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”.
