the
Marx Grave Trust, has asked all members of the public to respect the tomb of Karl Marx at Highgate Cemetary, London as a place of commemoration and family grave.
The tomb site and the Marx Grave Trust were established with the active support of Karl Marx's great grandsons.
The present monument commemorates the final resting place not only of Karl Marx, but also his wife Jenny von Westphalen, together with their daughter, Eleanor Marx, a prominent political and trade iunion activist, Harry Longuet, the grandson of Karl and Jenny Marx and Helena Demuth, their house-hold manager and the political confidante of both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
It is a Grade 1 listed structures of “exceptional interest.”
The Trust, which is the legal owner of the tomb and monument, is
currently in close consultation with Highgate Cemetery over the
necessary professional repairs to restore the monument, following recent
damage caused by vandalism. It is also discussing issues of
conservation and security with the Cemetery.
In an assault, reported to police on February 4, the grave’s
marble plaque was repeatedly smashed with a hammer, damaging it beyond
repair. A second attack on the night of February 15 saw the entire
monument daubed
in bright redpaint on the grave of Highgate Cemetery's most famous resident. "It will never be the same again, and will wear tose battle scars for the future," said Ian Dugavell of the friends of Highgate Cemetary Trust of the damage to the plaque
https://highgatecemetery.org/about/the-friends “Senseless, stupid, Ignorant,” the cemetery said. “Whatever you think
about Marx’s legacy, this is not the way to make the point.”
The graffiti covered inscriptions of Marx’s final words of
The Communist Manifesto, “Workers of all lands unite,” and the most famous of Karl Marx’s
Theses on Feuerbach,
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The
point however is to change it.” The contrast between Marx’s messages of
hope and the violent smears that covered them could not be more jarring.
“It will never be the
same again, and will bear those battle scars for the future,” said Ian
Dungavell, chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, of
the plaque.
Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/news/karl-marx-grave-london-highgate-cemetery-vandalised-hammer/
“It will never be the
same again, and will bear those battle scars for the future,” said Ian
Dungavell, chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, of
the plaque.
Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/news/karl-marx-grave-london-highgate-cemetery-vandalised-hammer/
The shameful attack on Marx’s grave in a far right targetted ideological assault coincided with fascist attacks on the graves of socialist
leaders in Spain and on Holocaust memorials and Jewish cemeteries in
France, Poland, Lithuania and Greece. In Manchester, a Jewish cemetery
was targeted on February 8, with fascist hoodlums smashing gravestones,
windows and wash basins.
The monument has been attacked previously, most notably during the
1970s, when vandals damaged the face of the bust
and attempted to put a bomb inside it to destroy it. No arrests have been made over the attacks.
As Mark Neocleous points out in his
research on
the interconnections between fascism and death. According to Neocleous,
the fascist fears that their dead enemies are not properly dead, but
“undead.” This means that the dead can — in some mystical sense — come
back to life.
Grave desecration, as Mark Neocleous argues, is integral to fascist
terrorism. According to Jewish law, “treating a corpse disrespectfully
implies a belief that death is final and irreversible.” In other words,
treating the dead disrespectfully gives no hope for their resurrection.
Fascists desecrated Jewish graves because it wasn’t enough that those
interred were biologically dead; grave desecration meant that the
fascists did not think they were dead enough. As Neocleous puts it,
“Unable to actually engage in this struggle in the world of the undead,
the fascist is forced to the next best thing: attack the grave.”
These attacks against Marx’s grave are meant to prevent
Marx from coming back to life — not literally, of course, but in the
figurative resurrection of a socialist movement. As
Walter Benjamin once put it, not even the dead are safe from fascism; in this case, not even Marx’s grave is safe.
For fascists, Marx’s grave does not represent the site of someone
dead, but of something threatening to reemerge. Marxism represents the
eternal enemy of the fascist imagination; Marx is not dead, but undead.
They fear that Marx is still influencing world history from beyond the
grave. Worse, they fear that the socialist movement is resurrecting Marx
from the oblivion of the past.
If capitalism is one day overthrown and humanity moves from its
pre-history towards real history, then Marx will be more than a ghost;
he will be immortalized.
Defacing a beautiful monument in this destructive manner will not change the power of his words. His overwhelming legacy refuses to die.
Marx's intellectual influence still so strong,his ideas and thinking have become fundamentals of modern economics and sociology. Marx’s legacy is pervasive, complex, and often polarizing. But the
epitaph carved in gold letters into his grey marble tombstone in the hearts and minds of many cannot simply be erased. His grave remains a pilgrimage site for followers from around the world attracting thousands of people each year. and his ideas still play an important role in shaping political and cultural discourses in the UK and abroad.
The German revolutionary socialist, author of “Das Kapital” and
co-author of the “Communist Manifesto”, although was German born, he had to
flee Germany and settle in London, living there from 1849 until his death in 1883.On Saturday, March 17, 1883 Marx was laid to rest in Highgate
Cemetery, in the same grave in which his wife had been buried fifteen months
earlier.
At the graveside
Gottlieb Lemke laid two wreaths with red
ribbons on the coffin in the name of the editorial board and dispatching
service of the Sozialdemokrat and in the name of the London Communist Workers'
Educational Society.
Frederick Engels then made the following speech in English:
"On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the
greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely
two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully
gone to sleep-but forever.
"An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant
proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death
of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty
spirit will soon enough make itself felt.
"Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature,
so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple
fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must
first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue
politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of
the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree
of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch
form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions,
art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been
evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained,
instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
"But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of
motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the
bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery
of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve
which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist
critics, had been groping in the dark.
"Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy
the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every
single field which Marx investigated -- and he investigated very many fields,
none of them superficially -- in every field, even in that of mathematics,
he made independent discoveries.
"Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man.
Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However
great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical
science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible
to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery
involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry and in historical
development in general. For example, he followed closely the development
of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those
of Marcel Deprez.
"For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission
in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist
society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being,
to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was
the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious
of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he
fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival.
His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung (1842), the Paris Vorw?rts!
(1844), Br?sseler Deutsche Zeitung (1847), the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung (1848-49), the New York Tribune (1852-61), and in addition
to these a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris,
Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great
International Working Men's Association -- this was indeed an achievement
of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing
else.
"And, consequently, Marx was the best-hated and most calumniated
man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported
him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic,
vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed
aside as though it were cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme
necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions
of revolutionary fellow-workers -- from the mines of Siberia to California,
in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to say that though
he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy.
"His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work!"
