Karl Marx – Part Two – The Father

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Hello, welcome to Origin Story. In each episode, we take an idea, figure or event from history, explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Dorian Linsky. And I'm Ian Dunt. So we are into season eight, which is all about the history of socialism. Last week, we did Karl Marx part one, and we learned a lot of things about his ideas and his spicy personality.

That's pretty much what's going to happen now all over again. It continues. More spice, more ideas as he tries very hard to write his big book, Capital.

Yes. And it'll make anyone that's ever procrastinated over a piece of writing feel pretty fucking good about themselves, I think. It's quite the journey. So he has run out of options. He has been expelled from Prussia, from... From Paris, from Belgium. He picks good, you've got to say, he picks decent places. He basically just does European capitals. He wouldn't be seen dead in exile in somewhere that wasn't a European capital.

So England it must be, and it must be London. In August 1849, he moves to Camberwell, but he gets evicted and settles in Dean Street in Soho, which at that point is a hotbed of German exiles. Not what we associate Soho with these days. He's expecting a short stay before returning to Cologne, but he ends up remaining in London for the rest of his life.

And Soho at that point is like incredibly crowded and unsanitary and rough. It's not great real estate. I mean, this is the start of a period of poverty for him that's going to go on for a really, really long time.

We'll get onto his finances because they're wild. They are extremely strange. So he's definitely not famous at this point with the public. As we discussed, the Communist Manifesto was not. A smash hit. But he is known to the authorities as a troublemaker. The Times actually prints extracts from the Communist Manifesto to expose the wildest and most anarchical doctrines infecting Europe.

Oh, wow. So there's a very small sort of red scare. He's also accused of plotting to assassinate both Queen Victoria and the King of Prussia, neither of which, in fact, he was plotting to do. And in reality, the Communist League... has fallen apart and Marx has essentially no political power whatsoever. And he's just not into the whole plotting thing. He's not a secret society assassination kind of character.

I mean, these secret societies, right, they've been, throughout this story as we've been telling it, they've always been there. You know, Blonky in the last episode and the referring man here, Bakunin was a huge fan of them.

To give some impression of it, partly that's just because so often trade unions, you know, or any kind of workers' organisations were banned. So there was no way to do this stuff apart from having secret societies. But they seem to appeal to a particular kind of person that liked the initiation rituals and the whispers.

And certain people throughout this whole story, you know, Owen is another example of like Marx, just saw this stuff and just didn't like it. We're just like, you've got to stop with all the special secret, you know, initiation stuff. So some people take to it and some people really don't take to it. Well, Marx decides that he should just spend his time writing his big book. So he spends most of his time reading and writing in the library of the British Museum.

where I revised my finals. Oh, did you? I didn't have actually used it. They close it off almost all the time now, but it's a very, very beautiful room. And if you ever did have to study somewhere, it was just like, why not study in that room? Well done, Carl. But he's also hosting meetings of the German Workers' Education Society on Great Windmill Street, which sounds quite fun. There's a weekly schedule of lectures, debates, language lessons, classes and dance and art. There's some fencing.

According to Engels, what he lacked in science, he tried to make up in aggressiveness. It's the same thing. It's exactly what you would expect from Marx fencing. When he's not at the library, he's working all night, sleeping all day. Him and his wife, Jenny, they're both chronically ill from the unsanitary conditions. The relentless cigar smoking doesn't help.

He's being spied on by the Prussians who report, washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely and he likes to get drunk. Marx calls himself a machine condemned to devour books and then throw them in a changed form on the dunghill of history. That's how I like to think of my research for origin story. Now, he's always short. It's really quite terrifyingly on point. I do not want that phrase ringing in my head.

Join us on the dunghill of history. So he's always short of money, but it's not because he doesn't have an income. Between 1852 and 1862, he writes well-paid columns for the New York Tribune and earns about £250 a year. It's about £30,000 now. It's not spectacular, but it's not nothing. The founding editor of that paper, by the way, was Horace Greeley, who we met in the first section, talking about the failure of the commune experiments. Oh, wow, right, right.

I also coined the phrase, go West, young man. So quite a character, like a bonus episode material with Horace Greeley. So he's got a job there. Why was he broke? partly because he was terrible with money, which I do think is just very funny for Marx. And he would spend it on bourgeois luxuries, like a private secretary who was rubbish. holidays in Ramsgate, piano lessons for the kids, etc. I do not accept that holidays in Ramsgate is a bourgeois luxury. It was then. It was quite the hot spot.

While living on bread and potatoes and having to use pawn shops and running away when the baker comes around to get his bill or whatever. So it's quite remarkable because technically he was not living in poverty and yet he constantly ended up in poverty. And whenever Marks or Jenny inherit money from a dead relative, they move to a bigger, more expensive house. Starting in Hampstead. So 1856 onwards, they live in Kentish Town, technically.

They have six children, two die in infancy, one at the age of eight, three live to adulthood, Jenny, Eleanor and Laura. We should mention also that Marx has an illegitimate child with Jenny's maid. Yeah, this was kept secret for years, really. And I think it only came out in the 1960s. Because he wasn't like, Engels was a player. Yeah, and Marx wasn't. And so it was said that Engels was the father. It was when Engels was on his deathbed, he said it was Marx.

