Marxism

Many famous men and women have found their final arrest in Highgate Cemetery, Michael Faraday rub shoulders with George Eliot, Christina Rossetti with Animala. Yet of all those who lie interred in his 40 acre plot, Karl Marx and his imposing tomb surely casts the greatest shadow. He is one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the modern age. Upon his gravestone, the following phrase is etched. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways.

The point, however, is to change it. But what did Marx actually write? What were his influences? And have world events since his death serve to strengthen or to undermine his theory of history? With me to discuss Marx himself and Marxist writings are Xavier Cohen, a third year undergraduate student studying PPY at Baylor College, and Cameron during a first year student studying French at college.

Karen, we have a huge topic on our hands today, but let's start with something maybe slightly more manageable. Where did Marx come from? Well, Marx was born on the 5th of May 1818 in Drear in Germany. He was born to a Jewish family, but didn't have a particularly religious upbringing or anything. In fact, his father, who was a lawyer, officially renounced his religion and switched to Lutheranism despite the fact that Trigger was a heavily Catholic town.

He switched to Lutheranism. But in truth of the sort of socially elite were Protestant. And so that served the Marx family relatively well. Having said that, though, Marx's upbringing was was not religious, either in a Jewish or Protestant sense it speculating too much to say that a relatively secular Jewish upbringing is going to lead on to his great, basically atheist philosophy.

But certainly it is the case that the kind of ideas that he grew up with that his father exposed him to weren't particularly religiously freighted. So he would have read certainly things like important thing is that the French Enlightenment like Rousseau or did all. He then went on to study law and philosophy at university and wrote a dissertation and got his Ph.D. at the age of twenty four, I believe, actually twenty one. I think he was very young when he got to do so.

He got his Puchi at 21 and then I think straightaway started working in journalism. He worked for a newspaper called The Reenergizes that made you decide whether you're doing it in English and German and worked as a journalist. He covered a number of different questions, obviously reporting in early 19th century German journalism was a different thing than it is today.

Notably, he wrote about the effect on peasants who would collect wood from land that was once common, but then became, it was declared to be private property. And so they faced prosecution because that he wrote about that and other economic questions. And that's really the sort of in a nutshell, really marks. He's moving about Central Europe. He ends up in Paris and eventually he's going to live in London for most of his life.

He met Engels, I believe, first in Cologne, but they had this big meeting in Paris in about eight imitating 40s 1844. I think this man, Friedrich Engels, would have a huge influence on Marx's life. Engels was the son of an industrialist who had factories in England and Manchester, I believe, and he was of a similar cast of mind to Marx early on. They both knew about Hegelian philosophy, which was which had a lot of sway at that time.

And they began collaborating on journalistic enterprises and on writing together on political economy. Later on, Engels would become a major of extremely major importance for Marx because effectively, Engels supported Marx financially during all the latter half of his life when he was working on capital because he used the proceeds from his factory to fund Marx. What some people have seen as a great irony that Marx was benefiting from industrial production in England.

I think Engels was also incredibly impressed with Marx, his intellect. Marx as a student is very keen on Shakespeare. Quote Shakespeare to Baron von Westphalian. Marx was incredibly influenced, as were almost all of his German contemporaries by. The great author of the previous generation, can you describe to us a bit of what Marx got from Hegel, but maybe how he turned on his head?

Sure, yes. It's often said that Marx Marx would say about himself that he turned turned Hegel on on its head, not so modest. The key part of Hegel that Marx is a kind of a much wider kind of debate and discussion is haggles philosophy of history. And Hegel thinks that there are importantly, that there is a kind of notable pattern in history, a kind of driving force in history, and that this can be understood by us and we can see where we are in this in this part in history.

And that history is heading towards a certain place. Interpretations of Hegel kind of often said to fall into two camps around the time of Marx's youth, the right to Ghanians or the old Acadians and the left young Hegelian. Marx was a part of the leftist aliens who, unlike the right Hungarians, the latter kind of had a more conservative interpretation of Hegel's philosophy.

And when he said that the culmination of historic progress was to be found in the contemporary Prussian states where one would find the development of reason manifesting kind of freedom and liberty for all man and rational beings. The left aliens look to develop Hegel's philosophy and less religious and less conservative direction, which meant kind of admitting that or recognising that history was not its end in the mid 19th century. And that was still a way to go to to progress things.

