Karl Marx – Part One – The Fighter

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Hello, welcome to Origin Story. In each episode, we take an idea, figure or event from history, we explain its origins and we talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Dorian Linsky. Hello, I'm Ian Dunn. This week's topic is a person and an idea. If you've heard last week's episode, you'll know season eight is all about the history of socialism. We've just covered early versions of socialism, so now it's time for the big guy, Karl Marx, and his best pal, Friedrich Engels.

Mark's surprise landslide winner of a 2005 In Our Time. poll of the most important philosophers ever. The philosopher Peter Singer says he's as important as Jesus or Mohammed. His biographer Francis Ween says the history of the 20th century is Marx's legacy. And none of these people actually is a Marxist. tells you something, that his importance is recognised and valued by people who actually don't agree with him. There's certain points, there's certain ideas that he has that...

It's like that classic mark of someone who's done something astonishing, that it doesn't seem very remarkable as you read about it. And then you realise it doesn't seem very remarkable because we as a society, in mind myself, have ingested these ideas so deeply that it's almost impossible.

would have realised that someone wouldn't naturally have thought them before he started stating them. Yeah, because there's a word that is not used as much as Marxist, but Marxian, which is quite a useful word, I think, for... influenced by Marx's way of looking at the world without necessarily subscribing to it. Because obviously, if someone calls himself a Marxist, one assumes that they're in full agreement.

Whereas, of course, you don't have to be. I found this New Yorker piece from, I think, 97, when Marx was generally considered, you know, Completely made irrelevant by the fall of the Soviet Union. And it started to go from this Wall Street banker going, I've come to the conclusion that nobody explains capitalism better than Marx.

And that everybody on Wall Street should be reading Marx. And he's actually really important. And we've all got it wrong that because of the fall of communism, you think that his ideas are irrelevant. And indeed, they did come back. This is, like, I think maybe my least interesting opinion of all time. And also probably, like, the most origin story. But it's just like...

I can't imagine very many people go into this episode or any kind of discussion about Marx thinking that he's absolutely right about everything. You do meet communists and you meet socialists a lot. It's actually quite rare that you meet someone who's fully committed to the entire... total system of Marxism without any kind of, you know, alteration to it or adaptation or revision whatsoever.

And it's comparatively rare, I think, that you find those people that used to be like, well, all it is is the genocide of the human spirit yet to come. Do you know what I mean? There's nothing of any value in there. You come across the stuff and your job is basically to start...

disentangling what works and what doesn't and what's enlightening and what isn't so even when it comes to describing capitalism there's loads of people say this all the time right it's a really good description of capitalism there's loads of period here where he just describes capitalism very very badly

You know, and he just doesn't get it. He doesn't understand it. Then there's other parts where... you're reading it it was written you know 200 years ago and the whole time you're just thinking of ai the whole time you're thinking of like mobile phones you know it just seems so striking and so revealing about the way that like power operates and the way that society

society revolves around certain kinds of economic power, you can't end up in one position or the other with him. And if you do, you've made some kind of terrible error. Well, it's just nice to come to me in that sort of open-minded spirit that I don't have a, like I'm not a Marxist, never been a Marxist, but nor am I like an anti-Marxist.

You know, just to come into who was he, what were his ideas? Because what I hate is the sort of dumbo conservative version typified by Jordan Peterson. Right. Where... Marx himself is personally responsible for the tens of millions of deaths that happened under communist dictatorships, which is just so stupid. and ignorant. And I find that very frustrating. But you were unlike me, a Marxist at some point. Yeah, yeah. I'd say from sort of like 16 to...

23, maybe something like that. Oh, shit, I didn't know it was that long. I'm being quite broad here. Like, most of my early 20s were about chiseling away the Marxism into... I went to anarchism really at the time, but like, but definitely it was there. And if I, even younger than 60, like when I was like, I think 14, I looked up the socialist workers party in Southampton in the yellow pages.

and gave them a call to join. Like I was not, I was actually not a good or healthy popular chart. So what was the appeal of Marxism per se? Because obviously, you know, I was like a left-wing teenager as well, but I didn't take like, I would never identify as a Marxist, but I'd be too lazy to do the reading, you know, but...

I don't remember being that many other options on the radical left at the time where I was. It was just like, well, that's just the sort of way you... go really and then I remember sort of being and it was all this quite basic sort of like the world just feels terribly unfair and unjust and it should be a better place than this but then I just remember being sort of ushered into this really sort of like baroque

sort of hall of mirrors of terminology really it was just like you know you're in there and suddenly like words that sound very strange like you know modes of production whatever you know, and even class war or even like proletariat, you know, which, you know, when you're 14, you haven't really come across very much, is there in this sort of large...

edifice which you're sort of just trying to understand and of course it stops you questioning things very deeply because there's all these people around you who have understood it very very well and read absolutely everything and can tell you what is and is not correct I remember it as this suffocating, stultifying.

blinding experience of just like having all of the idealism and the sense of energy and myself just sucked out in the name of like fossilized dogma it was a fucking horrible experience and for all of the really positive things that there are in this story and in these of ideas my experience generally of marxists themselves especially those like organized into parties into campaign is a very very very negative one indeed well we talked about this a little bit in the first episode how uh the lefts

habit of incredibly vicious feuds with people who are not that different to you was established very early on. And, you know, I was reading, I read a couple of biographies and you read a third one. And the one I like best was by Francis Wien. And I was like, yeah, but he didn't really do much. He did some organising at various times, but mostly he was just like, he was writing.

You know, and he's most of his ideas rather than for his adventures. So I thought, well, how is this going to be interesting? And it's interesting because his life is mayhem. And he's always causing fights. And he's one of those people that if you were just kind of, I think it's quite useful with historical figures, what would they be like on social media? And by fuck would he have been on social media? He would have been on social media. He would have been leading the worst pylons.

He would basically be blocked by everyone you know, including people who used to be his friends. Just an unbelievable wrecking ball of a personality. And yet, you know, with this really lovely sort of touching friendship with Engels that lasts for decades and Engels makes himself secondary to Marx. That's why we're, you know, theming this episode around Marx.

Because Engels is really important, really important in the simplification and the popularization of the key sort of Marxist ideas. And yet he's always just like hanging in the background. It's like, he's the genius. I'm just the genius's rich friend. Yeah, yeah. So it's not like I came away hating Marx at all as a person. But I was just like, I was glad that I did not know him. I find him quite hard to like. It's just this kind of...

He's a messy bitch, but he's a messy bitch in a very hectoring, unpleasant way. He doesn't seem to have anywhere between one and ten that he can find in terms of like a tone of criticism. Yeah, yeah.

they're drinking buddies, they're out in Paris, and then someone says something that's slightly off from his view, and then he just attacks them. Or at other points, and this is the bit where I think I just lose all sympathy for him, he has no capacity for self-criticism. So at various points, he just... projects his own opinion from like weeks ago onto someone he knows and then attacks them in print in the most vitriolic way.

We just think like the only way of maintaining sympathy is to think that you're just psychologically incapable of self-criticism. So you must go through this process. But it does not make him a likable human being in any way. And I think it's quite hard to go through it. Certainly you wouldn't want to be as. me.

But really, by the end of it, you're like, you really are quite an exhausting man, Carl, and I do wish you'd turn it down. Well, the good news for the listeners, because as obviously we're explaining the key ideas, there is also lots of messy bitch. There's a lot of it. So there is a surprising amount of drama and hilarity. I would think of it like, imagine this, like just... an episode about messy bitches occasionally interrupted by dialectical materialism. That's...

Yeah, I think that's perfect. It's like a kind of like a fucked up Flatshare sitcom in which every now and then someone breaks off to talk about Hegel for five minutes.

Okay, OED, Marxism. The ideas, theories, and methods of Karl Marx. Good so far. Especially the political and economic theories propounded by Marx together with Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis for the theory and practice of communism. And this is how it sums it up. Central to Marx's theory.

is an explanation of social change in terms of economic factors, according to which the means of production provide the economic base, which determines or influences the political and ideological superstructure. We will, like, unpack all this later. It's a good summary.