But even, I mean, and then to be honest, it wasn't even really properly confirmed until the fall of the USSR when they opened up like the secret archives and there was letters from the sun who was well aware of, you know, who his father was, etc. But even then, we don't have any details about the...

context of that. We don't know whether that was a relationship. We don't know whether it was something like more sinister. We just know nothing except for the fact that he had an illegitimate child with the housekeeper.

Fortunately for them, they do have Engels, who has finally agreed to work for his father's textile firm in Manchester full time, basically in order to fund communism and Marx personally. And he says he hates it. He'd much rather be writing and being an activist, but he has to do it. Which I believe in.

I think it's a genuine act of sacrifice. I know it sounds absurd. Oh, he sacrificed himself by making lots of money for his dad's company. But I believe him. I do think that is a sacrifice for this man. But it's quite weird because he does enjoy like hunting and private members clubs. expense account is almost as large as Marx's annual income. So it's sort of like he is sacrificing his sort of ambitions as a writer to sort of finance Marx, but he's also finding pleasures where he can.

Including, we should say, he has a relationship with a set of sisters, with one sister, then she dies, and then obviously with the other sister. These are, you know, very working class sort of Irish immigrants, housekeepers. um but he

basically treats them like girlfriend. The public facing is not hidden away. There's no embarrassment about it. In fact, Marx's wife, you know, full of many more bourgeois niceties, even the Marx himself basically says, I won't be seen dead with her. You know, there's a real kind of, there's a real sense of like,

bourgeois sneering. Well, he marries a German aristocrat and Engels is in long-term relationships with these one-class Irish women. Yeah, the latter of which he marries, but I think he marries literally hours before she dies. I think he marries on her deathbed.

He also helps with the writing because Marx can't write very well in English. So Engels basically has to translate all his Tribune articles. And Marx knows nothing about military matters. So Engels has to write those articles under Marx's name. Which is great until there's one point where I think Engels is very ill and indisposed and Tribune is asking Marx to write about some war in Europe. And he just can't do it. He just doesn't know.

So, which reminded me a little bit like in sort of Ratatouille, when the chef has to cook, but without the rat inside his hat. And he's just making a hash of things. You might be the first person to ever use that metaphor.

Very fucking good one. I think you should be proud of it. Right, Engels is the Remy. Engels also keeps hounding Marx to write capital. Unfortunately, Marx cannot stop distracting himself with fights. He constantly denounces his rivals as wretches, scallywags, charlatans and swindlers, challenges some of them to duels, despite having almost died in a duel as a young man.

For a little while, he's friendly with some Chartists, but he falls out with them and he basically has no political allies in England, which he thinks is an achievement. And he writes to Engels, I am greatly pleased with the public authentic isolation in which we two now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. I don't want any friends. I just love the authentic isolation.

And his defense for this behavior, I think, is a disastrous lesson for the left to this day. I just think this logic is entirely wrong. Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against our self-styled friends than against our declared enemies.

I'm of the belief that you should be more antagonistic towards your enemies than your friends. Crazy, dude. You're just crazy. That's exactly the kind of thing that the productive forces would have you believe. That's my false consciousness. So, throughout the 1850s, Marx keeps getting harried away. Every economic disruption makes him think the revolution is imminent. In his Tribune articles, he says, the crisis will become due.

And then present conditions must soon lead to an earthquake and all hell will be let loose. The Crimean War breaks out. He thinks that'll do the trick. Then it's a Chartist rally in Hyde Park. in 1855. Do not think we are exaggerating in saying that the English Revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park. It did not. No. Every economic depression leads the two of them, Marx and Engels, to just act like... absolute hysterical lunatics.

Listen to it. This is Marx writing to Engels in October 1857. The American crisis is beautiful. The setback to French industry was immediate. How are things with the Manchester manufacturers? Engels replies. The effect back on England now seems to have commenced. All the better.

Commerce is now once again worthless for three to four years. Now we have some good fortune. Then he turns to Germany. In Hamburg, things look terrific. There has never been a panic so complete and classic as in Hamburg. Everything is worthless. Absolutely worthless. silver and gold. For the moment, Hamburg is commercially annihilated. Marx wrote back, so much as I myself am in financial distress. Following this outbreak, I have never felt so cosy since 1849.

They fucking love it. Gareth Stedman Jones, one of Marx's biographers, calls it apocalyptic optimism, which I think is just perfect. Very good. Unfortunately, they're disappointed. The Financial Panic of 1857 does not bring down capitalism. and then the last straw for marx and engels is when ex-chartists helped to form the liberal party in 1859 and engels is

Furious. The English proletariat's revolutionary energy has all but completely evaporated, and the English proletarian has declared himself in full agreement with the dominancy of the bourgeoisie. Fuck these people. He's right as well. I mean, that liberal hegemony absolutely, you know, for decades afterwards, when Marxism would, you know, progress in Central and Eastern Europe, when something more like Bakuninism was progressing in the Mediterranean.

In England, it's the Liberal Party. So there's another distraction, which is very amusing, because Marx actually writes against conspiracy theories later. And says, you know, that capitalism does what it does, not because of malign individuals, but because of the system. Conspiracy theories are anti-Marxist. However, he gets completely swept up by a conspiracy theory advanced by the maverick as a euphemism for mad.