An important thing that Marx did that was important in turning Agel on his head. Is that where he goes or categories of like mind or the absolutes which are often seen as like akin to God as the kind of ideal development agent in history that is a part of all of us. Marx saw the material categories of men in our concrete lives needing to produce for ourselves work so that we can eat and continue to live as creating the kind of ideological realm within which our ideas and language rests.

Obviously, Marx isn't inventing socialist thought from from nothing. He's drawing on socialist traditions. But it kind of the kind of workers movements, trade unionism that was present in Britain, France. But theoretically important, he draws on the utopian socialists and I think often.

Because they kind of a close rival to the thought of the materialist thought of Marx and Engels, you often find in Marx, and it was very critical, patronising tone towards the utopian utopian socialists who were, you know, silly and immature in that in that thought because they weren't historically grounded. They didn't have a view of history, which he takes from Hegel. Right. This is the important thing.

We see where he kind of blends these two things, take these two traditions together. Cameron, you spoke earlier about how there's almost a dictionary between the ideas that Hegel developed in a religious context and Marx's economic viewpoint, but often saying quite, quite similar things. Hegel's philosophy, which is the basis of Marxism, but it's sort of the soil in which Marxism grows.

You often hear in relation to Plato and Aristotle that, you know, Aristotle flipped Plato upside down because Plato, Plato has these universal categories, the forms and everything in the world of limitations are instantiations of these absolute forms. Aristotle, on the other hand, goes from our imperiousness line and says everything that we see in the world, we then sort of categorise. And so it's from the from the data, as it were, that we construct our categories.

And there's a very similar procedure with Marx and his philosophical forebear. Hegel, where he has this very religiously tinged philosophy, is influenced a lot by different Eastern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, where you have this idea that all human minds are part of an overall phenomenon that's called mind, but they don't realise it yet.

And so over the course of history, various things sort of clash against each other and eventually lead to this great synthesis which destroys the divisions between our minds and comes to this realisation that all minds are one. Marx considered haggles philosophy to be structurally sound. That is to say that the the patterns that Hegel described of a dialectic progression of different phases through history, culminating in some ultimate realisation of perfect oneness.

In the case of Hegel, this is an ideal progression where minds realise that they are like individual minds. But part of one great thing called mind, Marx saw a similar thing with class divisions and antagonisms where you have various phases of history that correspond to different class untagged antagonisms, wherein different classes conflict, and then a social revolution breaks out and you get a sort of new paradigm.

But that paradigm in itself is a new arena for class conflict between different classes, newly constituted classes. So he, as it were, translates haggles ideal progression into a material progression in which the what he calls forces of production and relations of production are of utmost importance. You've introduced the idea of class struggle to say which is the key, one of the key central themes to all of Marx's writings.

Perhaps what we should do now for the next section of the programme is just in a rather rough way, of course, deal with the main tenets of Marx's historical philosophy. Xavier, can you start with how Marx views the economic reality of capitalism as he sees it in Victorian England? So for Marx, capitalism is one of several what he would call modes of production that have gone before. A mode of production is a kind of economic system, if you like, that prevails at a certain time in history.

And what characterises modes of production are the ways in which people relate to one another and objects in production. So a very important determining factor in what a mode of production like capitalism is, is what's going on when we consider what he would call the means of production. The means of production are things that are used in order to produce things.

Factories are an image we can have in our heads when we think of means of production, factories, tools, land in capitalism, the means of production are owned by a certain class, the capitalist class or the bourgeoisie, as Marx called them. And they employ rather than say own the working.

So in previous modes of production that might have included slavery or a kind of relationship of serfdom in capitalism, workers themselves are free to sell their ability to work, to call their their labour power. They're free to sell that to any capitalist they want. But ultimately, they're not free when we consider them as a group because they are forced to sell their labour to some Labour Party,

to some capitalist or perish. And it's this kind of relationship of some who own that, which is used to produce and those who actually make it, that Marx, especially in his early part of his life, but will continue to see this in the later part of his life, would have seen this as a wrong an injustice, a bad thing about about capitalism. And this is what he's writing in the Communist Manifesto. Yeah. And which is a sort of a vulgarisation text, really. It's it's a it's a piece of propaganda.

