true. He was the best-hated, but he was also the best-loved. Best-hated by the oppressors and exploiters of the people, best-loved by the oppressed and exploited, insofar as they are aware of their condition. The people of the oppressed and exploited love him because he loved them. For the deceased whose loss we lament was great in his love as in his hatred. His hatred sprang from love. He was a great heart, just as he was a great spirit. All who knew him know that.

But I stand here not only as a disciple and friend; I stand here also as the representative of German Social Democracy, which has commissioned me to give expression to the feelings it harbours for its teacher, for the man who created our party — insofar as one can speak of creation in this respect.

It would not become me to indulge in flowery phrases here. No one was a more passionate enemy of phrases than Karl Marx. That is precisely his immortal merit: that he freed the proletariat, the party of the working people, from phrases and gave it the firm, unshakeable foundation of science. A revolutionary of science, a revolutionary through science, he scaled the highest peak of science in order to descend to the people and make science the common property of the people.

Science is the liberator of mankind.

Natural science frees us from God. Yet the god in heaven lives on, even when science has killed him.

The science of society, which Marx unlocked for the people, kills capitalism, and with it the idols and masters of the earth, who, as long as they live, refuse to let God die.

Science is not German. It knows no barriers, least of all the barriers of nationality. And so the creator of *Capital* by the very nature of things had to become the creator of the International Working Men’s Association.

The foundation of science that we owe to Marx enables us to defy all the attacks of our enemies and to continue the struggle we have undertaken with ever-growing forces.

Marx turned Social Democracy from a sect, from a school, into a party — the party which already fights unconquered and will achieve victory.

And that applies not only to us Germans. Marx belongs to the proletariat. His whole life was devoted to the proletarians of all lands. The thinking proletarians of all lands — those capable of thought — are devoted to him in grateful veneration.

It is a heavy blow that has struck us. But we do not mourn. The dead man is not dead. He lives in the heart, he lives in the head of the proletariat. His memory will not fade away, his teaching will be effective in ever-widening circles.

Instead of mourning, let us act in the spirit of the great departed one, strive with all our might that what he taught and strove for may be realised as soon as possible. That is the best way to celebrate his memory.”

Dead, yet living friend! We shall tread the path you have shown us, to the goal. This we vow at your grave!

Present at the grave, besides those already named, were among others Marx’s other son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, Friedrich Lessner, sentenced to five years’ fortress imprisonment in the 1852 Cologne Communist Trial, G. Lochner, also an old member of the Communist League. Natural science was represented by two celebrities of the first rank, the zoologist Professor Ray Lankester and the chemist Professor Schorlemmer, both members of the London Academy of Sciences (Royal Society).

Fr. Engels.

413

Friedrich Engels
To the Editorial Board of the “New Yorker Volkszeitung”
(Draft)
18 April 1883

1122 Regent’s Park Road, 18 April 83.

Editorial Board of the New Yorker Volkszeitung

In your No. of the 15th, you print my dispatch to Sorge as if it were addressed to you.

In the No. of the 17th, you make me telegraph you that Marx died in Argenteuil.

We are not accustomed here to allow ourselves such liberties with other people’s names, or to permit such things to be done to us.

You thereby make it impossible for me to communicate with you further.

Should such misuse of my name ever occur again in your paper, you would force me to ask my old friend Sorge to declare this a direct falsification on your part.

Respectfully
F. E.