What Marx Learned from Boyhood in Roman Trier

Despite failing to persuade my Tory fellow villagers 

in Cambridgeshire to elect me Labour Councillor

this week, I remain persuaded that the people who

do the hard work deserve more than a derisory

share of money and power. This is one reason I 

admire the thought of Karl Marx, born two hundred

years ago today.  

Karl’s super-brain developed from infancy, during 

his classical education at Trier's Gymnasium, in the shadow

of one of the Roman Empire's most imposing relics. What 

the Material Boy found in the Material World just

outside his home at Trier was the very material Black Gate.

Karl Marx's house is one of those to the left of the Porta Nigra

On October 1 1819, when Karl was not out of nappies, his  father Heinrich 

bought the house at Simeongasse 1070 (now Simeonstraße 8). This was at 

exactly the time when Rome Two, Roma Secunda, ‘Roman Trier’ was rediscovered. 

In 1804, Napoleon had ordered it to be returned, in a symbolic deletion of the

Holy Roman Empire, to its former glory. Its medieval Christian accretions were

removed. The complete Napoleonic transformation of the Rhineland through 

bourgeois revolution was achieved in less than the generation immediately 

preceding Karl's arrival on the planet. The Porta Nigra was operating during 

his childhood as Trier’s Museum of Classical Antiquities.

It is no coincidence that Karl Marx came from a town so intimately associated 

with revolutionary change, founded by Augustus, the architect of the Roman 

revolution, as Augusta Treverorum, in about 15 BCE. It was later from Trier 

that Constantine masterminded the conversion of Europe to Christianity, at 

the time when feudalism became the dominant mode of production. 

The Ruins of Roman Trier are present in much of Marx's work (as I've discussed

in an article I'll send anyone if they email my two names separated by a dot 

@kcl.ac.uk), especially his classic 1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis 

Napoleon:

"The question to be solved, then, is how it came about 
that the popular masses in the Roman Empire so far
preferred this nonsense—preached, into the bargain, by 
slaves and oppressed—to all other religions, that the 
ambitious Constantine finally saw in the adoption of this 
religion of nonsense the best means of exalting 
himself to the position of autocrat of the Roman world."  

How, he ponders, are people so easily deluded by cynical leaders? 

Well, in election weeks that always seems a good question to me.