Anecdote about abolishing the law of universal gravitation

[el_chavista]

¡Salud camaradas!

Again needing your invaluable help to recalling this anecdote about a Hegelian guy by the times of Marx, who "intented to abolish the law of universal gravitation". Was it a Marx's joke or something?

[ar734]

This is from Capital, Vol I, Fetishism of Commodities:

"And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears."

[ZeroNowhere]

"Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany."

- Preface to 'The German Ideology'. It was a joke.