By Nikos Mottas*.
"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”.
With these words, Friedrich Engels had opened his speech during Karl
Marx's funeral at London's Highgate cemetery. This year marks the
134th
anniversary since the death of the greatest thinker in the history of
mankind; the man who tried not only to interpret the world but to
change it. And, indeed, Marx's theoretical work became the basis for
social change, highlighting the scientific perception of the class
struggle as the driving force of History.
"The
genius of Marx”,
Lenin wrote, "lies
in his having been the first to deduce from the lesson world history
teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made
is the doctribe of the class struggle”
(V.I.Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism).
Marx's thought and work consists a milestone in the history of
philosophy, political economy and social sciences. As Lenin wrote,
the Marxist theory “is
the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the
nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English
political economy and French socialism”.
The
thought of Marx brought a cosmogony in the field of social sciences
thus changing the way we interpret the world. “At
best”,
Lenin pointed out, “pre-Marxist
“sociology” and historiography brought forth an accumulation of
raw facts, collected at random, and a description of individual
aspects of the historical process […]
Marxism
indicated the way to an all-embracing and comprehensive study of the
process of the rise, development, and decline of socio-economic
systems. People make their own history but what determines the
motives of people, of the mass of people—i.e., what is the sum
total of all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are
the objective conditions of production of material life that form the
basis of all man’s historical activity? What is the law of
development of these conditions? To all these Marx drew attention and
indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single
process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is
governed by definite laws”.
Through
his extensive work, Karl Marx elaborated and expounded Hegel's
dialectics and created an integrated philosophical materialism which
gave to humanity- and especially to the working class- a powerful
weapon of knowledge. Marx- with the significant contribution of
Engels- highlighted aspects of political economy that prominent
bourgeois economists and scientists of the nineteenth century had
failed to feature. As Lenin explained, “where
the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange
of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people
[…] The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx's
economic theory”.
 |
| Karl Marx in 1861. |
The
man who could perfectly and precisely summarize the importance of the
Marxist thought is, of course, the long-time companion of Marx,
Friedrich Engels, with whom he co-authored some of the most
significant theoretical works of the proletariat's revolutionary
theory such as “The German Ideology” (1845), “The Holy Family”(1845) and the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848). Among
other things, Engels noted in his farewell speech at Marx's grave in
1883: “Just
as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so
Marx discovered the law of development of human history
[…] 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”.
Refering
to his own work, Marx was pointing out:
“What
I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence
of classes is
only bound up with particular
historical phases in the development of production (historische
Entwicklungsphasen der Production), (2) that the class struggle
necessarily leads to the dictatorship
of the proletariat,
(3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to
the abolition
of all classes and
to a classless
society” (Marx to J.Weydemeyer in New York, March 5, 1852).
The
heritage of Marx's thought is certainly inversely proportional of the
material goods he left to his
descendants.
He died as he lived: poor, without the scientific recognition that
other thinkers and scientists of his era had enjoyed. With the
extraordinary assistance by Engels he left behind the most valuable,
powerful and important work that the working class could inherit.
From the “Capital” (one of the most brilliant works in the
history of human intellect) to the “Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy” and from the “Manifesto of the Communist
Party” to the “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, Marx gives
answers to the most fundamental questions that had been highlighted
by humanity's pioneer philosophical thinking.
 |
| Marx's tombstone in Highgate, London. |
Today,
more than 25 years since the counterrevolutionary overthrows in the
USSR and the socialist countries of eastern Europe, those who had
predicted the “end of History” and the failure of socialism have
been refuted. The prolonged, deep systemic crisis of capitalism and
the immense contemporary problems rooted in the anarchy of capitalist
production prove the correctness of Marxist thought. Being rotten and
outdated, capitalism becomes more and more aggressive, creates and
perpetuates economic crises, extended poverty, unemployment and war.
Karl Marx- the man who changed the world forever- has been totally
vindicated by History and his revolutionary thinking is more timely
than ever.
*Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