History of society can be viewed as showing progressive stages in the ownership of the means of production and hence the control of political power. Marx and Engels predicted the final revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat and the eventual attainment of a classless communist society. We don't really need to do the episode. That's the best. That is by far the best I think we've ever had. I mean, it's also the longest maybe, but it's just very, very good pithy summary.

The first citation, amazingly, is in the French magazine Liberty in 1883, the year that Marx, literally a few weeks after Marx died. So the word, it's like the word Orwellian. It doesn't start until the person's died. Maybe it just seemed weird before then. I find it quite strange that that word wasn't used before then, to be honest. Well, it was used, Marxist, which sometimes it appeared in the Times in 1873, to talk about basically supporters of Marx during a factional dispute. Right.

As opposed to like a Marxism. And obviously he has that famous line where he says, well, in that case, I'm not a Marxist. Yes. So someone was saying that somewhere. I guess so, but there's translations and so on. But that's the first citation that we have. So look, the thing that we have to establish here is that he wrote so much that his most famous phrases and ideas are scattered across several different works over four decades.

Some of which works weren't actually published until like the 1930s. So even like Lenin would never have read what is now considered some of Marx's most important stuff. He's responding on the fly to these massive upheavals, constant revolutions. And he's just like changing. He's not just changing his mind, but...

Some of the most important concepts, he's really vague and ambiguous when you really need him not to be about the difference between socialism and communism, about, for example, what the dictatorship of the proletariat means. And so... When you talk about orthodox Marxists, I'm like, which bits? Because there are contradictions. Everybody's choosing their bits. Everybody's putting together the very best of Karl Marx.

And at different times, probably a Marxist now would not put together the same very best of Karl Marx as Lenin did. Yeah, they definitely wouldn't. Well, because literally there'd just be a bunch of stuff that Lenin could not have called on that only came to light a little bit later. Right, the sort of deep demos.

Live versions. The alienation B-sides. And then there's, you know, just whether you consider the idea that this stuff is even coherent. There is a lot of people out there who would just say that, you know, the early writings and the later writings just... Basically, you can't put them together. One's the product of a much more humanistic, sort of liberal-minded person, and the other one's a much hard-nosed, economic, sort of crusty older version. It doesn't help.

The majority of the time, his motivation was just to shit on someone. And sort of almost in an offhand way, on page 60 of shitting on someone who's like, oh, by the way, this is the superstructure and that's what proves my point. And then we take it and we're like, oh, this is part of the Marxist system. But that was not front of mind that particular day when he was writing.

Yeah, no, it would be like on sort of page 87 of his book, Why Herr Schmidt Sucks Shit, there'd be this amazing elucidation of some philosophical idea. And then he gets back to pounding her schmidt. But there's one more sort of thought before we start the story, is that, you know, a lot of Marxists would argue that the version... that Marxism-Leninism, the version that the Soviet Union is founded on, is distorted.

It's not only just not the only version, but kind of like a misunderstanding. So biographer Gareth Stedman Jones writes, the marks constructed in the 20th century bore only an incidental resemblance to the marks who lived in the 19th. Which is... It's unfortunate. But then the Marx who lives in the 19th was a hot mess. It's just hard to imagine it, you know, that classic thing people have done throughout.

So long, which is imagine if he could have seen what they'd done with his legacy and he would have been outraged. I mean, his ego was so vast that I imagine it might have struggled to escape. the satisfaction of all the statue building to launch a moral attack on the regime that's set up. We just don't know. What we can say is that's very different in any number of ways. And also there are certain other elements of Marxism that you can point to and be like, well...

it's at the very least consistent with what happened in the Soviet Union. And you can see how these sets of ideas could logically flow into that kind of regime. Yeah. I do think Stalin would probably have had him shot at some point. Well, I mean, that was one of his hobbies. He did love that. I don't want to give away later in the season, but there's a lot of shooting. He loves the shooting. A lot of shooting. Shall I begin? Please do.

Karl Marx was born in Trier in the kingdom of Prussia on the 5th of May 1818 into this sort of liberal middle class family with enlightenment values. His father Heinrich, a lawyer, and his mother Henriette were... Jews who became Lutherans due to an anti-Semitic law lived in a Catholic city. Very confusing. So he always had a strange relationship with his Jewishness and sometimes appeared to be openly anti-Semitic.

Yeah, I mean, he is writing. Despite being Jewish and obviously being, therefore, a target of anti-Semitism. So he goes to a very liberal school, interested in philosophy and writing romantic poetry. Not now best known. as a poet. Engel's also writing Romantic Poetry. I think it was just a thing that one did in that time. At the age of 17, he studies law at the University of Bonn, where he is quite the lad. So he's co-president of the Trio Tevin Club, a rowdy drinking club.

He gets into frequent fights in pubs. One night he's thrown into a cell for drunkenness. He challenges someone to a duel, despite having no talent for dueling at that point, and is almost killed. So he's establishing himself as very, very fighty. So he just stops basically punching people in pubs and decides to punch people in books instead.

There is a point where someone will talk later about it. He has very few hobbies, but he does like chess. And someone's just like, he has an extremely aggressive style. And you're like, yes, no, I'm not surprised by that. Oh, he's so busy attacking that he forgets to defend, doesn't he?

So he falls in love with his childhood friend and neighbor, Jenny von Westphalen, a few years older. She's the daughter of the liberal aristocrat Baron Ludwig von Westphalen. And he becomes kind of a father figure and marks... Quite obviously prefers him as this kind of like swashbuckling liberal intellectual to his own dad. And they go on long walks quoting Shakespeare to each other because they didn't have phones then. That's what people had to do.

So he transfers to Berlin, which is the capital of Prussia, and tries to combine law with philosophy, which he's much more interested in. And his father is very disappointed. because he thinks this is a waste of time. And he writes to him, degeneration in a learned dressing gown with uncombed hair has replaced degeneration with a beer glass. So philosophy is almost as bad as the drinking club.

Anyway, while Marx is in Berlin, Heinrich dies in 1838. So at university, Marx becomes obsessed with the late George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He does not like what he calls the grotesque, craggy melody of his writing. That's a lovely phrase. But he is so excited by his ideas that when he first reads him, he runs through the streets of Berlin wanting to hug passers-by.

So it was a genuinely life-changing experience. I know that's how you feel about Hegel. I fucking hate Hegel. And I've spent my life desperately trying to avoid...

reading about him or thinking about him in any way, shape or form, it always seemed, first of all, impenetrable. And secondly... alarmingly close to mysticism. Like once people start talking about it, you just think, what the fuck are you talking about right now? And I remain of the view even now that it is fundamentally absolute hogwash.

We do have to do it because it didn't just inspire Marx, but Engels, Lenin, Bakunin, and more. So I'm going to do Hegel for dummies, the dummies including me. In this room. Including, yes. So he's famously complicated and hard to read. So I'm just going to try and sum up in the most basic way possible the ideas that inspired Marx. I've not read all of Hegel's work. You've really let me down. Yeah, no, just full disclosure. Okay, so one idea is the narrative of history. So Hegel...

described the universal human consciousness as the Geist, which is either the spirit or the mind. And it's this force that gives history a direction and a destination and therefore a proper conclusion. Journey is that, he says, the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. And by freedom, he didn't mean do what you like, but...

making rational choices in a rationally organized society with absolute knowledge of yourself and the world. And therefore hostility between people would melt away because that's all down to, you know, alienation from the... the unity of the mind. This is the end of history, basically, that idea that you're going to reach this sort of perfect state. Weirdly, it's not quite, but he seemed to think that that was sort of Prussia.

At the time that he was alive, like basically where he was living at the time he was living, where there was some sort of constitutional monarchy, some liberal reforms. And he was like, this is as good as it gets. It's frankly questionable. It is questionable. And it's not quite clear that he 100% believed that, but certainly a lot of his critics.

