Shownotes Transcript
Address by Engels
"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.
3月14日下午两点三刻，当代最伟大的思想家停止思想了。他一个人留在房间里还不到两分钟，等我们再进去的时候，他已经坐在安乐椅上静静地睡去了──永远睡去了。 这个人的逝去，对于战斗着的欧美无产阶级来说，对于历史科学来说，都是不可估量的损失。这位巨人逝去后所形成的空白，在不久的将来，我们就会感觉到。
正如达尔文发现生物界的发展规模一样，马克思发现了人类历史的发展规律，即历来为各种思想体系所重重掩盖着的一个简单事实：人们首先必须有了衣食住行，然后才能从事政治、科学、艺术、宗教等活动，所以，直接的物质的生产资料的生产，因而一个民族和一个时代的经济发展阶段，便构成为基础，人们的国家制度、法律规定、艺术乃至宗教观念便是在这个基础上发展起来的，因此也就必须从这个基础出发来加以说明，而不是像过去那样本末倒置。
不仅如此，马克思还发现了现代资本主义生产方式以及因它所产生的资产阶级社会的特殊运动规律。无论资产阶级经济学家或社会主义批评家过去所作的一切研究都只是在黑暗中摸索，而随着剩余价值的发展，这一领域就豁然开朗了。
一个人能有这样两项发现，可以说是不虚此生了。甚至只要能做出一项这样的发现，也已经是幸福的了。可是，马克思在他所研究的每一个领域，甚至在数学领域，都有独到的发现。这样的领域很多，而且对其中任何一个领域的研究，都不是肤浅的。