Tory MP David Urquhart, who claims that the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was actually a Russian agent. And they were going, but hang on, but didn't we just go to war with Russia and the Crimean War? And he was, yes, that was a cunning distraction. to get us off the scent. And Marx, because he was a massive Russophobe, fell for it. They thought, yeah, fucking Russians, that's exactly what they do.

It's absolutely bizarre and obviously wastes far too much time reading and writing about this when he should be working on Capital. So anyway, he does start Capital. In 1859, a contribution to the critique of political economy and his notes for this book, which are known as the Grundrisse, which means floor plans. They're not published until 1939, but they do explain his thinking. in more detail. There's a very funny note where Engels is like, thank fuck you've written your book about capital.

Unfortunately, it doesn't include the bit, that bit. So he tells Engels, don't be bowled over by this. Although entitled Capital in General, these installments contain nothing as yet on the subject of capital. And his main task still seems to be trying to take down Proudhon and anarchism. Like, just cannot focus on the task at hand.

Quite a lot of his important ideas in critique has huge expectations for it, but it's basically ignored, disappointed a lot of his allies. So, time to get on with Capital, the missing third chapter. Oh, no. So he wastes most of 1859 and 1860 arguing with a Swiss politician called Karl Vogt.

He's alleged to be a French agent. Marx repeats this claim, and he is indeed a French agent, but Marx doesn't have any evidence. So Witt files a libel suit and then crows about it in a little book attacking Marx. Mark's response with his own lawsuit and his own little book attacking Voight. It's so fucking easy for these people to get book contracts. I don't know. Can you imagine?

I sit for ages thinking of book ideas. These fuckers, they just, it's just like, you tell you what, can I write a book about how this guy's a twat? It'd be amazing if I went to my agent and I've got a great new idea for a book. It's going to be 300 pages about this other writer who I don't like.

So the only good thing to come out of this time-wasting, expensive episode is his rant against the Daily Telegraph for printing votes' allegations. By means of an ingenious system of concealed plumbing... all the lavatories of London empty their physical refuse into the Thames. In the same way, every day the capital of the world spews out all its social refuse through a system of goose quills and it pours out into a great central paper cloaca.

The Daily Telegraph. Okay, that's very good. That's very good, isn't it? That is a good burn. So look, it's 1860. He's finally getting on with it. He's calling it a contribution to the Critique of Critical Economy, Volume 2. Great. Very catchy title. So while he's writing, radicalism is bouncing back across Europe. The 1850s have been a disaster. After the 1848 revolution, this huge reactionary backlash, it's a very bad time to be a socialist or a radical of any sort.

But now there are these things happening, support for the abolition of slavery in America, nationalist revolts across Europe like Garibaldi's in Italy, and the growth of trade unions. Unfortunately, one of these trends costs him his main gig. The American Civil War means the tribute can't employ him anymore. So he has lost his main income. He's broke. He's very self-pitying about it.

In 1863, Engels writes to tell him about the sudden death of his long-term girlfriend we were talking about earlier. Marx writes back asking for money. Basically goes, oh, yeah, yeah, very sad. Can you send me some money? Yeah, yeah. And we should say, and this is, you know, the culmination of a long time that it was as if Marx acted like she didn't exist. It was Marx's wife wouldn't be seen with her. And this is after being, you know, maintained by Engels for years.

Loads of Marx's letters are full of news about how his family is. Engels' letters to him are asking about his family. And finally, at the point that his long-term girlfriend does, he's like, oh, sorry, mate, can you send me another fiver? You're just like, you absolute piece. Like, Engels is very upset and Engels is correct.

And then he writes, and then Marx goes, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, it's really insensitive. But, you know, that's what happens when you don't have enough money. It makes you insensitive. So anyway, Marx apologizes. He gets the money. Then his mother, Henriette, dies and he gets a meaty inheritance, which he immediately blows by buying a house 200 yards from his old one, but twice as expensive.

He complains Womit Capital will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it. His saviour is a wealthy supporter called Wilhelm Wulff, who dies and leaves him the equivalent of £90,000. And that's why Capital is dedicated to Wolf instead of to Engels. He calls an intrepid, faithful, noble protagonist of the proletariat, a.k.a. he died and left him a lot of money.

The money is very, very important. I know this is such a cheap shot that I'm wary of making it, but I just want to say that one of the 10 points in the Communist Manifesto about how to get to communism... does involve getting rid of the right of inheritance. And I know that this isn't quite inheritance, but I do feel it's sort of pertinent to his life story. Inheritance keeps them afloat over and over again. You've got to work with the system you've got. I guess so. Yeah.

So he blames illness for this delay in writing this book, but it's possible that he made him ill writing it, the stress of it. He compared it to an incubus draining his life. And when he finally sends it off, and this is something that perhaps you might think about the next time you're filing a book. The task to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness in life, and my family. So in 1867, the first volume of Capital finally comes out, this giant beast that he has finally slain.