It's the manifesto of of a Communist Party. And so what it does is it puts some of this basic but quite complicated philosophy in relatively understandable terms. I talked about all heretofore existing histories in history of class struggle. Close's with his famous talks into the workers saying, you know, you have nothing to lose, but you change your world to win.

But within that text, you do find the lineaments of a broader theory of history and historical progression in which he really highlights the connexion between these forces of production and the relations of production that they give rise to. You sometimes hear talk of the economic base that say the technology and stuff that's around and what that stuff is capable of doing. So obviously there's a there's a vast difference between, you know, factory manufacturers.

You have it in China these days and a plough, as you might have had in mediaeval times. And the fact of that disparity in each case leads to a very different set of relationships. So we talked a bit about wage labour under capitalism, wherein workers sell their labour to the people who own the means of production. That's a different way of these different classes interacting than previously. But Marx really highlights the fact that it's dependent on the forces of production as they exist.

So the technological developments in the means of production are the main driving factor for marks of the class struggle. Would you agree with that statement? Well, it's certainly a driving factor in historical progress because as advances are made in the means of production and you get more technology technologically advanced and you can produce more and do more stuff with technology, there is sort of a lag time between that and new relations of production.

So let's say you come up with this vast new technology, the steam engine that will enable you to do immense amount of new stuff that just couldn't be done before. But it will also imply, according to Marx, new ways of organising labour, production, distribution and all that. The problem is the steam engine is here now and they don't say, oh, well, we've created a steam engine. We've got to come up with a new way of organising the economy. That's not how history works.

The steam engine happens and starts doing things and changing and progressing. And over time it becomes less and less compatible with the way that things have been organised until then. And this leads to what Marx calls contradictions between relations of production. That is the way that people interact and the forces of production as they exist. And these contradictions, he says, will be reconciled and not really reconciled.

But they'll explode in a social revolution which will change the landscape. And that's what you see between the feudal period when you have serfdom as the main sort of production and capitalism or the bourgeois production. So during most people fix it at about the 17th century, 18th century, the rise of the bourgeoisie and you have massive changes with the rise of a merchant class because of the technology that you have. And so that change is brought on by the changes, changes in technology.

A similar kind of analogy would be that many would say today, perhaps of Marx's persuasion or not, that.

The Internet, you know, Internet activists who looked kind of free data, you know, data wants to be free and that we've got these new technological things that give us a kind of abundance, perhaps, of the kind that Marx envisages that, you know, if I make a song and upload that you need some fancy algorithms that Apple might provide, you know, in your iTunes store to prevent that from being accessible to everyone. But ultimately, we can freely distribute such a thing to everybody.

And it's a certain economic system that we have capitalism that needs to make sure that can't be done so that one can continue to make a profit, which is the basis of people continuing to work under under such a system. And we you know, we see people talking now about changes in capitalism today. Some would say post capitalism, certain kind of capitalistic tendencies we're seeing due to the changes in technology, in the information knowledge economy areas.

So this I think we can continue to see such a theme be in the more specific terms that Marx laid out that way or not, this theme of technology influencing our economic system, we kind of still see this as a very relevant dynamic at play. Today, Marx had a strong sense of scarcity of a good commodity being very important for capitalism's ongoing success and progress. Some people criticised him in later years for not understanding that capitalism could create new scarcities.

Tzavela, do you think that's a fair criticism? Marx was certainly aware of the possibility of, you know, bright young things to come along and create a new consumer product that we may or may not think, you know, bring a great new thing into our lives. You know, we can we can provide examples where this might be a new fad for young people, a Furby or something that we think is a manufactured one that we might look at and think it's a shame that such a thing,

you know, by manipulation of advertisement can be encouraged. So many people desire this new this new good. And then with other cases, you know, with the two iPads that sat in front of us, we might think that this is a beneficial technological development that helps us to meet our needs and preferences in life more easily. Marx was certainly aware that capitalism would develop new consumer goods in this way.

But perhaps in his economic writings, he failed to foresee the extent to which this kind of. Ideological force, to use his own terms like that, might be misleading people from that kind of true interests. Perhaps this is one of the things that has failed to, you know, give the proletariat the revolutionary motivation that he said they certainly would have and he himself tried to instil in them.

