Heh.
So when Karl Marx died — I know this is kind of hard to believe — they didn’t just shove him in a state-funded hole or cremate him and sprinkle his ashes over the Working Man’s Club. No, his friend Engels paid for him to have a big poncey tomb in the froo-froo Highgate Cemetery.
By the 1970s, there were no more burials in Highgate and, somehow or other, that meant no money was coming in. Surely a complete coincidence that the whole cemetery — but especially Marx’s tomb — fell into disrepair just about then and was picked apart by vandals. Now, here’s where it gets really weird — it turns out, groundskeepers won’t do their thing for free. You have to give them, like, money to look after stuff.
So a cooperative took over the running of the place in the Nineties (the Nineteen Nineties, remember them?) and began charging to see Marx’s tomb, with the moneys going to maintenance.
I guess the core of Marx’s philosophy must be: everything is free and nobody gets paid, because the little Marxlets are upset to fork out £4 to make the pilgrimage.
Not sure what is funnier: the guy who’s pissed at the fee because lately he’s doubled sales (a typo, surely) of his Marxist newspaper, so he knows people are super stoked about Communism. Or the picture of all those kidlets taking snapshots of the great man’s tomb with their i-Phones.
Thanks awfully to iamfelix for sending me a link to the article.
October 28, 2015 — 11:16 pm
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