Was it worth it? So look, Capital pulls together these ideas, these other texts that we've been talking about. And whenever we discuss it. We always are discussing as well volume two, which was published in 1885, and volume three that was published in 1894. It's a weird book. What I liked was seeing people...

who just basically couldn't understand it. So William Morris, the socialist, said reading it caused him to suffer agonies of confusion of the brain. I read what I could and will hope that some information stuck to me from my reading. There's one way it sends a copy to Charles Darwin who writes back and goes, oh, I only wish I were worthy of receiving such an important book. Literally, you shouldn't have. Plainly, plainly hasn't read it. Francis Ween, I think, really elegantly calls it.

a work of the imagination, a Victorian melodrama, or a vast gothic novel, or perhaps a satirical utopia like Swift's. He compares it to Gulliver's Travels and Tristram Shandy, and he's really into it. It's like... It's full of strange jokes and paradoxes and almost like supernatural imagery. So it's not, as some people might assume. Just like a very sort of a solid and comprehensive scientific textbook. No, no. It is essentially an unfinished project.

And it's worth saying up front that it's like building an argument to create like a kind of a kill shot. The one moment you can just demonstrate the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism. And that kill shot never comes. There is no point that that trigger is pulled. There is no argument that shows why capitalism inevitably collapses and leads to communism. People try to provide it after his death. They do not succeed. He himself does not succeed in that endeavor.

Just like worth remembering that thing of what he's trying to do. He kind of just wants to be in a mainstream economic debate. This is the thing. I think the thing that would torture him is seeing how capital was ultimately received, you know, including in the years when he was alive, but in the years afterwards. He wants to be, he is challenging, but also evolving. The ideas of Adam Smith and Ricardo.

James Mill and John Stuart Mill. That's where he wants to be seen. Those are the people he's talking to and with and against. And he's much more generous with them, by the way, than he is with any of the socialists that he's usually working with. Right, yeah.

What's he trying to do? He's basically trying to explain the mechanism by which historical materialism leads inevitably to communism. So he's still playing that game, that one, two, three step Hegel game of moving forward and saying, what is the mechanism by which this works? Money is something that we use. So here we're going to go. We're going to be in about three to four minutes and just do Marxist economics and just kind of get it done. Money is what we use to purchase commodities.

Sometimes a commodity is sold at a profit so that more money exists at the end of the transaction process than existed at the beginning of it. Now, when that happens, we're using money to increase value. And that's what turns money into capital. as a concept, this idea of capital, from the notes you have in your pocket that you want to send to this great force that is an impact in human affairs. It's the process of using money to increase value. So the question is,

Where does that value come from? Where is this surplus value coming from? Why are we ending up with more value at some part in the process than we are later on? Yeah. He thinks he has an answer, which is, of course, labor. right labor is at the core of everything that he is about that the philosophy is about the socialism is about but he's not alone in it

The labor theory of value that we mentioned in the last episode, this idea that the value of a good is dictated by the amount of labor that was needed to produce it, that was shared by Smith, by Ricardo, by Mill. This is widely accepted at the time.

It's wrong, as we mentioned in the last episode. The reason that someone was willing to pay more for an identical shoe that has a Nike swoosh on it is not to do with the amount of labour that went into it. It's to do with their subjective perception of value.

But nevertheless, pretty much everyone believes it. So workers exchange their labor, or rather their labor power, for money to the capitalist. And what they get is this kind of magical thing, the labor, that increases value so the capitalist gets the profit. There's two kinds of capital. One is constant capital. So that is the objects, that is structures, production facilities, raw materials, finished goods, the physical world.

The other is variable capital. This is the cost of workers' wages. So Ricardo called it the wage fund. Constant objects, variable the wages. Constant capital does not increase value. Those machines, according to this theory, never do anything to increase value. You just kind of have to rule it out. It seems, I think, mad. You just rule it out. The machines, the production, none of that increases value. Only labor. increases value. Wow, this seems quite wrong. Yeah, it is.

So his key variable, the most important really sort of like mechanic there, is called the organic composition of capital. And that is simply the ratio of the constant to variable capital. If you get it wrong, if you go too much towards the constant, towards the objects, you're just starting to annihilate your potential to create more value. If it goes more towards labor, you're creating more capacity to create value.

So capitalists have basically two ways of increasing their profits. First way is called extraction of absolute surplus value. And that is basically just shitting all over the worker. You just extend the length of the working day. OK, if they're the only thing that produces the value, you make them work indefinitely. And then you just start saying, look, here it is. This is the brutality that we inflict on people. People literally dying, you know, kids dying in factories, the misery, the horror.

But he realizes ultimately that there is a limit to what you can do there. Trade unions are now starting to have success with an eight-hour day. Also, days only last a certain amount of time. And unless you're going to murder the whole of the workforce, there has to be some resting periods. So it's really finite what you do.

can achieve by extending the working day. Option two is called extraction of relative surplus value, and that is making labor more productive. One of the chief ways that they make... Labour more productive is by expanding the use of machinery. So the steam engine, the Jenny, the power loom, or now you could say, you know, AI.

This is the idea that we, I think we came up against it during growth, right? This idea of like the tech is of absolute paramount importance when we talk about economic development and the productivity that we see in the economy. This is exactly that idea here. The trouble is when people start putting all of this investment into machinery, well, firstly, it's really expensive. So one of the first things it does is it puts small firms out of business.