Come on, let's focus in on what Marx had to say about revolution, because that's what in the popular mindset, at least, is the most potent aspect of his thinking. Sure. Well, Marx said that effectively revolutions were inevitable. They're sort of the locomotive of history insofar as they crop up with regularity when you have certain conditions in place, those conditions being the contradictions between the ways that you can do things and the way that people organise doing things.

So what he thought in the case of the current well, the current at the time that he was writing situation, that would that is, say, a relatively advanced industrial capitalism, not at all as advanced as we have it now. But he thought that basically, once you reach a certain level of contradiction, which he saw occurring because of the continual division and redivision every division of labour, and because already in Marx's time you were seeing people in factories doing smaller and smaller tasks.

And this sort of culminates in Fordism that you get in the 1920s in America, where people are sort of screwing one screw onto a car and that's their whole job. I mean, you can think of Charlie Buckets, Father and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, whose sole job is to toothpaste caps onto toothpaste. This, Marx says, is deeply alienating. But it also will lead to conflict because of a number of a number of reasons.

One of the problems is that people will be so alienated from their human natures that they will basically revolt against the order that sort of dehumanised them to such a degree. And so Marx says that there have been a number of social revolutions throughout human history.

And the next one, the one that will happen because of the class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, will be the last one, because human history will reach such a point that the division of labour this time won't just be changed by a social revolution, it will be abolished. And you have a situation in which, because of advanced industrial technology, will be able to provide for all of our needs in an equitable way.

And it will lead to new ways of distributing things such that everybody will have their needs met. And you can be a full human being, which is what he sees as the end point of human history, or rather the beginning point of human history, because he says that we are currently in the prehistory of human society and will only be once we reach socialism, then communism that will enter human history through the destruction of the division of labour.

That will happen through a social revolution, which he thought was coming up quite soon. And he tried to sort of bring about himself in a few advanced industrial societies of his day.

Obviously, that hasn't happened, but that was something that he was anticipating at the time he was writing coming quite quickly, that turn of phrase of of Marx's Great Society, the prehistory with the emergence of prehistory, the kind of propagandising rhetoric of, you know, just how primitive capitalism is compared to our full communist potential.

That's kind of typical of of of the ways in which Marx was not just a kind of distant commentator on the world around him, but, you know, so he conceived of himself as a revolutionary who was trying to persuade others to to change the world, to change the world around it. I mean, this is a rather bold question. I mean, forgive me, but do you think Marx ever saw himself as almost a messianic figure leading the proletariat to this beginning of history as he saw it from the current prehistory?

If he did, he would be going against his own thinking in doing so, because he he would go against a certain kind of great man interpretation of history in which some, you know, great figure comes along and with their genius and power, move human history into a new direction. He would say that he was a product of history if if Marx didn't see himself as a messiah. Other people certainly have seen him in those terms.

I mean, Bertrand Russell has a famous comparison of Marxism as an ideology to Christianity, wherein there are various analogues between. So in this comparison, which is a bit mean and a bit unfair, but nevertheless amusing, Marx is the Messiah, the elect of Christianity correspond to the proletariat. The church would be the Communist Party. The second coming would be the revolution and so on.

So I think that does point to a degree of religious thinking or at least religious structures of thinking that could be said to exist in Marxism. That doesn't necessarily mean it's an invalid philosophy, but it is something that people have sort of flagged up.

We can come back to some of the more precise economic writings of Freud later in his life in that capital, but I feel that it's the right time to talk about some of a purportedly Marxist revolutions in the 20th century that did not come about in the way that Marx himself would necessarily have predicted.

So come and join the example of the Russian Revolution. Sure. Well, the the tricky thing about the Russian Revolution and most 20th century revolutions and deals is that they simply don't correspond to Marx's model of social revolution as as we've sort of discussed. So Marx predicted social revolutions in the most advanced industrial countries. So at the time, that would have been Germany, the UK and France, maybe the United States. But that's always, as always, a bit of a different question.

But he was expecting these revolutions to come about in these highly advanced capitalist countries because they had significant proletariats. That is to say, they had significant numbers, in some cases in the millions of industrial workers who worked in factories and were already being exploited by their employers who he thought would be the driving force behind social revolution.