That was one thing they took issue with. They're like, surely things could be better than right now. So the other crucial idea is a form of logic called dialectical reasoning, which leads to the self-knowledge and freedom. That's how you get there. So actually, he doesn't use these terms himself. One of his sort of explicators does.

But this is how we know it. So one idea, the thesis, inspires the opposing idea, the antithesis, and the contradictions are resolved by a third, the synthesis. And we came across this in Martin Luther King, who was really interested in that idea as well. And then maybe the synthesis also proves inadequate. Eventually it becomes a new thesis, so the process begins again. For Hegel, that dialectic operates on the level of history, that there are certain phases. One society...

which is too focused on community and order, inspires its antithesis, which perhaps takes freedom too far. And then they need to be balanced in the synthesis, which is the Prussian state in 1820. And Marx was very, very excited about this dialectic. He called it the vehicle of vitality, the efflorescence in the gardens of the spirit, the foaming and the bubbling goblet. He was getting quite carried away.

This system almost works like in a micro and a macro level, right? So for individual sensory experiences, you have the same process as you do for basically like the awareness of God, which is, you know, you start... with this moment of like unity and innocence. You then go through a period of division or alienation. Yeah. And then you go back to a period of unity. but this time with self-awareness.

And one of the questions that it answered in terms of sort of German philosophy at the time was the idea of like, why did God make the world? If God is perfect, you know, why would there be a need to make an imperfect world? Hegel's answer for that is because it's only through that self-awareness, only by having another, that sense of alienation from the self, that there's a self-awareness that God then can become perfect again. So you get this sense of like, perfect.

alienation or division and then perfect again plus self-awareness. Now, if you think about it, that process, you see that everywhere, right? Like that is in T.S. Eliot. It's in Homer. It's Lord of the Rings. It's the hero's journey, right? Everything is fine. You go off for the period of danger. You come back to the everything is fine status quo again.

but this time at a slightly higher level than you were before with some degree of self-awareness. I think it corresponds to some deep sort of model within the human mind. And so... followers of Hegel, and in fact, basically all of sort of German intellectual society, once they drank this stuff.

just saw it everywhere. They saw it in history. They saw it in politics. They saw it in law. And they all seem to experience it. It's not just Marx dancing down the street. They all seem to experience this almost transcendent moment of revelation as a kind of almost religious experience that happens.

to them well it's absolutely dominant in german intellectual life in the 1830s hegel dies in 1831 and afterwards everybody whether they like him or hate him love him or hate him everyone's talking about hegel right So his more radical followers, known as the young Hegelians, they argue that because he was innately conservative, he was incapable of following the radical implications of his philosophy.

to their conclusion, specifically to accepting of Christianity, to accepting of the Prussian state. And therefore he'd sort of, he'd settled on the end state of society too soon. So they want to take his ideas further and produce this sort of lesson.

mystical version. So these two young Hegelians, Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, they attack religion as a form of alienation. And they go, look, Christians, they put their essence, their best selves into the idea of God, and then they become alienated. from their true selves. As Marx would say, people pour their best selves into their labour and then become alienated. And then Feuerbach also flips the whole idea of the Geist on its head.

So Hegel is an idealist, therefore ideas shape material reality. And Foback goes, no, material reality shapes ideas, hence materialism. And Marx got very excited. by this. He wrote to Feuerbach, you have provided a philosophical basis for socialism. He thought this was just such an essential thing. Not that he saw it as quite such a binary. Once again, he was trying to kind of merge bits and pieces.

But when we talk about dialectical materialism in Marxism, one of those phrases that when you first discover it, you're just like, yikes. It's not one of those phrases. When you're a young person. It doesn't suggest that you're about to have a great time, does it? It doesn't. It's not like intuitively like, oh, I get that.

But what that is, it's a fusion of Hegel's method, the dialectics and theory of history with the young Hegelians focus on material reality and then his own obsession with obviously modes of production, someone which we'll get to. Does that make sense? Yeah. The only thing that anyone ever needs to take from any of this stuff is that process. You know, the thesis.

antithesis, synthesis. And the movement of history. But they're all part of that same thing. The one, the other, and then the other, that three-step. And throughout this story, Karl Marx is going to say a bunch of different shit, but... He will live in the house that Hegel built because his mind is going to be formed in a kind of Hegelian way.

Every bit of philosophy, every bit of politics will fit into that step. One, two, three. This is how it must function on the big, on the small, in terms of everything I'm looking at. That is now the shape of his mind. And that stays the shape of his mind until the day that he dies. What made me feel a little bit better about simplifying, Hegel here was listening to the In Our Time on Hegel's philosophy of history. And basically all the experts are constantly going, well...

He might not quite have thought of it in those terms. It's actually a bit more complicated than that. And Melvin Bragg is just going, yeah, but basically, basically, it's this, right?

It's just like, come on, man. Spoil it down. So Marx publishes his PhD thesis in 1841, but he can't get a university job because he's a young Hegelian and they're very unpopular with the Prussian authorities. So he moves into journalism instead and writes for the Rheinische Zeitung, covering, you know, freedom of speech, unfair laws, etc. When we say journalism, his articles are...

Really kind of essays about 50 pages long sometimes. He makes a big impression. He's this real juggernaut. He's swarthy. He's a big, swarthy, hairy man. One colleague describes him as domineering, impetuous, passionate. full of boundless self-confidence. His Edison, Moses Hess, who he later hated, called him Russo, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heiner and Hegel fused into one person.

It's actually not unfair. I think it's really not. There's lots of compliments there. That's quite something, right? I know, it's a compliment. I mean, it's not like it's... it's not an overemphasis. Like, I think that's actually a pretty good little summary. Yeah. I mean, you can see why Marx later turned around and treated that guy like shit. Don't compare me to some of the most important intellectuals of our time.

At this point, he is a liberal, not a communist. And in fact, when he's accused of communism, he writes that the Zeitung does not even admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality.

and therefore can still less desire their practical realisation or even consider it possible. There's a point actually where he suggests that they should send the army out against them. He says, oh, there's a solution for all this, which is cannons. Everybody's got to start somewhere, right? They do indeed.

So his first article that we would call Marxist, I guess, attacks this law which makes it illegal for peasants to collect firewood from private forests. It used to be you could just pick up sort of leftovers and this law was introduced and people started getting arrested for what their families have been doing for generations.

Now, this article doesn't seem like such a big deal, but it pisses off the provincial governor who complains to the Prussian king. At the same time as Tsar Nicholas of Russia is complaining to the Prussian king about another article, which is anti-Russian.

So the paper gets shut down and Marx is threatened with the rest. So he basically storms out of Prussia in a huff. I've become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging and hair-splitting over words. Anytime someone tries to edit my copy, this is my response. So it's 1843 now and he moves to Paris, which he calls the nerve centre of European history, sending out electric shocks at intervals which galvanise the whole world.

I mean, as we said in the last episode, this is just a period of French history where it's all killer, no filler. Shit is going down. It's like Vienna before the First World War. It's like you want to be there. Everybody's there. He's married Jenny by now after a long ago. and she's pregnant with their first child, also called Jenny. So comedy ensues here because he co-found another newspaper, which translates as the German-French Annals.

with a young Hegelian called Arnold Rouge, with a mission to find the new world through criticism of the old one. But it's kind of a bit of a mess. The first thing, they don't have any French writers. The German-French Annals is basically just Germans. For another, they're not getting on at all. Him and Rude.

And also he's terrible at deadlines. Sarouge says he has a peculiar personality, perfect as a scholar and author, but completely ruinous as a journalist. He finishes nothing, breaks off everything and plunges himself ever afresh into an endless sea of books. And again... That is a tendency that he will keep for the rest of his life. Like really bad with deadlines. So basically, they managed to put out one issue, but it is 350 pages long. Oh, my God. So...

