Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx¶
Core Argument¶
Engels’s oration at Highgate Cemetery is not merely a eulogy but a concise summation of Marx’s twofold theoretical breakthrough and his revolutionary practice. The speech opens with the stark announcement of Marx’s death on 14 March, and immediately establishes the magnitude of the loss: an “immeasurable” blow to both “historical science” and the “militant proletariat” of Europe and America. Engels then distils Marx’s two great discoveries. The first is the materialist conception of history: the “simple fact” that before humanity can engage in politics, science, art, or religion, it must first eat, drink, and have shelter. The production of material life, therefore, forms the foundation upon which all legal, political, and ideological superstructures are built, and must be explained from that economic base, not the reverse. This, Engels asserts, had been concealed by an “overgrowth of ideology.” The second discovery is the “special law of motion” of the capitalist mode of production: surplus value. This concept, Engels argues, “suddenly threw light” on a problem where all previous bourgeois economists and socialist critics had been “groping in the dark.”
Engels insists that Marx was not merely a man of science, but that science for him was a “historically dynamic, revolutionary force.” He notes Marx’s particular joy when a discovery promised immediate revolutionary changes in industry and history, citing his close attention to developments in electricity. The core of the speech, however, is the claim that Marx was “before all else a revolutionist.” His true mission was to contribute to the overthrow of capitalist society and to liberate the modern proletariat by making it “conscious of its own position and its needs.” Engels lists Marx’s militant career: his work on the Rheinische Zeitung, Vorwärts, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the New York Tribune, and, as the crowning achievement, the formation of the International Working Men’s Association. The polemical thrust is directed against the “absolutist and republican” governments that deported him and the “bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic” who heaped slanders upon him. Engels counters this by declaring that Marx died “beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers” and that, despite many opponents, he had “hardly one personal enemy.” The speech closes with the enduring verdict: “His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.”