Visit to Karl Marx Grave

A TRIP TO LONDON THAT INCLUDES VISITING THE GRAVEYARD OF KARL MARX   AND OXFORD UNIV. AT THE GUIDANCE OF PROFESSOR MILIAM CHUNG, AND  VISITING THE GRAVE OF ADAM SMITH, KIRLYARD, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND.

 

London is a very attractive place to visit. The spirit of the  great empire of British Kingdom is still alive in the marvelous architecture of  the  old buildings of London Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Piccadelly Circle, the London Eye, Trafalgar Square and the Oxford University campus. The historical remains in the city of London can not be replaced. This is an unique  British culture. As was expected,  everybody carries an umbrella to welcome a drizzling rain when we got off from the Virgin Atlantic Airline at the Heathrow Airport. This is where capitalism was born in the middle of 18^th century with the famous  book “Wealth of Nations” written by Adam Smith who was born in             Edinburgh, Scotland. To visit the graveyard of Adam Smith requires an another  90 minute fly from London  to Edinburgh, Scotland. For my convenience,  Therefore, I first decided to pay respect to Karl Marx, the father of socialism and  communism, who is buried at  High Gate Cemetery, North London. It took 40 minutes by Uber taxi to arrive at High Gate Cemetery  from London to meet Karl Marx, whose 15 feet statue stands aloft in the center of the High Gate Cemetery. Born from the upper middle class in a  small town named Trier near the bank of Moselle River, Germany,  married to Jenny von Westphalen, the  daughter of Baron von Westphalen, a prominent member of Trier Society. Marx(1818-1883), striking friendship with Voltaire, a great French thinker, belonged to a Young intellectual Hegelian Society in Germany and studied Helgelian dialecticism under the guidance of theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss and converted the Hegelian dialecticism into dialectical materialism, criticizing Christianity as a editor of Reinishe Zeitung, the then very influential newspaper, and  against Prussian  autocracy. His  radical articles against Prussian government policy forced  the paper to shut down and had to move into France in 1843. The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary Karl Marx was without doubt  the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19^th century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be Marxist. The very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified and his meanings adapted to a great variety of political circumstances.  During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings , known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts(1844), which remained  unpublished until the 1930s. In the manuscripts, He outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. It was also in Paris that Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) Marx was expelled from Paris and moved to London with Engels, where Engel’s family had cotton spinning interests in Manchester. Marx devoted himself  to an intensive study of history to draw the materialist conception of history under the

Karl Marx Cont’d.    August 3, 2017  in London.

thesis that the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production. He traced the history of the various modes of production and  predicted the collapse of the industrial capitalism, which became  the worst Archilles heel in his theory. Marx discovered  law of development of human history and also 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 values suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve  of which all previous investigations,, of which bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark. Though his prediction that capitalism must inevitably and necessarily collapse was wrong, the laws of motion which his model of capitalism revealed may still be visible in American capitalism- indeed not only in America, but also in many capitalistic society around the world. The class struggle between capital and labor, between big corporation and small, bourgeois and proletariat, between big capital and small, are reality with which we are facing today.  Accumulation process- Primitive accumulation, circulation of capital, distribution and redistribution of surplus value are well noteworthy to delve into. Inheriting the theories of Surplus Value from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx played a pioneer role in elaborating his version of the labor theory value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit in the capitalistic system. Volume I of Das Kapital was published in 1867 and volumes II and III were finished during the 1860s and were published posthumously by Engels.  No human being in the world ever published almost 2500 page book  exploring the analysis of the class structure in class conflict and predicting the falling rate of profit. Profits are both hallmark of capitalism and its Achilles heel, for no business can permanently maintain its prices much above the costs. There is only way in which profits can be perpetuated: a business or an entire economy- must grow with sustained technological progress by continued innovation. As the word goes “Silence is Gold”,  Engels however made such a short eulogy as follows;” On the 14^th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon , the greatest  living thinker ceased to think. Peacefully gone to sleep. “ But Marx died beloved, revered, mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers, but for ever.  Even today his grave is being flooded with many tourists and followers, because of his great thinking, More and more visitors every year are drawn to the Grave  to read the following epitaph in his monument;

 

WORKERS OF ALL LANDS

UNITE

KARL MARX

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways-

THE POINT HOWEVER IS TO CHANGE IT.

Jenny von Westphalen                     Aro Karl Marx

The beloved wife of Karl Marx      Born 5^th May 1818, died 14^th March 1883

Born 1^st February 1814                And Havy Lorquet

Died 4^th December 1881                     Their Grandson and Relona Demuth.

Dr. Hubert Hojae Lee, an economist, A member of Presidential Advisory Board.