That kind of sums it up before this massive falling out. There's two important articles there. One, a very controversial one, on the Jewish question, which reads as very anti-Semitic, because it seems basically going... Jews are obsessed with money. The more sympathetic reading is what he really means is the bourgeoisie, but he doesn't sort of have that word yet. And so he's using them to represent the bourgeoisie in capitalism. However...

He is still making massive generalizations about Jewish people. I mean, you know, later in his life and his letters. I mean, he associates Jews with capitalism. It's basically, you know, it's greedy. It's all of this stuff, like you would imagine. What is the profane basis of Judaism, practical needs, self-interest? What is the worldly cult of the Jew, huckstering? What is his worldly god, money?

It's quite hard to kind of talk your way out of that one. He also publishes Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. It's a cracking read. Famous. I love the way when you haven't written the critique yet, you could always just go towards a critique, notes towards. It's like I haven't.

finished the thing, but this is the sort of thing that I'm thinking about. I'm not sure my editor would find that a very compelling argument. Notes towards a column on Keir Starmer. So this is famous for... for a particular thing inspired by Feuerbach's attacks on religion, he uses a metaphor he's picked up from the recent opium war in China.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. I think he nicked it from Bruno Bauer. Did he? There's quite a lot of nicking with him, actually, which he often cites. But quite a lot of the key lines originate somewhere else, very often with angles, actually. So, look, more scrapes. So...

The main reason there's no second issue, apart from the fact the editors don't get on, is because Heinrich Heiner, the German poet, published these satirical poems which outraged... Probably the Prussian king again, because they're always complaining. All the royals are complaining to each other. Can you get shut down? So copies are confiscated. Arrest warrants are issued. The paper is shut down. So they all start writing for a radical German language newspaper called Forvets.

With an exclamation mark, which is the most German, I think, title ever. For Vets! For an internationalist, right, we will see this in his unbelievable ethnic stereotyping. He's obsessed with national difference. Did you notice this? He goes, the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its...

and the French proletariat, its politician. He's like one of those stand-up comedians where it's just like, French guys make love like this. German guys make love like this. Like, it's just... It's weird. Like he did genuinely believe in his nationalism, but could not stop talking about like the Russian soul and how the English behave and what's up with Mexicans.

That's not a direct quote. But, you know, there were a lot of generalizations. But while he's working on adults, he meets two really important people who will, this is called foreshadowing. Very good. The only non-German contributor they managed to sign up is the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who we'll meet later. Bakunin recalled rather pithily, he called me a sentimental idealist and he was right.

I called him vain, perfidious and sly. I was right too. So fast forward 30 years and they're knocking seven stages of shit out of each other. He also meets a 23-year-old Prussian writer called Friedrich Engels, who pops in to submit some essays. They'd actually met a couple of years earlier, writing for the Zeitung, but they hadn't got on. Engels said, he raves as if 10,000 devils had him by the hair.

This time, they hit it off, and they spend 10 days drinking wine and talking about politics, and at the end of which, they are friends for life. It's this absolutely extraordinary meeting of minds where they realize that they are both concerned about the same things, and they see the world in the same way.

They're an odd couple, right? I mean, you know, Engels is much better at making money, a much more practical man. They call him the general because, you know, he did well in the army and is quite good with fighting tactics, although it's never quite clear if any of that really stands up.

And Marx is this much more abstract, scholarly, you know, even physically, you know, tall and short. There's this sort of very different emphasis to them. And it sort of seems that it takes a while for the friendship. There's a couple of points to probably address, you know, where they fall out quite badly once very early.

on and once much later it's not really until they both end up in london that i think the friendship becomes very solid but this but this is like it remains even though there's a few ups and downs apart from the relationship with his wife the really very good friendship that he has that he never manages to catastrophically fuck up by his vitriolic temperament. Okay.

Quick sketch of Engels. He's born in Prussia in 1820. His wealthy father owned cotton mills in Prussia and Manchester and sent him to Manchester to learn the ropes in 1842, just after he's become a communist. And he arrives during, as we alluded to in the first episode, the Chartist general strike. And he's surrounded by Chartists and Owenites. And it's this very exciting time to arrive in Manchester.

Like in 1989, at the height of Madchester. Yes, in many ways directly compared. Very similar. He toured the slums and he wrote a very great important book called The Condition of the Working Class in England. And he shows in detail... How the Industrial Revolution Emiserated Workers. And he argued that as all of the workers are being pulled into the cities and the factories, that class consciousness will increase, class solidarity.

And he was obsessed with thinking that England was the perfect place to sort of study this. And he spent the rest of his life being disappointed by the English for not having a revolution. Because he was like, the circumstances are the most perfect. Right here. But he just knows what's going on. He's actually out there reporting and studying. And a lot of stuff that comes into Marx's writing later about how people live.

He hadn't gone out and reported. Engels, that's a real kind of like, you know, proto Orwell kind of thing. Like, I am going to go into the slums and just see how people live. Actually, it really is quite directly comparable to the Wigan Pier, isn't it? He's a much more well-rounded human being. He loved music, poetry, horses, fine wine.

Many women. He sounds much more fun to me. Whenever you read a story about him, I mean, there's a reason that later on sort of Marxist daughters much prefer like hanging out with Uncle Engels. And it's just basically, it's just a much more fun guy, basically. There's a contrast between the two, which I'm going to save. but made me absolutely hoot in the British Library to the point where people looked and tutted. Don't blame me. Blame the hilarious contrast between Marx and Engels.

You really let yourself down by not saying that out loud. So straight away, Engels hassling Marx to write his big book. He goes, you've got to write a big book about your ideas. This is 23 years before Capital comes out, by the way. And his friends are just going, when's your big book coming out? So anyone who is taking a while to write a book, rest assured, it's not as long as Mark's.

So he keeps getting distracted by being a messy bitch again. So they agree to write a pamphlet attacking the young Hegelians, who they've now fallen out with. Engels writes 20 pages. A reasonable submission for their little pamphlet. Marx comes back with 300 pages, which they turn into a book called The Holy Family. And this is what Marx keeps doing. He wrote an article, another hatchet job for four vets.

which was rejected for multiple reasons, but one of them being that it was 300 pages long, and that's too long for an article. And he just keeps squandering his time and energy on these hysterically aggressive feuds. And people around him are just like, why are you doing it? It's literally like somebody that is just won't come to bed.

Because they're having like a Twitter feud with someone who lives in America who they'd never heard of. Oh, but those people are showing much more restraint than Marx ever does. Marx is like dozens and dozens of pages to incredibly obscure people who've really done nothing wrong. And he just...

So I have to say it's not just in terms of the subject matter that he goes off on. It's the writing style. The comma becomes very oppressive when reading it because he can't make a point without just making it once. comma, coming up with about six variations on the point, either positive or negative, and then finishing it. And you just think, like, this just...

You only needed one line. Well, this is the hysterical abuse, which I still think you can still see among some Marxists today. Oh, God. Where their opponents are all sort of vile and disgusting and scoundrels. And all that. And it's like, oh, my gosh. Like, it's quite fun. It can be quite fun to read in small doses. But then there's like page after page of abuse. As someone said, he wanted to break window panes with a cannon.

And that's kind of just utterly disproportionate. Somehow, though, he manages to take time out from his Florida abuse. to write the economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844, also known as the Paris Manuscripts, which are incredibly important as part of the process of his thinking, even though they weren't actually...

published for almost like 100 years. Yeah, that's right. So until 50 years after his death. So no one in, you know, the episodes that we're going to cover and it's Lenin, you know, Clement Attlee, no one knew of this document. Yeah.

And after that point, that's really when the debate, once it got published, the debate broke out about whether Marxism is a consistent system over the whole of his life, whether there's this young humanistic Marx that we're about to discuss now and this later sort of economic one. The way I'm going to describe it right now assumes that it is a coherent, consistent, total system. Also, I think the thing to give him credit for is even though his philosophy is scattered.

across all these sort of different bits of writing never sat down to do it in one go i find it completely consistent oh really that's interesting because a lot of people say there's like with the first marxism early marxism right

And then the later one. Yeah. I just don't get that at all. I just think this all fits together perfectly easily. There's not much to resolve. There'll be bits later on where we say that there's a tension there. But I think all of it just fits together as a coherent system. And he clearly thinks of himself as someone building. a total system. And even if you think about that impact of Hegel on him, the three-step process that's there and how everything fits into that process.