Now, in the Russian example and in 1917, Russia was effectively an agrarian and agrarian or even a close to a feudal society. I mean, you know, Tsar Nicholas had only abolished serfdom shortly before, a few decades before.

And so it was not unusual for a Marxist to say at that time that Russia was a backward nation and to think that that would be the place where the first Marxist style revolution with the seizure of the means of production would occur is not something that Marx would have predicted at all. It nevertheless happened. And that the reasons for that are, well, endlessly debated.

But do you feel it was a rather different kind of revolution? It was an opportunistic revolution by rather small group of people. I would I would say that because in the case of Lenin, I mean, Lenin developed Marxist theory for what he said was Marxist theory in a in a certain direction, a direction of basically revolutionary strategy. And Lenin wanted to seise power in Russia.

He had spent a lot of time in Germany, notably with various German socialists and communists, and felt that there was a propitious moment for revolution in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century, attempted it in the very early 20th century. And then finally in 1917, with the disorder that was brought about by the First World War, managed to take advantage of a power vacuum to take power.

And that was it has to be said, because of the success of Lenin's major theoretical and strategic innovation, which was the Vanguard party. This was something that Marx didn't directly theorise, but that Lenin would have said he he sort of derives from Marxist thought.

And it's the idea that you need a radical party that can basically lay the groundwork for a social revolution and have it sitting there and ready for a revolutionary moment, which is what happened in Russia and which Lenin and the Bolsheviks seised upon. But it certainly isn't what any what one might say a classical Marxist would have predicted. There are cases early on in the in the Soviet Union and I think nineteen twenty one.

And in Kronstadt, where there's a moment where workers are quite militant workers of the kind that Marx might have, you might one might envisage remarks in earlier writings in the Communist Manifesto who dock workers who are rising up against kind of bosses and a certain kind of authoritarianism that they're seeing coming in the changes and in the Soviet Union, who are kind of crushed by the the Red Army. And it's this kind of fight often between anarchists and Leninists.

So those who are all kind of agree that ultimately we should end up in a lovely utopian communist society, but who disagree. There are strong disagreements there between how once you get there and people will use Marx, it will try and drag Marx onto their side by creating different parts of his of his work.

And at that, I think is a really major difference with Leninism is the sort of authoritarian strain, because I would have said implicit within the theory of the Vanguard party, that is this sort of gada which exists. Of effectively intellectual's, which in the Russian situation, it had to sort of be intellectuals who form the Vanguard party because you didn't really have a well-developed proletariat.

And according to the Marxist counter things, it'll be the the working class that rises up and drives the revolution. Whereas in the case of Lenin, it was a sort of relatively small self-selecting squad of radical intellectuals who did a lot of the fermenting and, you know, radicalised a portion of the working class. But they were driving it sort of from above or at the very least from from the side.

Right. And so this almost elitist strain in Leninism that puts intellectuals above the working class, which was disputed at the time. I mean, Rosa Luxemburg was somebody who said that, you know, we need to give scope to the working class to determine the the mode of their revolution. She was a sort of left Marxist or even more libertarian Marxist.

And I think this authoritarian strain that you find in Leninism, at least from my point of view, can go some way towards explaining Stalinism, much of what happened later, which just had so little respect for the lives, much less the viewpoints of the working class. Now, I will say that there's a tendency on the radical left, especially since 1956, of excusing or explaining away these revolutions in a sort of dogmatic Marxist way.

What I mean by that is by saying, oh, well, the Russian Revolution didn't follow what Mark said. Therefore, Marks remains perfectly right. And we just need to pay attention exactly to what he said to the letter, chapter and verse and disregard these revolutions because they weren't really Marxist. Right. I think that's a disingenuous way of looking at things.

And I think that the sort of dogmatism with which some Marxists deal with these ideas is something that Marx himself wouldn't have appreciated. I mean, he famously said when the first Marxist party was formed, I don't know what Marxism is, but all I know is I'm not a Marxist.

And I think that's because he, as we said, was a very practical political operator and was less concerned with sort of sticking to exactly what he wrote and more concerned with re-evaluating, constantly re-evaluating how has this phrase, the ruthless critique of everything existing. And so I would have thought that if Marx had lived until this day, he would have changed his doctrine umpteen times and offer the better because he was he considered what he was doing to be scientific socialism.

