New York, September 7

Dr. Karl Marx

The friends of Dr. Karl Marx, leader of the International Association, suspect that he has committed suicide, despairing of the success of his cause. They prophecy that his organization in the case of his death will collapse, because he has been practically alone in holding it together. (False report of death).

Editorial: Karl Marx

The death of the most important leader of the International Workers' Brotherhood is reported. Karl Marx died in London in his fifty-third year, it is said, by his own hand. The hopes he had put on the uprising of the commune had been disappointed, and he saw his aim, to lead, as labor dictator, the social transformation of Europe in the Communistic sense, postponed for many years. His whole life had been directed toward revolutionary overthrow. His rare gifts he used with 2unflagging consistency for the undermining of the social structure. His whole being was thoroughly critical, negative and decomposing; a positive program, how the new world which he wished to create out of the debris of the old one, should be constructed, he has never formulated; the general communistic principles cannot be regarded as such.

Marx was born at Trier 1818. He studied law in Bonn and Berlin, and especially in Berlin dedicated himself to the study of Hegelian Philosophy. In 1841 he settled at Bonn as Privat - Dozent. In 1842 his took over the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, and had the honor to see the paper suppressed. Marx fled to Paris and with Ruge, he edited the German-French Annuals.

The revolution of 1848 brought him back to Cologne...1849 he fled again to Paris, later to London. From there he corresponded for a while with the New York Tribune. Of his literary works the critique of Proudhon's "The Philosophy of Misery" (published in French in Brussels) created a sensation in 1848. His 3most important work "Das Kapital, Kritik der Politischen Oekonomic" appeared in Hamburg - that is to say only the first volume and without much success. For the mass of the workers it was both too expensive and too erudite.

Marx was for the workers of Europe what LaSalle (sic!) has been for those of Germany: the spiritual head, the organizers, the brains of the whole. His place in London will be filled as little as that of LaSalle in Germany. Criticism was his strong suit. He understood like no one else how to find the weak point of his opponent and to reveal the contradictions in his reasoning. He pleased himself in this work almost beyond discretion, and as justified as his censures of the economists frequently were, his critique not rarely bordered on the realm of merely hair-splitting subtleties and sophisms.