14 September 2020 — The Meaning of Life Type Stuff
After the Wedding. L.S. Lowry.
No person is an island. It takes a village. Circle of Life. We are stardust. Seven generations. These truisms reference connections between people and what we owe each other. Appealing to chaos theory, an action, no matter how small, dominoes around the world. You accidentally wave at someone who looks like your friend Nevraj in Toronto, and a union goes on strike in Australia. In the same way, ecosystems interdigitate. Food webs explode beyond neat textbook boundaries, nutrients cycle between the atmosphere and the ocean, and capitalist extractive activities threaten everything. Everything. By appealing to these interconnections, we illuminate neon contradictions and build an eco-socialist theoretical base.
There have now been two attacks on the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in the space of just two weeks. The first and most damaging was an attempt to obliterate with a hammer Marx’s name from the original headstone marking the burial place of Karl and his wife Jenny, which was incorporated into the monument erected in his memory in 1956. The second was this weekend’s daubing of anti-communist slogans on the plinth supporting the monument’s bronze bust of Marx.
Eleanor Marx, daughter of the greatest political scientist in history, faced the formidable task of living up to her family name in the turbulent period during the birth of the organised labour movement in Britain. What she managed to achieve in this period, under the influence of her father’s ideas, makes Rachel Holmes’ new biography Eleanor Marx – A Life, an appropriately impressive project.