And obviously, science is in part all about testing hypotheses, disproving them, putting theories out there and saying, oh, where the holes in this. And so the fact that Marx and I lived until 1883 meant that he couldn't continue refining it. Other people tried to do it in his place, but obviously that grew into a whole web of different factions. Is there a difficulty that Marx himself, again re-evaluating for his own life and writing so much makes it?

There's no one Marx that we can go and say, oh, that's what he thought. You said that he changed his opinion towards the end of his life about various issues. So I think I think Lenin might have said that Marxism is a block of steel from which, you know, no no parts can be removed.

It would be very, very strange for any given human with the kind of interest that Marx had to continue throughout their life and in an entirely consistent philosophy or guide to political action throughout their lives. Let us return in the final 10 minutes. Time flies to some of the more specific economic points the remarks made later in his life. He wrote a huge amount I found when I was reading the show. And some of his mathematical writings in the 1870 are maths myself.

And he and he got interested in trying to revise the calculus. He didn't succeed. But nonetheless. But he should have written such a thing as being, you know, some non-trivial knowledge of the subject is quite extraordinary. He's not remembered for his mathematics, but he is remembered for his economics. And this particular point about how profits change as a capitalist society develops that has become very well known to want to set it up for us.

So typically, in what we would call perhaps modern economics or neoclassical economics, there is a view that within capitalism, if we're even to mention such a word in economics, which which we might not do, if you look at a kind of one economic textbook in economies, as they might say, we have ups and downs, moments where economies are growing at a moment where economies are growing at a slower rate or even shrinking recessions. And the picture that is painted is one of these ups and downs.

But as time progresses in the long term, that's that's why we have these ups and downs. And there's no kind of big changes in the way that capitalism works. Economies work apart from a general trend to growth, whereas for Marx, this is kind of capitalism as a kind of historically specific mode of production, as we said before, a specific economic system that has a tendency and it changes as it as it grows and as time goes on.

And part of this comes from what Mark sees as a tendency for the what he calls the rate of profit, which is the kind of rates of return, if you like, broadly on investment that on average capitalists will get for the money that they put down in their businesses. So the rate that there is a tendency for that greater profit to decline as time goes on and as that rate of profit declines.

And this helps lead to deeper and deeper crises which provide riper moments for the working class as unemployment is created, widespread suffering, riper moments for social revolutions, for workers to recognise their true interests in fighting for a communist world and taking control of of of their businesses, their factories, and ultimately creating a new society over time.

Interestingly, this profit from Marks comes solely from the workers, the workers from marks create value, and we have a picture of the bourgeoisie as a kind of lazy, fat cat doing nothing. So whereas in an economic textbook today, the owners of capital are rewarded, their profits, a reward, are seen as a reward for bearing risk on their capital that they can face to lose the marks.

You know, you put down money in an industry, you're very likely to get more back and the workers are the only people producing the things that have value. And yet profits are being earned by capitalists who don't make any of the products and workers are not exploited. And exploitation then becomes a quite kind of mathematical economic category for Marx that he can measure.

He measures in a certain kind of ratio in his work, and [INAUDIBLE] measure this across time and predict that, you know, the rate of exploitation as it leads to the kind of rate of profit will decline as time goes on. He was criticised later for through no fault of his own, coming before the so-called marginal revolution.

Yeah, so the the marginal revolution is the kind of change around the kind of turn of the 20th century and slightly before where economics moves from what might be called classical economics to neoclassical economics, where they kind of methodology changes when people recognise the importance for rational agents of considering the marginal unit B. B, that the kind of the next unit that capitalism might produce, the next worker they might employ,

and the cost to them of employing that next worker versus the profit that they would get from such a thing. And this way of thinking about things leads to quite a kind of widespread, much more mathematical approach to economic thinking.

Not that Marx's approach wasn't mathematical in its own right, but economics prior to this revolution is often seen as only of historical interest, but old fashioned quite yet and not not useful insofar as economics can be useful today, we're told in the dying moments, let us move towards some of the modern day verifications of Marx's writings. There is a very strong analytical Marxism department in Oxford for the last 150 or so years.

You are saying about that? Yeah. So interestingly important, depending on one's point of view, import what one might call important developments in Marxist thought that taking place here in Oxford at since the kind of 1970s, most notably a political philosopher who studied at Oxford, went on to become the teacherly professor of social and political philosophy. And it's called Alsos Gascoine Hussein Jerico and embarked on a project he called No Marxism.

