Precisely 73 years after his death on March 14, 1883, a monument to Karl Marx was unveiled yesterday above his grave in Highgate Cemetery. It was a strangely modest and stilted little ceremony. About two hundred people stood among the tombstones on the steep hillside to honour the memory of a man whose spirit - if that is the right word - now dominates approximately half the world. (According to Mr Arthur Horner, it is more than half; according to Professor Bernal, it is merely a third.)
There were, admittedly, several ambassadors from the satellite States and the chargés d’affaires of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic. There were Mr Palme Dutt and Mr Harry Pollitt, Mr Horner, Professor Bernal, and Mr Andrew Rothstein, and two unassuming characters called Frederic and Robert who proved to be Marx’s great-grandsons from Paris. But predominantly, it was a shabby afternoon without a hint of triumph.
What was lacking in the ceremony, however, was present in good measure in the monument. It is a bronze head between two and three times larger than life, with a great mane of hair and a beard so bushy that it entirely fills the space where the neck should be. The figure is cut off just below the shoulders by a ten-foot plinth of polished granite. At the top of the plinth, in gold lettering, is the inscription, “Workers of All Lands Unite”; below that is the tablet which originally stood above the grave, commemorating the death of Marx’s wife, Jenny van Westphalen, of Marx himself, and of Harry Longuet (his grandson), Helene Demuth, and Eileen Marx, his daughter; below that again is a quotation from Marx’s reflections on the philosopher Feuerbach - “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” The edifice stands on steeply falling ground and faces determinedly uphill.
Not Without Grandeur
Although the colour is bilious and the inflated proportions are monstrous at close quarters, it is not without grandeur. The face has formidable benignity, the face of a father who would chastise his children but always in sorrow. If Communism ever becomes past history, the archaeologists of the future will be able to learn a great deal about the psychology of it by digging in the cemetery at Highgate. The monument is, in fact, Big Brother in three dimensions, which may or may not have been what Mr Laurence Bradshaw, the sculptor, intended.
Mr Rothstein, the chairman of the Marx Monument Committee, spoke of the gratitude of the committee to the Longuet brothers (Frederic and Robert), without whose agreement no monument could have been placed on the grave. He omitted to mention that it was largely because of the obstruction of Robert’s father, Jean Longuet, that the monument had come so late. Marx is buried in a private cemetery, and his grave is the property of his heirs. Until 1939 Jean Longuet was the senior heir; he was a prominent French Socialist and antipathetic to his grandfather’s memory. On his death the property passed to his younger brother who was, according to the monument committee, “sympathetic.” Then he too died, and the honour of authorising the present memorial has fallen to the two first cousins who attended yesterday’s ceremony. The cost of construction was £12,500, and the subscription list appears still to be open.
After Mr Rothstein came Mr Horner. Marx’s call for working-class unity throughout the world was, he said, more valid than it had ever been because working-class unity would enable us to realise peace and prosperity in all lands through the establishment of socialism. He was proud to be associated with this recognition of the founder of the future of the world.
His Own Monument
Then came Professor Bernal, who claimed, rather curiously, that we were not there to erect a monument. We were there to honour a man who had built his own monument - in the hearts and deeds of men. The liberation which Marx brought from the mental limitations of a class society had enabled humanity to begin to make its own history, not blindly as heretofore, but consciously. This new knowledge carried with it a terrible responsibility. What happened to men henceforth would be the product of their conscious wills. Marx clearly saw that it was the working class who could shoulder that responsibility best for, by its experience in industry, it was the only class who could master the new forces which science had brought to society.
In the end it fell to Mr Harry Pollitt to throw off the dustsheets. He did so with a flourish. In spite of the politicians, the press barons, the radio lords, and other propagandists against Marxism, the ideas of communism were all-conquering. One day the people of Britain too would take their future into their own hands and build the lasting memorial to Karl Marx that he himself so passionately strove for throughout his life in Britain.
In spite of Mr Pollitt, however, the imposing bundle of wreaths that were then laid at the effigy’s feet were nearly all of foreign extraction. The gratitude of the Bulgarian people, of the Romanians, the Czechs, and the Russians were freely expressed in roses and carnations: the London district committee of the Communist party and the Marx Memorial Library were almost the only donors of home-grown produce.