Karl Marx Was Unsentimental to the End, and Thought Last Words Were for Fools
Karl Marx received a doctorate in 1841. However, he could not get a teaching job because of his politics. So he took to journalism. Within a year, however, his newspaper was suppressed, and he was forced to move to Paris and the relatively freer French environment. In Paris, he met Freidrich Engels, and the two developed a friendship and began a collaboration that revolutionized the world. In 1845, the Prussians pressured the French to expel Marx. So he moved to Belgium, where he founded a correspondence committee to link European socialists. That inspired English socialists to form the Communist League, and ask Marx and Engels to write a platform for their party. The result was the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848.
Shortly thereafter, 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. Eventually, he ended up in London in 1849. He spent the remainder of his life writing, and in 1867 the radical philosopher published Das Kapital. Twinned with the earlier Communist Manifesto, it became the philosophical bedrock of Marxism and communist theory. On his deathbed in 1883, as he expired from pleurisy, he was solicited for final words. His reply, before he breathed his last, was: “Go on! Get Out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!“