And if that can be bleeped out or analytical Marxism, and he saw kind of 20th century academic Marxist thought as being a part of what you might call the continental tradition, which the Analytica tradition, which prevails over the continental tradition in Oxford, would see as lacking rigour, lacking clarity, a general kind of fluffy pretentiousness would be the attitude that many would have towards it.

And he struggled for many years with the Marxist philosophy of laureate's as a kind of French structuralist, I believe, and sought to cut the rubbish from Marxism and create a kind of rigorous analysis of capitalism that would stand up to the kind of philosophical standards that were prevailing in Oxford in his day standards, which had led to conclusions that were to see Marxism as quite irrelevant in philosophy.

Doing so, he wrote a book called Karl Marx's Theory of History, A Defence, where he focussed especially on a mere paragraph of Marxist thoughts, prefaced the contribution to a critique of political economy in 1858, which is often thought of as the clearest statement of Marxist theory of history.

And he uses this and he employs a functional explanation, which is the explanation that we find in in science and biology, most notably in evolution, where we say that a certain bird develops a certain kind of wing over another kind, precisely because this kind of wing is the kind that will.

Further, the bird's flight or ability to live and reproduce this kind of explanation where one looks at the function of a given trait in order to explain why it exists, Karen Hughes finds in Mark's, whether it's to be found in Mark's or not or to be contributed by Cohen, is up for discussion.

Perhaps, but Karen would say that the key thought in Mark's is that the key thing in human history is that the forces of production, which are essentially the kind of technological capacity and the skills and knowledge that humans have in order to employ those to make things so the ability to kind of make stuff. This is the kind of drive, ultimate driving force in history. It's not so much classes and class struggles.

You know, this main force is carried out through them. And this needs to keep developing because humans desire more stuff. And we are intelligent beings. And this is broadly happened already and it will continue to happen. He thinks he sees the relations of production. That is the ways in which those who own or employ or rent the kind of broad relations of production that characterise a mode of production like capitalism, such a thing being determined and shaped by the forces of production.

And it's precisely because the relation to of production of capitalism are the best way of developing, giving us growth in a given historical moment. It's precisely because of that, that capitalism is allowed to continue to exist.

But as soon as we start to see full and growth come in, things that as soon as it starts to happen, as soon as a certain mode of production, a certain dominant way of capitalists, say, purchasing the labour of workers, as soon as it starts to fail to provide us with growth, we'll start to see moments of crisis where new candidates, new options, new economic potential economic systems will start to present themselves.

And ultimately, if one fails to continue to develop the forces, production will only be a matter of time until it gets replaced with another system that well. Well, so you've already begun and almost finished answering. The final question I'm going to ask Carmen before our time is all up that, you know, repeated her around an iPad, which is perhaps more than anything else but the triumph of a modern capitalist economy.

And indeed, Marx himself was very admiring of what cuppers had managed to achieve. Do you feel, Cameron, do you feel that we are now in a society so far removed from that which Marx himself was able to observe and to get empirical evidence from that his theory that capitalism would ultimately lead to the revolution of the proletariat? Do you feel that that might no longer apply? Well, I think dogmatism when it comes to Marxism is never to be desired.

And I think Marx himself would have embraced a robust revisionism when it comes to his theory. Taking into account new data. I would say that the easy division of society into bourgeoisie and proletariat no longer holds. Certainly in Western societies. I would personally identify more of a global division of of class antagonisms. So it's no longer the case that the industrial working class is in one country and produces for that country and everything.

And we live in a globalised world, as we've been hearing from various jokes for the last 25 years. And the different classes that Marx describes, I think are now globalised.

And so. You need some degree of nuance to Marxist theory if you're going to keep it at all, but I do think that the Marxist toolbox of focussing on the material facts of life, looking at the ways in which we are all affected and affect the world around us and in so many different ways, much is deeply, deeply relevant and deeply useful for evaluating the world. And as he would have said, for changing it.

Well, thank you very much, both of you, for agreeing to rush through such a vast topic, but with such universal expertise. Next week is the final episode in this series in our spare time. And I hope you'll join us. Thank you.