That, again, gives you the sense of a complete system. So I think that seems like the most compelling way to do it. But it must be said, some people, you know, really, really choose to do it another way and consider it sort of these islands of thought. OK, so what's he saying? in these manuscripts. This is essentially the process of him going from that young Hegelian mold into what we recognize as communism. He starts by asking himself a question, right? He takes that fur back.

idea that religion has alienated humanity, that humanity has taken some core element of itself, its sense of justice, its sense of love, its sense of mercy. and applied it, projected it onto an external being, alienated itself in that way. And it can come back to its own complete sense of self once it stops believing in God and taking all those qualities back into itself. So Marx likes that idea.

But he's confused. He's like, why would this happen? And his answer to why would this happen, why would humans behave this way, is because the world's all fucked up. There's something all fucked up about the world. It says this state... This society produces religion, an upside down consciousness of the world, because the world itself is upside down. And religion acts as this sort of...

protest and consolation, the opium of the people stuff, for the state of the world. Yeah, because he's not, the whole thing about that is he's not slagging off religion. He's just going, well, it's not the reason the world is fucked up. It is a response to the fucked upness. Well, yeah, that's exactly. And then it's that thing of trying to almost tell, you know, philosophers, don't waste your time.

just shitting all over religion right now, which he agrees is completely false. It's like the religion is only there because there's something going terribly wrong in the material world. That's the place to start putting your attention. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary.

It is their social existence that determines their consciousness. The critique of heaven is thus transformed into a critique of earth. By the way, I should point out here, if there's any Marxist scholars listening to this. that I'm taking from, in each bit that we talk about the ideas, I'm taking from the whole period around it, works in the sort of immediately preceding the Paris manuscript, immediately afterwards, and patching it together into a story. So don't.

For the name of God, send me an email telling me that that came from the German ideology or on the Jewish question or something because we're well aware of that. I generally find Marxists on social media are pretty chill. So reasonable. And loath to criticise.

So I'm sure it'll be fine. And they really love people in my political persuasion. So I don't think we'll have any trouble there. That'd be cool. So it's just kind of a crucial moment, right? Because now suddenly all of that philosophical, abstract Galien chat... The spotlight has been turned and we're talking about the material world and we're talking about society and economics rather than these much more abstract scholarly categories. Which is, you know, where this journalism transformed.

the way that he kind of applied his ideas. And maybe if he had managed to get an academic job, he would have stayed in that philosophical realm for much longer. You're right. And it's suddenly being like thrown out and saying, okay, how do these ideas apply to like peasants being arrested for...

for collecting wood or whatever. Yes. So it does push him into the material world. Yeah. So he starts thinking, what is this essence? It's called species essence. You know, that's what Furback was talking about, right? It's our species essence that we hand over to God.

Marx is like, well, a species of essence is like, what is the thing that defines mankind? You know, what is the core of what mankind is? And he doesn't really like this thing of infinite love and mercy and whatever, because it's not very Marx. He prefers the idea of labour. He says, what's the one thing that just defines humanity? It's labour. And this harks back, obviously, to St. Simone.

to Fourier from our first episode. This is like an idea that is almost at the beating heart of what socialism is, of what socialisms are, really. the glory of labor, the importance of labor, the philosophical, the moral importance, the personal importance, the political importance of the act of...

working on the world, of changing the world in your fashion with your hands and with your mind is what defines you as a human being and is at the core of all political sort of thought. I think, by the way, that there's a real... kind of truth to that right like obviously it's there in terms of you know

How would you define humanity? Well, humanity builds bridges rather than just living on the fact that it has to live on one side of a bit of water. But even if you think about your day-to-day social life, like what is the question people most want to ask at a social gathering even now would be, oh, what is it that you do? We're very...

concerned with the things that people do in order to have impact in the world and how they shape the world around them. He then says that basically under capitalism, this act of labor is alienated. There's a lot of different odd reasons for why that's the case. And essentially you're producing for other people. You're not really doing it in a voluntary way. It is not part of your species essence.

But ultimately, it comes down to it's a degraded experience. The thing that should be that you're taking the world and shaping it according to your vision of it, of how you want nature to be, of how the world around you to be, is suddenly like you have to sell your labor.

to a boss who's going to pay you a pittance to mass produce something. And the years after, Marx, you know, you'll get Ford, for instance, with the division of labour so that your act is basically reduced to like, oh, you're going to drill a screw in. A thousand times a day, you know, let alone making the car, let alone making the door of the car. It's just one mechanical thing over and over. The exact thing that we said Fourier hated in the last episode.

That sense of just being completely alienated. So he's got this core thing. First of all, Labour is at the absolute baseline. It is the sacred thing, this baseline from which all of politics and philosophy and eventually economics will continue. And secondly, that our labor in the current system is alienated and all messed up. And that's what's making us so completely mutilated and broken that we start believing in things like religion.

And he takes one step further. He's thinking in a Segalian way. He's thinking like, well, how do we change the situation? Like, what's the way out of having that kind of alienated labor? And he comes up with the idea of a class that might be able to change it. And he almost magics them up.

When he was in Germany, he was hanging out with some pretty posh people. Most of his supporters were like middle-class, liberal, you know, sort of figures. Once he goes to Paris, he meets lots of really quite poor people, especially like Germans in Paris, very often like in really quite low... professions really struggling. He's actually meeting working people now. And he's suddenly just kind of almost just sort of...

posits them as a solution to his philosophical problem. He says, where then is the positive possibility of emancipation? Answer, in the formulation of a class with radical chains and a state which is the dissolution of all estates. a sphere which has universal character by its universal suffering. And that is the proletariat, the working class, which he kind of just invents. He just pops up and he's just like, well, that's it. Fine. It's the working class. That's what solves my problem.

The thing he's done here is twofold, right? First of all, alienated labor. is that thing that replaces God in the middle part of the Hegelian moment where God makes the world in order to become self-aware that there's this process of division. And then God himself is just replaced by the working class.

Like rather than the self-awareness that you'd get from God at the end of the process, the self-awareness of the working class and the working class is positive as this driving force towards history. So again, he's still in Hegel's house. He's just removed. All of the furniture, all of the carpets, got all the new stuff in, and here it is. He's come up with a completely new set of contents in order to populate that building. Well, he comes to this conclusion, which is...

It's so Hegelian, but it also sounds kind of utopian, even though he was very sniffy about utopias. Oh, yeah, yeah. It is. It is utopian. He writes, Communism is the genuine solution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man. It is the true solution of the struggle between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species.

It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself to be the solution. I mean, that is, and he doesn't always sound like this at all, but...

There, it almost sounds quasi-religious. It's like I've literally solved the problem of why people don't get on and why they feel unhappy. Because it's... all hegelian even that knows itself to be the solution that classic self-awareness thing it's all it's all hegel language and so when people say like oh why didn't he talk more about how communism would work it's sort of immaterial to him because the end point of the hegel stuff is

always like you said the end of history everything's solved we've unlocked the puzzle and then everything's happily ever after now so it was beyond concept that they would need to describe that end state because all of their work was about how do you get to that end state

But where he bumps up against the young Hegelians is he thinks they're too abstract. Right. So this book that he's writing. with Engels, the German ideology, which again, like this doesn't come out during his lifetime and the notes towards it don't come out during his lifetime and so on. But two really important kind of very, very simple quotes, really.

Where he goes, life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. He's going like, you can't detach these ideas from your economic and social conditions. And that also relates to the 11th Theses on Feuerbach, which ends up on his gravestone. Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. So it's trying to...

