18. Karl Marx’s Final Refuge and Final Words
Karl Marx’s European socialist correspondence committee inspired English socialists to form the Communist League, and they asked Marx and his colleague Freidrich Engels to write a platform for their new party. The result was the Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848. Shortly thereafter, the authorities kicked Marx out of Belgium. So he returned to France, which also expelled him. He headed back to his birthplace, Prussia, but by then he had been stripped of his citizenship, and the authorities refused to re-naturalize him.
So in 1849, he ended up in London, the final refuge of European political dissidents in the nineteenth century. There, he spent the remainder of his life writing, and in 1867 published Das Kapital. Twinned with the earlier Communist Manifesto, the two works became the philosophical bedrock of Marxism and communist theory. On his deathbed in 1883, just before he succumbed to pleurisy, he was solicited for final words. He replied before he drew his final breath: “Go on! Get Out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”
