ABSTRACT
On 17 March 1883, Frederick Engels made his speech at the graveside of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery, London. In particular, Marx had discovered the law of surplus value, ‘the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created’. ‘Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force’, and the man himself was ‘before all else a revolutionary’, whose real mission was to overthrow capitalist society and its state institutions, and to contribute to the liberation of the proletariat. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