It's trying, again, to really build that bridge between the ideas, the ideas of Hegel, the ideas of the young Hegelians and actual concrete action and change. Hi, I'm Dorian Linsky from Origin Story. And I'm Ian Dunn from Origin Story. Every year there are more and larger data breaches. You've probably heard about the big cases in the news or been personally notified that your data has been compromised.

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And I know this sounds like perhaps you've heard this bit already, but no, it just happened again. His journalism manages to annoy the Prussian king and gets him expelled from France in 1845. He renounces his Prussian citizenship, basically remains stateless for the rest of his life.

gets asylum in Brussels on the condition that he doesn't publish anything about politics. Do you think he sticks to this condition? He's not great on it. No, he does not. He instantly starts publishing about politics. What's more... Marx and Engels co-found the Communist Correspondence Committee as an international network to push their version of socialism and squeeze out their rivals.

Now, this is really important. As we said in the last episode, there were so many socialisms kicking around in the 1840s. And they chose the word communist, I think Engels insisted, to sound tougher. And more distinct. And their main aim, their main target was the other socialisms. It's just like only one can prevail and go forward into the next round against the bourgeoisie.

And a year later, it merges with a very weird apocalyptic communist group called the League of the Just. So these weirdos sort of merge with them to form the Communist League. And it's really important to remember that at this point, communism... as they see it, is really a description of their league. Like when we're talking about the Communist Manifesto, it's not a manifesto for communism around the world for all time. It's literally the manifesto of their gang.

called the communists with a big C. You know, it's a very, very small group. And inevitably, they're not all getting on. So what they need to do is to go, well, look, this is what we believe. We're going to sort of lay this down. And it really is collaborative, right, between Marx and Engels. It's Engels who replaces the original slogan, all men are brothers with workers of the world unite. Because obviously they thought, no, not all men are brothers.

That idea of the utopian socialists, everybody would be happy. Well, if you're talking about class struggle, it's like, they really want everyone to be happy.

Yeah, yeah. And also bear in mind, by the way, it's not just the, you know, the rich, the bourgeoisie that they're talking about. They recognize that classes like the petty bourgeoisie shop owners, the peasants. you know, who they frankly talk about in pretty brutal fucking terms, like they're a bunch of rural idiots and completely useless. And then the, like the lumpen proletariat, the sort of like the social scum, as he calls them, like a kind of subclass of that. And they're not.

Well, not technically at all. They're literally uninterested in these groups. Plenty of bad shit could happen to those guys, and not all of those guys are rich, and they would not care. They have... people that they are loyal to, and that's the proletariat, the working class. It is not about the brotherhood of man. So inevitably, Proudhon publishes a book called The Philosophy of Poverty, and Marx responds with his own 100 page.

Spahn's accusing you don't understand history, you don't understand the relations of production. Proudhon says that Marx is just jealous and is the tapeworm of socialism. The tapeworm of socialism. You don't understand socialism. I'm a real socialist. No, I'm a real socialist.

And Marx's combative personality is absolutely foundational. If we are talking about, okay, this is where communism really coalesces, his strength of will, his intellect, him and Engels, they're pulling it together. And therefore their personalities, particularly his, shape it. One observer wrote, this is a really...

Early on, 1840s, Marx was the type of man who was made up of energy, will, and unshakable conviction. With a shrill voice and a firm conviction of his mission to dominate men's minds and prescribe them their laws, before me stood the embodiment of a democracy. dictator. One can not say, oh, Marxism inevitably leads to dictatorship, but he did kind of have that personality. He wasn't just like...

Let's just, you know, let's just go around the room and hear from everybody and see if we can broker compromise. And look, throughout this, in every organisation, remember, he's scheming, he's trying to screw people over. Oh, we're going to brief on this before someone knows about it. We're going to move the headquarters over. over here so that they wouldn't be able to go to that.

And this is exactly the behavior that we see later, you know, in Russia, with the constant scheming. Now, it doesn't mean that it is your fault what happens there. What it does mean is that later on, when they were searching for historic examples from there,

heroes are people who behave this way. There was plenty there to inspire them. Oh, yeah. So just to set up the Communist Manifesto, because you're going to explain the kind of content of that. I mean, if you've read one book by Martin Engels, it's probably that. Well, not least because it's really fucking short. It's really short. You can read it in under an hour. And it's got a very definitive sounding title. Yes. You go, that's the manifesto of communism.

Interestingly, Engels' drafts were called the Communist Credo or the Communist Confession of Faith. So it's very much a kind of quasi-religious thing. You know, what do we believe? Never actually available for sale. It just got sent to members for free and appeared in translation in a Chartist magazine. That's the English translation two years later. So this idea that it was kind of, you know, sweeping Europe is not quite true.

And you're going to explain the important ideas, right, of the basics of Marxism. But it does like a couple of other things. One of the things it does, which is towards the end of the book, it just trashes all the other socialisms that aren't based on class struggle. He's quite nice to the utopian socialist that we covered in the last episode. I mean, look.

He's criticising, you know, but when it comes to St. Simone and all of that, he's as generous to them as I think his temperament allows him to be to anyone. But he's saying they won't work. Utopian socialism, bourgeois socialism, Christian socialism, all of which exist. continue to exist. Christian socialism obviously feeding into Labour and Party and so on. But he's just like, it's a very interesting strategic document because, like I said, first they lay out the ideas. At the end...

He dispenses with his rivals. And in the middle, tries to preempt criticisms. I thought this bit was extremely shaky. Because... He sort of goes, oh, people are going to say this, right?

Because the whole thing is about the specter of communism, the specter haunting Europe. Basically, it's a definitional thing. It's like everyone's talking shit about communism and we're here to explain what it really is. That's what the specter is. It's the rumor. It's the bogeyman. This is what it's really about.

So then he knows there's going to be, sorry, they know there's going to be criticisms. So if people say communism will abolish individual freedom, because we can't have freedom under capitalism anyway, because our individual choices and ideas are limited by the system we live under.

you know, what's to lose. You say it will abolish private property. Well, most workers don't own anything anyway. It doesn't matter. Abolish nations, the working man have no country. Family and education, bourgeois claptrap. And it's like it's not quite convincing, but it leads to that conclusion of the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.

But that's also, by the way, one of my favourite bits because I find it all very funny. I find the bit on bourgeois women incredibly funny. He says at one point, he sort of goes off on this flight of fancy about how the bourgeois are always shagging each other. He says, It's weird that he has time in a communist manifesto to go off on this tangent.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common, and thus, at most, what the communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women. But it's an extraordinary claim. It's as if you go, okay, right, this challenge is marriage. And you just go, marriage is bullshit anyway. Everyone's having affairs. You're all fucking each other. You're all fucking each other anyway.

So like, you know, they're incapable of taking seriously any of those criticisms. Just like, yeah, maybe it will curtail freedom. Maybe it will sort of challenge this thing. They just go, all of this is like worthless. There's really no such thing. as nationhood or freedom or whatever anyway, so you've got nothing to lose. It's very powerful rhetorically, but it rang a little disingenuous to me.

So I think that certainly the opening is some of the most powerful political writing that he ever does because it's concise and it's short. And he's not wasting his time haranguing some obscure person who's now faded from history. He was really under a lot of time pressure, right? Like he said, he would do it. He failed to provide it by January. They send him a letter being like, for fuck's sake, man, send us the copy. And he finally sent.

it there. And I think that the speed with which he had to produce it actually gets some of his best writing out from him. I think it makes it very forceful. Well, because Engels had already done his bit. He'd done a draft called The Principles of Communism. He'd filed early. And a lot of that ends up in the manuscript. So it is a jointly authored thing. But it's Marx, I think, who is just like, who takes ages to get it right to his satisfaction.

I mean, this arguably would be the single most influential piece of political writing since The Rights of Man. In fact, I don't even think really, like what even begins to compare? It's not initially that successful. I mean, as you were sort of alluding to, like in the decades that follow, it's almost completely forgotten.

