The Struggle Carries On

It’s Sunday afternoon. I’ve just completed my first week in paid employment as a fully-fledged journalist and, having begun to appreciate the true value of weekends, I am determined to spend them doing something thought-provoking, engaging, cultural and generally productive. Thus, after a deeply thought-provoking, engaging, cultural and generally productive night on the town (well The Hobgoblin in Angel), I’ve woken up late and gone for a fry-up with my hungover girlfriend.

That still leaves the best part of a very warm and sunny afternoon left to burn. But where should the sensitive socialist take his hippy better-half for a romantic day out? Half-way through following a north London nature trail we’ve discovered, I realise we’re near Highgate and decide to take her to the cemetery to see Karl Marx. What, you might think, could possibly be better than that?

Well, for one, not paying the £3 entry fee. I was half-tempted to try to convince them that my great great uncle Karl was buried there and that they should let me enter for free, but I wasn’t sure they’d buy that tactic. After flashing my student card in front of the official’s face fast enough for him not to spot that it is two years out of date, we get into Highgate Cemetery East for £2. Not much to moan about, one might imagine, it’s hardly going to break the bank – even if I do have a girlfriend who insists on ordering the most expensive item on the menu when I take her out to dinner – but it’s the principle!

Highgate Cemetery is a museum of the dead, replete with famous figures, splendid architecture and stunning surroundings and it’s worth the entrance fee. But I object to paying any amount of money (unless it is going to help the world’s poor) to see the founding father of communism. It’s one of the ironies of modern society, like the image Che Guevara, slapped on t-shirts and posters and sold mass-market to thousands of teenagers around the world who haven’t the faintest idea of what he was rebelling against, just that he was a symbol of rebellion. Kind of like the kids who stick photographs of Charles Manson on their walls just to be cool. I digress. If things like religion and the afterlife weren’t just opiates of the masses, Marx would be spinning in his grave.

I’d never seen Marx’s grave before. As a socialist and social sciences graduate, it felt like a kind of pilgrimage to me. When I got there, I was surprised to find there were still fresh flowers at the base of the headstone. I should have expected it really. Family members will often bring flowers to the graves of their loved ones, and among communists, everyone’s a brother or a sister! Pinned down by stones, I found messages written by the people from all over the world who had taken the pilgrimage before me. Skipping past the one written in Chinese that I couldn’t understand, I found one in English that read: “The struggle carries on, comrade!”

The struggle carries on. So long as there is injustice in the world, so long as there is poverty and inequality and starvation and war and oppression, the struggle carries on. Because it has to.

In 1967, a young sergeant named Mario Terán entered the schoolhouse in the tiny Bolivian village of La Higuera to execute the world’s most famous revolutionary. Upon seeing him, Che Guevara uttered his famous last words:

“I know you are here to kill me. Shoot coward, you are only going to kill a man.”

Because men are mortal. But ideas like justice, equality, freedom and peace never die.

Several decades later, Mario Terán received free eye surgery from Cuban doctors.