They paraded down West Berlin's Karl Marx Strasse, some 24,000 strong, under banners that defiantly announced their allegiance to Communism and the "class struggle." Yet few of the marchers were workers, and a good many had not even been born when Soviet troops tried to starve out West Berlin in the infamous blockade of 1948-49. Some of the youthful demonstrators melted into the beer halls along the way. Here and there, braless girls with sweaters tied around their hips joined in the march with a shrug and trudged along with shoulders back.
From the sidewalk, an unkempt man taunted the demonstrators. "I escaped from the East to see you?" he kept repeating, with some astonishment. Another bystander jeered: "Why don't you all just go over to the other side?" The young people laughed.
SIMILAR May Day scenes were played out on the streets of other Western European cities. In Paris, young leftists paraded through a pelting rain. "Down with the army!" they chanted, until they joined up with some inhospitable union members at the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville. A window broke, fists flew, and the chant quickly changed to "Oh, les nouveaux flics [Oh, the new cops]!" In Milan, young people marched under banners that spelled out what they regard as Italy's current evils: IMPERIALISM, FASCISM, CAPITALIST OPPRESSORS.
Thus, last week, a host of young European left-wing activists paid tribute to the ideas and ideals of a bearded German philosopher who died a pauper and was buried in London's Highgate Cemetery 90 years ago. Today, the powerful, shaggy visage of Karl Marx peers out of a bookstore window in Rome. It glowers over a meeting of young German Socialists at Hannover-Linden and a student gathering at Vincennes University on the outskirts of Paris. The name is scrawled on buildings and walls from Norway to Sicily, sometimes in elaborate quotations but most often only in simple graffiti. "Viva Marx!" says a slogan scribbled on a building near the University of Barcelona. More than a thousand miles away on a gray stucco wall in West Berlin, a splash of whitewash exults: "Marx lebt [Marx lives]!"
The Marxist renaissance is a peculiar phenomenon. By any empirical standard, Marx's major prophecies—such as Communism's triumph over capitalism or the outbreak in industrialized societies of the workers' revolution—have proved false. No economy based on his teachings has approached the efficiency of a free-market system, and governments that tried to enforce his Utopian views have been compelled to rely on totalitarian methods. Nonetheless, Europe's expanding middle class is discovering to its horror that its sons and daughters are increasingly hostile to industry, "the System" and even to the established left of organized Communist parties. Says Francesco Forte, president of Italy's state-owned ENI oil colossus: "Marx has suddenly emerged as the official philosopher for the younger generation in Western Europe."