But in the decades after his death, with the growth of sort of like socialist Labour parties around Europe, it starts to be picked up. And then obviously after the Russian Revolution, where it's printed in huge amounts, not... only in Russia, but also like for university students in the West trying to understand what's going on. But it's another one of those things where it's influential after. I mean, no doubt somebody has written a book purely about the publication history of Marx. Yeah.

It doesn't get widely read for quite a long time. Yes. Yeah, that's right. And it's such an odd thing of like, it's only really been read by anyone outside of its historical context. But it is a document that is profoundly embedded in its historical context. You know, he is of a very small group. trying to establish their place when they feel revolution is rising around them. You get that sense of power, I think, of the way it's written by the very first line after the preamble, which is...

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. And instantly you just get that whoomph of like, someone is about to explain the fucking world to you right now. Nailed it. Yeah, it's very, very good. This is the theory of historical materialism. So he starts analysing history through productive forces. Essentially, the kind of forces that combine the labour that he was speaking about in the theory of alienation with...

The means of production, the land, the machines, the factories, even if you start thinking about it, like the laws that dictate how you operate with those things. He goes from primitive communism. which is the way that he talks about society, you know, before antiquity, essentially when we're sort of hunter-gatherers essentially and all land was held in common, to antiquity, to feudalism, to capitalism, to communism.

And there again, you see that fundamentally Hegelian structure, right? Like primitive communism, the original unity. alienation through feudalism, through capitalism, and then the unity that comes again at the end through the future communism, but this time with self-awareness. I think where you've really got to credit Engels, though, is that In his account of historical development, it's basically England. Right.

that specifically they're talking about. And that is sort of rooted in Engel's work. Yeah. This is part of that thing that we spoke about in the first episode of everyone in this era is trying to work out what the hell is going on with the French...

Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. They're clearly in this engine, this furnace of incredible historic change. And they're all just trying to work out what the hell is that what's going on. And this... historical materialism is by some distance the most

elegant, you know, and convincing and ultimately widely accepted explanation of what the hell is going on during that period. To the point where you've had plenty of, you know, historians that aren't Marxists that would now talk about the French Revolution as the triumph.

of the bourgeoisie, you know, over the old feudal laws, which was not the way it would have been seen or could have been seen until Marx started talking in these terms. So what are the productive forces there? Tools, machinery, land, infrastructure. human labor power. And history is the story of these productive forces creating political outcomes. He's explaining a mechanism that produces history and that would...

allow you to predict the way that history will go next. Those productive forces, those fundamentally economic forces revolving around labour, define the ideas of a society, ideology, law. Politics, marriage, romance, religion, science, all of them are the result of these fundamentally economic mechanisms. Economics has been put at the heart of politics.

The development of those productive forces creates social classes. The bourgeoisie, the proletariat look at each other as essentially as enemies in this world. But he actually has quite a lot of praise for the bourgeoisie, to be honest. He says he praises its sort of high revolutionary role tearing down the existing structures.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life and his relationship with his kind. It's so rare that I don't really like his writing that you hit it here and you're like, this is beautiful, beautiful writing. With some of his finest writing.

where he says the bourgeoisie has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals. He's great praise for the bourgeoisie for sort of smashing these old... These old prejudices and systems and making everything kind of, you know, like fluid, like I said, melting into air. But also, on the flip side, he would like them to be torn down and destroyed. He would. Well, the thing is that he believes that...

They're almost like sort of prosperous and they just created something they can't control. There's modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property. A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange is like the source. who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.

I love that Strand in his writing. It's like the specter is haunting Europe, isn't it? Yes, yes, yes. There is a lot of stuff that seems to have come from, like, gothic novels and the world of magic. Yeah, exactly. So that's it. They create capitalism. They introduce capitalism, these immense forces of production and exchange. But it has this tremendously chaotic structure to it, the productive forces under capitalism. Yeah, yeah.

And by virtue of creating capitalism, they create the proletariat, the working class, the people that must sell their labour, typically in factories. towards the bourgeoisie. And these are their gravediggers. These are the people that are ultimately going to destroy the system. He doesn't really explain exactly why that is inevitable.

here he constantly says that it's inevitable it's just this is what's going to happen this is how the productive forces will work but he just doesn't really describe exactly what is the mechanism

by which you will get this collapse of capitalism and this introduction of communism. That's what's going to take up pretty much the whole of the rest of his life, trying to figure it out. For this period, he's just like straight up, I'm telling you right now, this is absolutely going to happen. But it's the characterisation. of capitalism, which is the most resonant bit here. I was thinking, reminded of like the Sorcerer's Broom, you know, where it can't...

You ask it to fetch water and it can't stop fetching water and everything's flooded. And this insatiable global force that just has to sort of to settle everywhere. And I still feel that that is a very good description. of capitalism to this day. It's just the kind of like, okay, how do we replace it? What do we replace it with is going to require some more thinking. So, okay, so here's some...

thoughts and some complications and some problems that we have with what we've just heard. The first one is, is this deterministic? You know, is this a sort of almost like an insistence that there's almost like a kind of there's a... Firm direction towards history, highly predictable. It's pure fate. Now, the truth is that it's a muddle. And there are some people, sympathetic and non-sympathetic to Marx, who go one way and go the other. The majority would say that it is deterministic.

If you were to try and protect him, you'd say this. Look, lots of part of that book is all talking about, you know, the utopian socialist. He's got this sort of 10-stage plan for action of abolishing inheritance and things like that. It is about political choices.

It is clearly a book about political action. It's not someone that just thinks you can just step back and let this shit work itself out. So that's what you have on the one hand. On the other hand, you have the fact that he writes persistently. that it's inevitable he just says it over and over again the bourgeois fall quote and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable

And that's kind of where this thrilling, like world-revealing sense of the text sort of comes from. That sense that he's revealed the mechanism. You know, it's odd. He likes... He doesn't want to think of himself like the utopian socialist, Saint-Simonian and all of that.

dreaming of a possible future. He wants to think of himself as the scientist telling you what the mechanisms are that will happen regardless of whether you're paying attention. Which also makes him a prophet. Which makes him a prophet, which suits that huge ego that... he has if he is the person that explains the world but also similarly

He's really quite bourgeois himself in his cultural habits, right? He's quite prudish. He doesn't like sort of lewd jokes around women, you know, all of this sort of thing. Whenever he comes across professional revolutionaries, like the Blonquis, you know, the terrorists,

or whatever. He has this actually with Bakunin. The Secret Society. He doesn't have any interest in all of that shit. He's like, I've got to make money. I've got kids. You know what I mean? Like, I've got a family. He's quite respectable. And most of his work is designed to be scholarly and respectable.

Most of his work on economics is designed to fit within a discussion that is already happening with John Stuart Mill, with Ricardo, you know, with Adam Smith. That is the context in which he operates. And that makes it very tempting to talk about this quite scientific system. rather than a much more moral or aggressive one. However, that brings with it kind of a problem. And the first problem is like, well, exactly how much free will does anyone have in your system? So it's almost like... We...

Are we just cogs in a machine that this is all going to happen anyway? He tries to sort of fudge it. He can see the danger. He says later in the 18th premiere of Louis Bonaparte, he writes, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it. under self-selected circumstances, which is like, all right. Engels later writes the economic phenomenon, quote, in the last instance of what determines history.

But these are quite journalistic kind of get out clauses. The truth is like really within the system, if it's true, if it's scientific, if it is an engine of historical change, as he has described it, all you could do is maybe slow down or speed up the development. forces rather than human impact on them are what's going to decide it. But the bigger problem is really just that it's wrong, that his predictions do not come true.