And it encourages the creation of ever larger firms, these great monopoly companies. In the years to come, after capital, this would be one of the things that people really pointed to as a, fuck me, he got that right. You know, in the 90s when no logo. So that we're doing well. Just like, wow, he really spotted the way that the small businesses were not long for this world. Impact number two of machinery is that because the machinery does more work, the capitalist demand for labor.

decreases. So wages go down and people start losing their jobs. That's where this phrase, the industrial reserve army comes from. Marx's view that capitalism just requires this kind of just... pool of unemployed labour and that again emotionally had a huge impact during

periods of recession in marxist rhetoric to be like this is not an error you know this the system is designed and will always work according to this to keeping people as an industrial reserve army This process eventually creates this vast gap between the rich, And the poor, Marx writes, there will arise, quote, the mass of misery, oppression, servitude, degeneration, exploitation, but also the outrage of the steadily growing and organized working class, schooled by the mechanisms of...

the capitalist process of production itself. This is his picture of how it happens. Now, what's been described so far just gets you the point of this is how a capitalist crisis might happen. Yes. It's essentially that you put too much on the machines. They don't create value. Labor's just being made unemployed, but that does create value. So you suddenly just get this process of diminishing profits. But for him to make it inevitable, he needs something else.

What he needs is to prove that the rate of profit falls. That is an unremarkable thing to say in the Victorian period because everyone fucking believes it. When we were talking about degrowth, do you remember that Mill thought that ultimately you get to a period of no more growth? That's because Mill believed that the rate of profit fell. Ah, okay. And he welcomed it, as you said at the time. Ricardo believed the same thing and he didn't welcome it.

But they all believe the same thing. The rate of profit is going to fall. And Marx believed it too. But he knows the difference is if you're John Stuart Mill, the rate of profit cannot fall. And fine, you were wrong about the rate of profit falling. If you're Karl Marx and the rate of profit doesn't fall... you're fucked because your whole system, the inevitability of the process from capitalism to communism does rest on that fact. He knows he needs to prove it.

And yet he does not succeed in proving it. He doesn't do it in the book. And then the years afterwards, I mean, he's got notebooks full of algebra. We just write it down into the equations, equation 1882, a year before his death. He's still offering up new explanations, new solutions. none of which particularly satisfy him, and it never really works out. That kill shot...

simply isn't there. It's sort of fascinating. It's slightly tragic. The thing that he most wants to do above all else is to prove the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism and to be the master economist. And he can't do it. I mean, he's not a tutored, he's a self-taught economist. But he's also a philosopher. He's also, when he wants to be, a great, vivid prose writer.

He's also pioneering basically socioeconomic history and the social sciences. He's doing all of these things which are pioneering and valuable and influential to this day. But it's driving him mad that he just cannot prove that capitalism is doomed and that the final crisis is coming. It's so true. And he's an incredible... Just looking at the breadth of work over his lifetime that he does to an impossibly high standard, you just think...

His mind is a truly profoundly extraordinary thing. But the ultimate mission is unsuccessful. And I think it really fucks him up, the reception to it. In Britain, the language barrier is just too severe. I mean, people just can't read it. I mean, he's not getting... But it's this, you know, for classical...

Economics at that point, not to have read it, is really quite frustrating because it is a really interesting challenge to what was being discussed within the language of people who were, you know, who were literate in it, but they never get to read it. The only English language notice is one paragraph in a...

view of 22 different German language publications, most of which is about Romanian poetry. And someone just sort of goes, oh, there's a fucking capital thing. Well, Engels was reviewing it under pseudonyms. I saw that. You're the cheeky fucker. Seven different publications. Reviews of mindfulness. Yeah, on Amazon. And at least one of them, I couldn't quite, there were contradictory accounts here, but at least one of them was hostile.

to stir up controversy. Wow. Since the main thing is the book should be discussed over and over again in any way whatsoever. You know, all publicity is good publicity. Marx is desperate for the national debate. And he never gets it. It's ghettoised in the Labour. It turns into Labour movement economics, which is exactly what he didn't want. But Engels says to him, look, you should do a kind of capitalism for dummies, basically, as you should do a short, readable version of this.

Because otherwise somebody else is going to come along and do it and they're going to fuck it up and they're going to simplify Marxism in a way you don't like. Which arguably Engels did after Marxist death, right? I mean, he did warn him. Yeah, he did say, someone's going to write it.

Not even really the sort of most dyed-in-wool communist stands by Capitol. There's loads of really, really valuable things in it, but stands by it as a complete work in the way that they would, for instance, the Communist Manifesto.

And part of the reason for that is that basically the labor theory of value, this idea that all value comes from labor. So between the publication of volume one and volume two... of Das Kapital, marginal utility theory emerges for the first time in the work of Jevons, in the work of Walrus, in Menger's work, Principles of Economics. That turns into neoclassical economics, which basically turns into the orthodox economics of today, the kind of thing that we know now.

which is that the value of a good or service is based on a consumer's subjective appraisal of purchasing a good or a service rather than some other good or service, and that therefore supply and demand. are the things that determine value, not labour. You may have heard of that phrase. Took me through it. But it's quite weird. I mean, it's so deeply ingrained in how we think about everything that actually it was at this point that it was really demonstrated.

Marx was aware of this. He was reading Jevons. So he was aware of these first steps, although he never responded to them in paper. He never put it down in his writing. By the time the third volume of Capital comes out, 1894... marginal utility theory, neoclassical economics is the dominant form of economic analysis. Marx is writing for a kind of almost like a classical economics world that has just gone. The world of John Stuart Mill, you know, decades after the passing of this era.

