Chapter VII: The Evening of Life

During the last twelve years of his life Marx had to fight almost uninterruptedly against various bodily ailments, all of which had their origin in his chronic liver complaint and over-exertion. His work, for which he had sacrificed, as he wrote to an American friend, "health, happiness and family," remained unfinished. He devoted his enforced leisure to making a study of American agriculture and of rural conditions in Russia, for which purpose he learnt Russian; he likewise occupied himself with studies of the Stock Exchange, banking, geology, physiology, and higher mathematics. In 1875 he wrote his "Criticism of the Gotha Program"--("Neue Zeit," 9th year, Vol. I., No. 18)--which contains some very important data as to Marx's attitude to the State, to the revolutionary period of transition from Capitalism to Socialism, and lastly to Socialist society itself.

He went to Karlsbad for the purpose of recovering his health. In 1877 and 1878 he was in some measure capable of carrying on his work, and set about arranging his manuscripts and getting the second volume of "Capital" ready for the press; it soon appeared, however, that his capacity for work had gone. The decline in body and mind could no longer be checked; even visits to French and Algerian watering-places proved ineffective. It was just at this time that Marx began to find recognition both in France and in England: Jules Guesde, Henry M. Hyndman, Belfort Bax set about spreading Marxian doctrines, and Marxian and anti-Marxian parties were formed. But the man to whom this recognition had come was already a ruin. Bronchial catarrh, inflammation of the lungs, spasmodic asthma, together with the loss of his wife on December 2, 1881, and of his eldest daughter (Mme. Longuet) in January, 1883, gave the finishing stroke to his enfeebled body. On March 14, 1883, Marx breathed his last. Engels gives an account of the last moments in a letter to his American friend Sorge, dated March 15, 1883:

"Yesterday, at half-past two in the afternoon, the best time for
visiting him, I went down to see him; everybody was in tears; it
looked as if the end had come. I made inquiries, trying to get
at the truth of the matter and to offer consolation. There had
been a slight haemorrhage, but a sudden collapse had supervened.
Our good old Lena, who had tended him better than any mother
does her child, went up, came down. He was half asleep, she
said; I could go up. As we went in, he lay there, sleeping,
never to wake again. Pulse and breathing had ceased. In those
two minutes he had gone painlessly and peacefully to sleep....
Mankind is less by a head, and indeed by the most important head
it had to-day. The working-class movement will pursue its
course, but its central point, to which French, Russians,
Americans, and Germans turned of their own accord in decisive
moments, always to receive that clear, unambiguous counsel which
genius and perfect mastery alone can give--is gone."

On Saturday, March 17, he was buried in the Highgate Cemetery, London. Among those who spoke at the graveside were Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The former gave a brief account of his revolutionary struggles, in which he said:

"Just as Darwin discovered the law of the evolution of organic
nature, so Marx discovered the evolutionary law of human
history--the simple fact, hitherto hidden under ideological
overgrowths, that above all things men must eat, drink, dress,
and find shelter before they can give themselves to politics,
science, art, religion, or anything else, and that therefore the
production of the material necessaries of life and the
corresponding stage of economic evolution of a people or a
period provides the foundation upon which the national
institutions, legal systems, art, and even religious ideas of
the people in question have been built, and upon which,
therefore, their explanation must be based, a procedure the
reverse of that which has hitherto been adopted. Marx discovered
also the special law of motion for the modern capitalist mode of
production and for the middle-class society which it begets.
With the discovery of surplus value light was at once thrown
upon a subject, all the earlier investigations of which, whether
by middle-class economists or by Socialist critics, had been
gropings in the dark...."

After him spoke Liebknecht, who had hastened from Germany to pay a last tribute to his friend and master:

"The dead one, whose loss we mourn, was great in his love and in
his hate. His hate sprang from his love. He had a great heart,
as he had a great intellect. He has raised social democracy from
a sect, from a school, to a party, which now already fights
unconquered, and in the end will win the victory."

Engels, who outlived him by twelve years, edited the two last volumes of "Capital," while Karl Kautsky, the disciple and successor of Engels and the real disseminator of Marxian doctrines, edited the three volumes of Marx's historical studies on surplus value. The latter work is not far short of being a great history of political economy.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] By democratic parties were then understood working-class political movements, such as Chartism, etc.

IV.

THE MARXIAN SYSTEM.