Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx
弗里德里希·恩格斯 / Friederich Engels
弗里德里希·恩格斯（1820—1895），马克思主义创始人之一，马克思的亲密战友。恩格斯出身于德国纺织主家庭，与马克思相识后并肩战斗，共同起草《共产党宣言》并领导第一国际工作，著有《反杜林论》等大量著作。马克思逝世后，他担任整理和发表马克思的文献遗产和继续领导国际工人运动的重任，参加创建并指导第二国际工作，与各种机会主义进行了坚决的斗争，直至1895年8月5日病逝。
Ace in the Hole
Understand these new words before you read this article.
1. immeasurable adj. 无法计量的，无限的
2. ideology n. 思想(体系)，思想意识
3. bourgeois adj. 资产阶级的
4. revolutionary n. 革命者，革新者
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. 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.
Two such discoveries would 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. 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.
