Marx and Engels: Collected Letters, Volume 2 04

Marx, who devoted his life to the liberation of workers, suffered from various illnesses and poverty in his later years, and died at his home in London in March 1883.

The following is an excerpt from a letter that Engels sent to Friedrich Sorge in the United States.

(This is a translation from the Japanese version, with some additions for ease of reading.)

The doctors could have put Marx off his death by making him a vegetable.
But it must have been more painful for Marx than his own death to live with so much unfinished work and the desire to complete it, without being able to do so.
With Marx's death, humanity has become a head shorter. It has lost the most important head of its time.
The proletariat continues to move forward, but it has lost its center.
The French, Russians, Americans, and Germans have all looked to Marx for clear and consistent answers.
The local bigwigs and clever, if not swindlers, will be able to act freely because of Marx's death.
There will be detours and lost paths ahead of us.
But now that we have come to this, we must eat away at the lost paths. What else can we do?
So we cannot give up our courage.



After Marx's death, Engels searched through Marx's posthumous manuscripts and discovered the drafts of the second and third parts of "Capital."
Engels searched for the draft of "Dialectics" but could not find it.
Engels stopped his own research, completed Marx's unfinished work, and succeeded Marx to dedicate his life to the liberation of workers around the world.

When Harada was a lecturer at a design school, a fellow professor approached him with a plan to produce a short animation based on Marx.

Although Harada was interested in the offer, he unfortunately had to abandon the project because the actual filming would have required historical research (clothing, customs, buildings, lifestyles, etc.), which would have taken a considerable amount of time.

Instead, Harada gave a lecture to a large audience of high school students, linking animation with Marx.

A poster put up by participants at the "Japan Communist Party Supporters Festival 2023."（https://kiyubaru.exblog.jp/33542121/）