So The Economist is just living in a different intellectual climate, a different conceptual universe. It's just terrible, terrible timing, although to be fair... The timing would have been better if he'd written the book when he first said he was going to write it. Yes. And of course, the second and third one's come out after he's dead. Well, yeah. The second problem is...

that he's wrong about workers' conditions under capitalism. He just says it's going to get worse and worse and worse. Well, from 1881 onwards, Bismarck is introducing a system of social security. OK, comprehensive state insurance plans, sickness insurance, old age pensions, partly, you know, an attempt to sort of discourage socialism, ironically. Right. But what it produces is a level of.

material well-being for workers under capitalism, that it just doesn't really fit with the kind of world that Marx has described in Capital. Well, if you're an average worker... You like the way that socialism is operating with the status quo. The status quo is just like...

It is scared of a revolution. It is scared of unrest. And therefore it grants certain socialist demands for better working conditions to the workers to sort of keep them down. So the worker ends up... much better off for the existence of socialism and communism, acting as these kind of like levers on the employers and the governments. But if you're Marx and you just really, really want things to get worse so that the revolution can happen, which again is very apocalyptic thinking.

then it's really frustrating. But at the same time, he wasn't such a sort of sociopath that he wanted to stop all reforms and go, actually, I don't want workers to have better working hours and not be so sick and miserable. And so it's kind of like he wants it. Theoretically, he wants things to get worse, but he doesn't sort of actually want human beings to suffer. It's also the prison that you're...

Your dogma puts you in. You've got this total system. So you can't make concessions to facts like this. You can't say, well, actually, you know what? We actually improved things for everyone because they had to discourage socialism by making allowances for the old age pension. Because that's not your system. The system is... very specific, very, very specific indeed. And that is not what is written in the Communist Manifesto. Let's make a lot of shit so that Bismarck gives us an old age pension.

So he's kind of constrained in doing it. But eventually, I mean, the trouble is factory legislation improving. There's one point, it's a really telling line. He says of Russia in the 1860s, he writes this. The old atrocities from the childhood period of English factories stand in full bloom, which is this sort of tacit concession that they are no longer taking place in English factories now.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he sort of almost switches to suddenly start talking about Russia now, where conditions are still fucking terrible, because he increasingly can't do it because of factory reform in the UK. The truth is that after the hungry 40s...

The economy entered into a much more benign period for the second half of the 19th century. Workers did get richer. It's not like these guys were living fabulous lives by any stretch of the imagination, but people were getting richer. And partly, of course, because of trade unions. Right. But he never addressed it. So Judy H. Cole, one of the great sort of scholars of socialism, wrote this.

Indeed, one cannot help feeling that after 1848, he buried himself so completely in his study of the British records of the early part of the 19th century as never to observe, despite his residence in England, what was happening. happening there at a later time. It was almost like he just sat in that room in the British Museum

and just got lost in books about shit that had happened decades before, not seeing that in the world around him, capitalism was already fundamentally changing in ways that were not compatible with the theory that he was putting forward. We can see why he becomes obsessed with Russia, because, you know, early on... He's just going, well, you know, there's no way revolution can happen at Russia because it's not industrialized. It's not an advanced economy. Right.

And then in the 1870s, he's reading loads about Russia and changed his mind because he thinks, oh, okay, it's not happening in England. It's probably not happening in Germany. You know, maybe it can happen in Russia. And of course, Russian Marxists are doing the same thing, aren't they? They're just like finding reasons why it could actually happen. Exactly. Exactly that. I think one of his really core...

and it's a fair one to make, but I think it's profound, is that he massively underestimates the efficiency of capitalism. And this is a thing for all socialisms to grapple with. You know, they come from that thing of like the free market. It's fucking chaos. Like, why would you, you know, all of the early socialists that we talked about in the first episode were like that. Like, why the fuck would you organize it? Like, this is just crazy. Surely corporate...

rational coordination of the economy. Surely that is the way forward. And there's very many places where the free market is tremendously inefficient and fundamentally irrational. But there are other places where it's hard to see the rationality underneath it, which I think took me personally years to recognize this about capitalism. So I'm looking at this from Joe Wolfe, who's brilliant on it, on the role that middlemen play.

in Marxism, for Marx and Engels, and the role that they play for Friedrich Hayek and von Mises, you know, the classic people that represent neoliberalism, the real belief in the free market, people who I disagree with about almost everything, but not this point. It's interesting on something. like middlemen, they get it and Marx and Engels don't.

So Engels does a speech in Elberfeld. He talks about middlemen. He says, like, we live in a world of free competition. Let us then take a little look, a little closer look at this free competition and the world order to which it has given rise. And he talks about this bale of cotton that's produced in North America.

river, and it's bought by one speculator, and it's shipped over to another middleman, and another middleman goes up and down the river, and then it goes to another country, and then it's packaged up, and it's like, so eight journeys, and it's just like, how is that efficient, what is that? Well, Hayek and Mises look at this stuff, and they're like, no, those middlemen are heroes. Like, what they're doing is they're...

figuring out where things are oversupplied, they're buying it cheaply, and they're taking it to where there's demand for it. In other words, they are using the price point that is providing information about scarcity. and demand and they have a personal incentive

to respond to it. And your central state organizing production will never have access to the kind of information, top-down, coordinating information, that will facilitate that degree of efficiency in the way that this free market does with the... way that it encourages middlemen and that that error i think more than any of the other errors is to explain why capitalism just caught all of those

Those claims, oh, it's going to fall any time now, getting very excited in letters about the latest sort of thing. Now, now it will happen. And 10 years later, now it will happen in the middle of the 20th century. Now it's going to happen. It's like, no, it doesn't. There's a reason that it keeps on not happening. It's because it's a much...

more efficient system than had been recognized by this proposal of economics. So the other big thing happening in Marx's life around this time is... the international, the first international. So in 1864, while he's writing Capital, he is invited to be the German representative at the first meeting of the International Working Men's Association in Covent Garden.

