“The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt.”
Friedrich Engels at Marx’s funeral, Highgate Cemetery, London, 17 March, 1883
Zvonko Šundov, a doctor of philosophy, got his last pay cheque 24 years ago. Still, the 63-year-old insists on paying for both our coffees. The years he spent as probably the most educated homeless person in Croatia have not broken him.
“Reality is a trap for every thinker,” he says.
In 1991, Šundov was fired from the Zagreb School of Electrical Engineering. He won court cases against his dismissal in both Zagreb and Strasbourg but he has never returned to the classroom – because his job no longer exists. He taught Marxism.
In socialist Yugoslavia, Marxism was a compulsory subject in all secondary schools and colleges. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of communism, when, in his famous essay ”The End of History?”, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the eternal victory of liberal democracy and capitalism.
Hundreds of Marxism teachers and professors were left without jobs. During the great changeover, they were despised as couriers of totalitarianism who had no place in a democratic society.
But now Europe’s political landscape is changing: leftist movements inspired by Marx’s ideas are gaining strength due to the international economic crisis. At the beginning of 2015, Europe got its first government of radical leftists since ”The End of History?”, with the victory of Greece’s Syriza, a political movement that grew out of the Communist Party. In Spain, Podemos, a movement close to Syriza, has come from nowhere to establish itself as a third force in national politics. Germany’s Die Linke party last year took power in the state of Thuringia on a democratic socialist platform, with a lead candidate who campaigned with a big red bust of Karl Marx. In Britain, the new Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn has said Marx is a “fascinating figure... from whom we can learn a great deal”.
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