There are certain elements where he has very penetrating insight about future developments in the economy and history and society. But his fundamental view that capitalism will collapse, that it will lead to communism, is... a falsifiable theory and has been falsified by history. But the biggest flaw with what he says and the one that kind of shines this light over everything that comes later is the fact that it's...

very reductionist to economics. Like, everything is ultimately the product of productive forces. And that includes things like, well, race or romance or... patriotism right you can reduce it to the stuff when you look at world history if you walk around cathedrals or anchor what or you look at the hajj or something

The Marxist argument is, well, this stuff all has to be about economics, ultimately. It's about productive forces. And you look at it and you think, is it? Is that like a very satisfying view of... humankind and its incentives and the things that matter to it is really like religion have no role for instance you know let alone any other kind of phenomenon that we look at

I felt myself bumping up against the sort of Marxist idea that everything is economics. And I thought, but again and again, we've seen this analysis fail to understand ethnic enmity. or the power of nationalism and the power of religion. And this is a problem that, you know, the Soviet Union accounts over and over again. It's just not, you know, it's just the ineradicable power.

of these group identities. And yet it still comes up, not just among Orthodox Marxists, but more broadly, this idea that everything is reduced to economics. That's where it all sort of flows from. Exactly. It's not just, you know, people are made up of these sense of identity and belonging and appealing for a kind of superiority.

that are much more complex than this system allows. Now, Marxists can move on that. They can make it more nuanced and introduce these other ideas of group identity, like the patriarchy or patriotism, you know, good and bad tenses. But once you do, that economic system loses all prediction.

power right it is not true that history is just about productive forces anymore it's about some other shit as well you know people's religions their sense of the group there's that sense even at that point of hang on a minute you haven't got power right You haven't understood what power is if you think it's purely economic. And the history of what happens with Marxism in the decades, centuries to come afterwards, is primarily about that mistake more than any of the other ones.

So let's return just to the context of the Communist Manifesto, because history really does take Marx by surprise. Around the time he's collecting the finished copies from the printer, 24th February 1848, revolution breaks out in Paris. caused by various things, potato famine and demands for democracy and free press and nationalism and all these things kind of just exploding, spreads to Vienna and Berlin. It brings down kings and chancellors. Marx and Engels are very, very excited about this.

It's the dawn of the proletariat. The members of the Communist League all rush back to their homelands to hasten the revolution. So Marx goes to Paris, then to Cologne, where he launches the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. It's back. Like the news. The new Rhineland news. The new Rhineland news. Although you clearly enjoy saying it in this way so much. He's convinced there's going to be a two-phase revolution like France in 1789. He wants to bring on phase two. Unfortunately...

Again, he manages to antagonize other socialists. According to one of them in Cologne, I've never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt. It was very evident that not only had he not won any adherence, but had repelled many who otherwise might have become his followers. Just... pioneering, pioneering behavior on the left. Like they might have followed you, but you were just too annoying.

So anyway, the revolution fizzles out, not because Marx was annoying, or is violently reversed. Prussia, France, Austria. And they're really gutted by this furiously disappointed. um and they go well this is it you can't trust the bourgeois to have a revolution this is just it's just weak um the newspaper is shut down prints its final issue in red ink red by the way has been associated with the left since the french revolution

But it's only really adopted en masse by socialists in 1848. That is the year of... That's when it becomes like... Undeniably like. Oh, wow. To print in red ink sends a very, very clear message. That you want to make your newspaper hard to read. Exactly. In England, the revolution doesn't happen at all. Which is very annoying because the manifesto explicitly says that in no other country has class war assumed such colossal dimensions.

And now Marx writes, England seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled in the womb. And he goes, nothing's going to improve in England until the chartists are in charge. They're just absolutely, just a lifelong history of being very annoyed by England.

And Marx needs to basically explain the events of 1848 through his context of his new ideas. Okay, well, why did it? Why did it fail? It coincides with this manifesto. What happens? So here's theory in the 18th Brumaire, like you mentioned, of Louis Bonaparte.

Very good piece of writing, by the way. Very good. In the French Republican calendar, by the way, the 18th of Brumaire was the date of Napoleon's seizure of power in 1799. So Marx saw the election of Louis Bonaparte as a pathetic echo there. 1848 was a bad parody of 1789. And then Louis's election, bad parody of Napoleon, because he would make these vague promises, but he really wasn't going to deliver.

And this is where we get this famous observation. Hegel remarks somewhere. I love that. We should just say that somewhere. Don't know where. He remarks somewhere that all facts and personalities of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgets to add, the first time is a great tragedy, the second as a miserable farce. I mean...

How many times has that been quoted without even attribution just as an idea? It just comes up. It's weird because it seems like a very strangely sort of esoteric thing to say. But actually, I find myself wanting to use it in copy all the time. Yeah, yeah. He's just furious. They've basically elected a blank slate. And he's particularly furious with the support base, the voter base for Louis Bonaparte, which is the peasantry.

which confirms Marx's prejudices, that they're all a bunch of suckers. And you can't rely on them. You have to rely on the urban workers. This will obviously become quite important when we look at the way that the Soviet Union, a predominantly peasant country.

treats peasants once a worker's government is in charge. So he's running out of options. So where he ends up writing the Brumaire is in London. which is where we shall resume in part two. But before we go, can I just give you some Marx and Engels fun? Fuck yes. Yes. So...

This happens a bit later. Marx's daughter Jenny convinces her dad and Engels to play the parlour game Confessions. What? Which we know as the Proust questionnaire, right? Where you just have to answer these questions. What's your favourite colour? What makes you happy? Blah, blah, blah. Newspapers have versions of this. colour supplements all the time. Anyway, so this, I've selected some highlights from Marks and Engels, their contrasts. Favourite virtue, Marks, simplicity. Engels, jollity.

Chief characteristic marks singleness of purpose. Engels, knowing everything by half. Your idea of happiness marks to fight. Engels, Chateau Margaux, 1848. Your idea of misery marks submission. Engels going to the dentist. And... Favourite maxim, Marx, nothing human is alien to me, which he gives in, I think, Latin. Engels, not to have any. And my favourite bit, favourite motto, Marx, everything should be doubted. Oh, yes. Engels.

Take it easy. Take it easy? Yeah. What the fuck? So I would actually love to produce an origin story mark which has said, take it easy, Friedrich Engels. Oh, that's fantastic. Also, Marks is such a fucking hypocrite. Question everything. Apart from anything I've ever written. So that was delightful. Well done, Jenny Marks, for getting him to play that game.

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Hi, it's Dorian Linsky from Origin Story. And it's Ian Dunn from Origin Story as well. To mark the midpoint of season eight, the story of socialism, we're doing a live show. First one in a while, so we're very excited. It's at the Tabernacle in West London on Thursday the 13th. And you can come as the masses. Google origin story tabernacle. We hope to see you there. So, look, thanks for listening to part one of Karl Marx. We have, as usual, sources and some thank yous in the show notes. Yes.

And a brief thank you to Kevin Morgan, Emeritus Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at Manchester University, Michael Braddock, Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Joe Wolfe, Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy and Public Policy at Wilson College, Oxford. Those guys have sat with me through so much fucking time for this episode. And my social relationship with them is dangling by a fucking thread. So I really hope this thank you manages to do the job.

So thank you for listening to Our Own Story or watching us. You can now watch us on Spotify and new this season on YouTube. You can also contact us via our Patreon page or on Blue Sky or Telegram. Thank you. Have you just aged like a hundred years? I'm literally in 1848. So I'm just thinking, do they even have telegrams then? I don't know. Anyway, I'm feeling quite Victorian about it all. Thank you for supporting us in our research to get our Patreon backers.

If you'd like to help keep us reading and recording and reading Marx and God forbid Hegel, go to patreon.com slash originstorypod and you'll get lots of nice bonuses. Or you can subscribe via Apple Podcasts, tell a friend, give us a review on the podcast.

podcast app patrons also get each episode a week ahead of time so thanks so we'll join us as Karl Marx arrives in London and mayhem ensues but really just like lots of lots of really vitriolic letters there's just like a lot of writing a lot of smoking a lot of bitching It's good stuff. And also we will discuss his rather important book, Capital. And the establishment of Marxism is the most popular form of socialism in the world. So it's recovering everything. We'll see you next time.

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