WE GATHER on the 141^st anniversary of the death of one of the two founders of scientific socialism. On Saturday March 17 1883, Karl Marx was interred in Highgate Cemetery, beside his wife Jennie von Westphalen who predeceased him by 15 months. 

Frederick Engels in his eulogy said: “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.”

Socialists have gathered here to mark this anniversary each year since 1883, not from morbid sentimentality, but because the methods of scientific socialism, which Marx and Engels unlocked, are the tools necessary to understand our world and the Promethean spark that allows us to glimpse the possibility of building a better world. 

Marx’s materialist conception of history revealed the law of development of all human societies. But Marx also discovered the special law governing the extraction of surplus value through the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society it created. Marx undertook his most influential, original and productive work in this city, but he is not the property of Highgate, or London. 

Marx’s image is recognised worldwide. He spoke, thought and wrote in German, French, English and Russian. His works are translated in over 100 different languages. His aphorisms have entered the idioms of hundreds more. The rise of modern capitalism spread through Europe and adjacent regions marking an “epoch” in world history in the sense established by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto. 

Marx and Engels understood capitalism as an inherently expansive political and economic system, hence a world system. Marx belongs to the workers of the world as can be seen by the numbers of visitors from so many countries who come here today and every week as well as the many comrades from the Caribbean, Africa, Iraq and Iran who have chosen to be buried alongside him. 

Marx’s tomb was unveiled on March 15 1956 by Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which funded the memorial with support from the German Democratic Republic. The ceremony was attended by African-American communist Paul Robeson, the Soviet ambassador Yakov Malik and Professor JD Bernal, president of the Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School.

Since 1883, when Gottlieb Lemke laid a wreath on Marx’s coffin in the name of the London Communist Workers Educational Society, Marxist education has been central to commemorating Marx’s life and work. Today, the Marx Memorial Library continues to maintain the archives of the Marx Grave Trust. 

Sculptor Laurence Bradshaw said his aim in creating this great bronze head was to express the “dynamic force of his intellect” and the quotation from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach on the pediment — “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways — the point however is to change it” — encapsulates the liberating force of Marx’s historical and dialectical materialism. 

Bradshaw wanted his Marx to be at eye-level, rather than “towering over the people.” Bradshaw’s Marx addresses his visitors with an unblinking, democratic gaze that speaks to us of our own historical responsibility. 

The reminders of human mortality around us echo The Communist Manifesto evoking the transience of economic relations and old social orders in the face of revolution: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

So, what would Marx make of the sclerotic, chaotic and decadent version of capitalism we see in Britain today? 

Firstly, he would certainly recognise many of its outward manifestations in this general election year — the open political corruption, corporate greed and imperialist barbarism — the dominant expressions of class rule in our present day. 

Commenting on “Corruption at Elections” in The New York Tribune, which can be studied at Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell, Marx wrote on August 20 1852:“If you follow the history of British elections for a century past or longer, you are tempted to ask, not why British Parliaments were so bad, but on the contrary, how they managed to be even as good as they were, and to represent as much as they did, though in a dim refraction, the actual movement of British society.” 

Marx had lived in London for only three years at this point, but he immediately grasped the essential details of British parliamentary politics in the general election of July 1852. 

“The bribery and intimidation practised by the Tories were merely violent experiments for bringing back to life dying electoral bodies which have become incapable of production and can no longer create decisive electoral results and really national parliaments. And the result? The old parliament was dissolved, because at the end of its career it had dissolved into sections which brought each other to a complete standstill.” 

Marx would recognise today’s Tory Party. MPs like rats leaving a sinking ship, scuttling to pick up lucrative consultancies and directorships before quitting what they refer to euphemistically as “public life” in the wake of endless scandals, which shame Britain’s degenerate corporate state, from illegal deportations of the Windrush generation, to Grenfell, dodgy PPE, Covid corporate finance lobbying and the Post Office scandal. 

And Marx would recognise an official party of opposition clinging to Tory spending limits — wrapping itself in the Union Jack in pursuit of Establishment respectability. He concluded his examination of electoral corruption thus: “The new parliament begins where the old one ended; it is paralytic from the hour of its birth.” 

But Marx also shows us the real social forces beneath the parliamentary facade. In Britain today the real economy is officially in recession, but the Big Four banks — Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays and NatWest — posted record pre-tax profits in 2023 of £44.2 billion, up 41 per cent from £31.4bn in 2022. HSBC — a bank whose name drips with the bloody history of British imperialism — announced a 78 per cent rise in annual profits in 2023 to £24bn due to global interest rate increases. 

Let us remember, those interest rate increases in 2023 were necessary, we were told, because wage increases were in danger of racing ahead of inflation. So measures to suppress wages led directly to record increases in bank profits. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear Karl saying to Citizen Weston: “I told you so.”

In 1865 as Marx patiently explained to English trade unionists in his address to the general committee of the First International, published as Value, Price and Profits, by his daughter Eleanor in 1898, profits stand in an inverse relationship to wages.

“Whenever a quantity is given, one part of it will increase inversely as the other decreases. If the wages change, profits will change in an opposite direction. If wages fall, profits will rise; and if wages rise, profits will fall.”

The super-profits of a parasitic financial sector built on super-exploitation of labour in global supply chains and financialisation of public assets, today stand as the main barrier to investment in productive forces and are the pinnacle of a pyramid scheme of rentier capitalism in Britain and the US where homelessness is epidemic because workers are unable to afford to rent their own home. 

What Marx could not foresee, because no socialist planned economy arose in his lifetime, is that the world capitalist economy in 2024 would depend for its economic growth, technological and scientific innovation, and new developments in world trade on the rise of the economies of the global South, and the leading role of socialist China. 

As new generations of workers survey the social wreckage of capitalism in Britain and take their place in opposing war and genocide from Gaza to Haiti, they are turning to the ideas of scientific socialism, which is the only alternative to imperialist barbarism. 

The task of political transformation indicated by Marx is once again the order of the day. 

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all lands, unite!”