Last weekend, as part of our wedding celebration, we invited guests from all over the world to come to Highgate Cemetery and to visit the grave of Karl Marx. (Doesn’t everyone do this?). Here is what I said:
First of all, this is not Karl Marx’s grave. Marx was not wealthy enough to have afforded a grave in such a prime location. Your maps will show you where he was really buried and you can see the headstone with his name on it, which is still there.
This huge, ugly bust of Karl Marx’s head was erected by the East German Stalinist regime in 1956, just three years after they bloodily suppressed a workers uprising in Berlin with the help of Soviet troops. Karl Marx’s memory is not honoured in this way and if I had my way, this god-like monstrosity would be replaced by a more modest headstone, as I know Marx would have wanted.
And while this monument has a genuine quote from Marx’s early writings, how about this one instead from the Communist Manifesto: “The first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy”.
Because Marx was not a dictator, not a supporter of dictators, and was a revolutionary democrat, through and through.
The regime in East Germany had nothing in common with him, and they had no right to his memory.
And also as we look at this grave, it bears remembering where Marx came from and why he is buried here.
Marx was born in Trier in western Germany. His first years were spent as an advocate for democracy and an opponent of censorship. He supported the revolutions for democracy in 1848. The local governments couldn’t stand him and he was forced into exile, to Brussels and Paris and finally London.
He lived here as a refugee.
And note that there is no cross on his grave, not this one and not the original one. Because Marx was an opponent of organised religion — and was born to a Jewish family. A descendant of a line of rabbis, he embodied much of the Jewish tradition of scholarship and criticism and debate in his writings and his life’s work.
A refugee. A democrat. A Jew.
And so much more.
Karl Marx was an incisive and original thinker, and the man who together with his life-long friend and partner Friedrich Engels figured out how to turn a world of suffering, poverty and inequality into something better. We could do this, he believed, through the labour movement, with ordinary working people organising themselves into trade unions and labour parties. And those parties would raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.
His vision inspires our work today and we honour him with our visit.