It's the first time he's accepted an invite like this since the Communist League collapsed 14 years earlier. Doesn't normally like organizations. The aim is to promote brotherhood, end war, and spread Britain's workers' rights to Europe, just like you were saying. People were going like, oh, actually, we're making progress in other countries. Well, 27 of the original 34 members of the General Council are English, so it's not that international.

It's a very English version of international. Just go, we'll let a few foreigners in. The Times quips, it will be nothing less than a new world when Englishmen and foreigners find themselves able to work together. Jesus fucking Christ. So typically, Marx, once he gets involved, comes to dominate the international. And this is where he meets all the different kinds of 1860s progressives. There's trade unions, feminists, Irish nationalists, pacifists, suffragists.

But he has very little to do with the big social developments in England because he's not really interested unless they're revolutionary. So trade unions, they're good as a means to an end, class consciousness, revolution. For a very short period, he convinced himself revolution will start in Ireland, then spread to England and Europe. So he really wants to hang out with Irish nationalists. Then he realizes that's not going to happen.

Doesn't really care about their aspirations. The International Congress in 1870 is postponed by the small matter of France declaring war on Prussia. Which I think just seems, it's sort of shattering, isn't it? Because it's that retreat back to nationalism. Nationalism which affects Marx and Engels. Both of them get really... I mean, Marx starts screaming about how the French need a good thrashing. He really wants Prussia to win. Yeah.

Incredible. The working men of All Nations Unite thing takes a backseat for a while. And that thing of like, oh, hang on a minute. There are other identities and other groups and other sense of belonging that people have that are not economic should have been very pertinent to Marx and Engels.

themselves if they've been capable of that degree of introspection. It comes up again and again. One of the reasons he wants Prussia to win, he wants to cause a revolution in France, but also he wants to ensure that proper German communism prevails over the silly French person. You know? Anyway.

Prussia crushes the French, as Marx wanted, lays siege to Paris, leading to an uprising in March 1871. Now, look, the Paris Commune could be, should be, will be a whole episode. What's relevant here is a real jumble of the radicals we discussed already. There's far-left followers of Louis Blanqui, there's anarchist followers of Proudhon and Bakunin, there's quite a lot of members of the international. Marx was asked to deliver an address to the people of Paris, but he really blows the deadline.

finishes it on 30th of May, two days after the commune has been smashed by the army and thousands of communards slaughtered. And yet still much sooner than anyone expected him to fly. Oh, okay. I mean, it's sort of both too late and also surprisingly early. So never mind.

He declares the commune will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society, even though he later admits it was in no sense socialist because it involved all the social classes. It wasn't really proper. Engels is furious with the British again.

The working classes in England have behaved in a disgraceful manner by not backing the commune. Which is really quite funny because, of course, he is an employer of British workers for like 20 odd years. But he wants to sort of rise up and overthrow him.

And he's really angry that they haven't. So Marx's address is published in English as the Civil War in France. And it's just really important to remember, just the importance of translation, like you were saying. It's like if your book has not been translated, it's not going to be read widely. So this was published in English first, and it makes him famous, or rather infamous, along with the republication of the Communist Manifesto. Marx suddenly is known as the Red Doctor.

And it's fair to say as well that during the commune, there was a lot of, including forgeries, but a real attempt just to associate him with it. He was dredged up as well as the spectre, right? He's known literally as the hidden hand that has orchestrated the uprising from London. I mean, very good. You'd be happy with that.

So pioneering the connection between anti-communism and anti-Semitism, the Pall Mall Gazette calls Marx an Israelite by birth who heads a vast conspiracy having for its object to create political communism. One French newspaper alleges that the International has 7 million members. Just a slight overestimate. Meanwhile, Bonapartists claim that Marx is actually an agent of Bismarck and working for the Prussians. So there's a lot of bullshit being spread around, which Marx loves.

He calls himself the most calumniated and the most menaced man of London. That really does one good after a tedious 20-year edel in the backwoods. He boasts that he is perceived by reporters who want to see the block caps monster. With their own eyes. In reality, of course, the International does not have 7 million members and is not orchestrating a global communist revolution because of factional disputes. The main one being between Marx and Bakunin.

Bakunin, his old frenemy from Paris in 1844. Now, Bakunin is an amazing character. Six foot five. And just enormous Hulk-like Russian anarchist in love with destruction. Just wants to bring down the state, use terror as a tactic. He's been kicked out of the international, but he's got back in by creating a group, the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy. Nothing wrong with that. And then affiliating it. It's like your classic entryism, right? 100%.

