On a summer visit to the grave of Karl Marx, Marxist activist Ben Gliniecki, 24, was disgusted to learn that he would have to pay £4, or about $6, to pay respects to the man who sounded the death knell for private property, writes the Wall Street Journal. “There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which capitalists won’t sink if they think they can make money out of it,” he complained.

The charity that looks after this private London graveyard say their cover fee subsidizes the upkeep of a cemetery where 170,000 other people rest. 

This graveyard, in a genteel part of north London, typically sees around 200 visitors a day, WSJ reports. Most visitors ask to see Marx's final resting place.

“They do complain [about the fee], and tell me Marx would be turning in his grave,” said a representative from the charity. “But I tell them, it’s redistribution in action, because all the money we generate goes back into the cemetery.”

​“He’s buried here because it’s beautiful, not to make the cemetery profit,” said one visitor, an Italian Marxist living in London.

“It’s such a bourgeois monument,” said a former cemetery worker, as he looked up at the bust of Marx’s giant head. “I turned around [and saw it] and I was like ‘Oh, come on.’ ”

For most visitors, the fee is a justified expense to help pay for the upkeep of a cemetery whose other inhabitants range from novelist George Eliot to punk impresario Malcolm McLaren.

Gliniecki argues it is the state’s role to look after public amenities and that Marx would have been horrified by the fee. There is “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment,’” he read from The Communist Manifesto.