The Once and Future Marx

LONDON'S HIGHGATE CEMETERY IS A KIND OF MARBLE encyclopedia of Victorian notables, its stone restored and its romantically assertive vegetation pruned back by volunteers. Among monuments to soda bottlers and prizefighters, railroad men and novelists, one stands out: the grave of Karl Marx and his family.

There is no graceful melancholy here in the cemetery's newer and plainer section on the east side of Swain's Lane, least of all at the grave itself. Here a stern and defiant head and shoulders rise above a stark rectangular slab. And here, as late as the 1980s and perhaps still, delegations of visiting communists and other admirers left red flowers by day, while rightist vandals daubed graffiti by night. In the cemetery's semiofficial photographic album, and in life when I was there in 1989, a group of young Chinese men in Mao jackets were smiling shyly and photographing each other against this massive backdrop.

I still wonder what the visitors were thinking. Was this holy ground or just the red version of the Washington Monument? In their way, both Marx and these young technocrats were prisoners of a system, now virtually gone, and its ideological machinery. Only now-six years after Tienanmin Square and four years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union-is Marx emerging from the marble overcoat in which his followers had buried him in Highgate and in the halls of Moscow's Institute for Marxism-Leninism. Admirers and critics alike are reevaluating this massive figure, an exile in death as in life. Articles or references to Marx are popping up in such unlikely places as The Wall Street Journal, the investment magazine Worth, and the addresses of Pope John Paul II. Non-Marxist Westerners are finding in him, if not more to like, at least a great deal more to think about, and even to respect.

This renewed interest in Marx begs an old question: What, exactly, is Marxism? For some it is an economic world-view based on labor as the source of all wealth. Others see it as a way of analyzing history that focuses on productivity and class. When I put the question of definition to George Kateb, a professor of politics at Princeton, he stressed what has often been missing from academic Marxism but was central to Marx himself: a program of radical social change.

"I see Marx," he said, "primarily as he wished to see himself: as a revolutionist with two purposes, a negative and a positive. The negative purpose was the relief and the ultimate abolition of human misery. And the positive purpose was the eventual construction of a truly egalitarian society which would be without armed conflict or ruthless unarmed competition." Indeed, as Kateb points out, Marx was one of a handful of European thinkers who rallied behind Lincoln and the Union cause. Slaves were not proletarians, but they were oppressed, and that was what mattered.

[For a brief summary of Marx's life and philosophy, see "Karl Marx: A Primer," page 15.]

If Highgate is the place to look for the monumental past of Marx, the Princeton campus is an excellent one for investigating his present standing. I found no self-described Marxist on the faculty. (No surprise; since an avowed Marxist faces not merely the wrath of conservative alumni but the sectarian derision of other schools of Marxism!) A dozen or more Princeton professors have been among the outstanding commentators on Marxism in its Russian, Asian, Western European, and American variants: Robert W. Tucker, Arno J. Mayer, Stephen F. Cohen, Jerrold E. Seigel (now at New York University), and the late Cyril E. Black have all illuminated Marx's impact. I sought out other scholars whose work has been important, if not always as well known to the lay public. Their insights were provocative and sometimes surprising. In the world of social thought, Marx remains a player, but usually not for the reasons that he or most of his followers expected. . . .

Due to copyright restrictions, we can provide only a limited amount of this article on the Web. For copies of the entire article, please send $2 to Princeton Alumni Weekly, 194 Nassau St., Princeton, NJ 08542.