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A Sports Dispute Started the Cuban Missile Crisis and Other Odd Facts

Khalid Elhassan October 28, 2019 31 min

24. Marx Was Seriously Not Into Dying Statement

Not long after publishing the Communist Manifesto, Marx was expelled from Belgium. He went to France, which also expelled him. He returned to Prussia, but by then he had been stripped of his citizenship, and the authorities refused to re-naturalize him, so he ended up in London in 1849. He spent the remainder of his life writing, and in 1867 published Das Kapital, which, twinned with the earlier Communist Manifesto, became the philosophical bedrock of Marxism and communist theory.

For all the dramatic changes and upheavals his writings wrought, Marx was not into dramatics. As he lay on his deathbed in 1883, expiring from pleurisy, Marx was asked for final words. His reply, before breathing his last, was: “Go on! Get Out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!“

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.