Nevertheless, despite the fragmentary status of the Nachlass of Marx and his intrinsic aversion to the erection of a subsequent social doctrine, the unfinished work was subverted and a new system, ‘Marxism’, was emerged. For all of that, they are not, however, less genial, or any less a fertile ground with extraordinary intellectual implications. His incessant intellectual endeavours ended in a literary failure. Other than a small part, the colossal plan of his work was not completed. The excessively rigorous method and merciless self-criticism, which made it impossible for him to carry to the end many of the works he began the conditions of profound poverty and the permanent state of ill health, that tormented him throughout his entire life his inextinguishable passion for knowledge, not altered by the passing of the years, leading him time and again to new studies and, finally, the awareness he attained in his later years of the difficulty of confining the complexity of history within a theoretical project, made incompleteness the faithful companion and damnation of his whole intellectual production and his life itself. Contrary to what is commonly believed his oeuvre was fragmentary, at times contradictory, and these aspects are evidence of one of its peculiar characteristics: incompleteness. Marx left many more manuscripts than the ones he published. Indicatively, in 1881, one of the last years of his life, when asked by Karl Kautsky about the possibility of a complete edition of his works, Marx said: “First of all, they would need to be written”. With the exception of the newspaper articles he wrote between 18, most of which featured in the New-York Tribune, one of the most important newspapers in the world at the time, the works published were relatively few when compared to the amount of works he only partially completed and the imposing extent of research he undertook. The main reason for this peculiar situation lies in the largely incomplete character of Marx’s oeuvre. Of the greatest thinkers of humanity, this fate befell exclusively upon him. Yet despite the affirmation of his theories, turned into dominant ideologies and state doctrines for a considerable part of humankind in the twentieth century, and the widespread dissemination of his writings, he is still deprived of an unabridged and scientific edition of his works to date. His ideas have changed philosophy, history and economics irreversibly. His thought inspired the programmes and statutes of all the political and union organizations of the workers’s movement, from the whole of Europe to Shanghai.
His image formed the background of the congress of the Bolsheviks in Moscow after the revolution. His name was soon on the lips of the workers of Detroit and Chicago, as on those of the first Indian socialists in Calcutta.
His death, almost unnoticed, was followed by echoes of fame in such a short period of time that few comparisons could be found in history. Few men have shaken the world like Karl Marx.