HOST: David Harvey is a Marxist thinker about political economy and has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for over 40 years. He currently teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Prof. Harvey has written extensively on the significance of Marx’s Capital for understanding contemporary capitalism, and will be presenting this knowledge and more to his podcast audience.
At
a quarter to three in the afternoon, March 14, 1883, Karl Marx passed away
peacefully in his favourite armchair. Three days later, a few miles up the road,
he was buried, a citizenless émigré, in London’s Highgate Cemetery. At the
graveside, eleven mourners paid homage to “Old Moor,” and listened to Marx’s
longtime comrade and benefactor, Friedrich Engels—“The General”—remember his
dear departed friend: “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.” “His name,” Engels predicted, “will
endure through the ages, and so also will his thought.”
A
hundred and thirty six years on, Highgate Cemetery continues to receive a
steady stream of Marx well-wishers, of all ages and nationalities, the curious
and the converted, and fresh flowers and moving inscriptions, in almost every
language under the sun, regularly adorn the great revolutionary’s gravestone. Towering
overhead, seemingly indomitably, is the man himself, or rather a gigantic bust
of him, with its menacing eyes staring out into the distance, perhaps frowning
at his conservative rival Herbert Spencer, whose remains lie opposite across
the path.
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