But he prefers secret societies to mass revolution, the peasantry to the urban proletariat. So he's really popular in Russia, which makes sense, and in Southern Europe. I mean, Spain becomes really like the hotbed of anarchism for decades to come, right? Mediterranean countries are much more open to the sort of anarchist heritage, the anarchist tradition than we've ever seen, really, certainly in Britain. So as the national balance of the international shifts, he almost succeeds.

in taking it over. He is just a hardcore character and they go at it like a pair of lunatics. Bakunin, who is anti-submitting in ways that, even by origin story standards, right, you read a lot of anti-Semitism. Fucking insane. He claims he is being persecuted by a dire conspiracy of German and Russian Jews fanatically devoted to their dictator messiah Marx, who is, of course, in league with the Rothschilds. Right. Okay. Of course. Jesus Christ.

I didn't realize quite how far back some of these conspiracy theories went. He says of Mark, a nervous man, some say to the point of cowardice, he's extremely ambitious and vain, quarrelsome, intolerant and absolute, like Jehovah, the Lord God of his ancestors, and like him, vengeful to the point of madness. Marx responds with Russophobia. Mr. Bakunian has translated Proudhon's anarchy into the barbaric idiom of the Tatars.

And they keep coming up with this. There's the bits where Engels is just like, well, Europe would be better off without the useless Slavs or America should invade the lazy Mexicans. Like, I mean, just constantly, it's like ethnic stereotype after ethnic stereotype. At the same time, they're just going, well, of course, the workers of the world unite. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, but also.

I mean, such a strange contradiction. And it just shows how powerful, I think, ethnic and national stereotyping is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and how it's unlikely to disappear once the economic conditions have been alleviated. Exactly. So beneath all the racism, there is a really important clash over communism and liberty. And Bakunin says bluntly, I hate communism because it is the negation of liberty. I want the abolition.

of the state. But basically, all he ever says is, no, we'll be fine. Don't worry. Yes, that's exactly right. That's his rebuttal. Yeah. Chill out. But those anarchist critiques, I mean, you could say the same, like there's loads of good passages from liberals in this period. Yeah, Mill as well, same thing. Exactly. Mill talking about socialism rather than Marx himself. They didn't quite tally up that way. But ultimately, in terms of his...

cool and you know the anarchist stuff is weirder than it's very weird because they're also quite against sort of elected officials and you know any kind of power in that respect but ultimately they are the ones spotting the danger coming they are the ones going like hang on a minute This is not going to be as clean cut. You have misunderstood what the human condition is like and people will misuse the kind of power that you are about to hand over to what you think will be

tra-la-la representatives of the proletariat, but will in fact turn into a whole new class themselves once they're handed this degree of power. He literally says that they will cloak their own desire for power as the will of the people. Exactly. You know, I mean, we don't want to... shadow too stridently here but that may be a thing that happens but really bang on about the potential and i think where marx is too stubborn is he doesn't admit that there is that potential

He could respond, sure, it could go that way. But here's why I don't think it will, or here's why I would argue for a different version. He's just going, nah. There's no weakness in the theory that could lead to dictatorship. I think he's too Hegelian. to recognize the argument.

his politics is like looking down on a model village. You know what I mean? He's like, well, no, that's fine because I just put the building over here and now I've redefined it and it doesn't, you know, it's not a thing. Whereas when you're looking at it from within the model village, you see how all of these dynamics... All he has to do is just sort of tweak it.

Tweak it, tweak it, tweak it, and then it'll be fine. So Marx and Bakunin have a massive showdown at the 1872 Congress in The Hague. Bakunin loses, gets kicked out. But Marx has already been planning to blow up the whole international because he's sick of it. It's a little bit...

Like setting fire to your workplace because you'd want to leave your job. 100%. What I love about it is like at some point there was a conversation where they were like, where do you send a communist organization to die? And they're like, New York.

It's three months before the Congress. He said, I can hardly wait for the next Congress. It will be the end of my slavery. After that, I shall become a free man again. So, yeah, he achieves this by moving the HQ to New York, which one member protests that might as well move it to the moon.

And as he predicted, it loses momentum and disintegrates altogether. I mean, it's not quite, but it's almost like his last ever political action is just to detonate the organisation. Because he's just sick of all these arguments. Because he obviously hates arguments. But what the international did do was succeed in establishing the language of social democracy throughout Europe.

Gareth Stedman Jones writes, European socialism was an invention of the 1860s. Terms like solidarity, strike, meeting or trade union were adopted in countries where their previous use had been unknown. Which surprised me, I must admit. I didn't quite realise that that was...

But anyway, Marx has reasons for retiring from the international. One was his declining health. Among other things, he suffered from piles, rheumatism, giant boils, problems with his lungs, liver, head, and eyes. I don't really know where he wasn't suffering from something. Yeah, but these carbuncles sort of like, I mean, at one point he's reduced to like literally just cutting it out himself. These are golf ball size sort of growths on his back and his...

bum and his thighs and he's just basically hacking it off like blood impossible it's like complete decline and actually in the photos you know the image that we have of him is actually of a really quite old man he's really quite dashing and sort of military looking But you see the decline after his mid-40s in a very pronounced way. You know, he still looks in the prime of his life at that point. And then suddenly he's an old man. And he's just getting really...

Yeah, he's really tired and ill. So he's got this pension from Engels now because Engels has left his business and moved to London. And he's arranged for Marx to receive a handsome pension as well, most of which he spends on health resorts like Carlsbad and the Isle of Wight. And I'm watching for him. It's quite ironic. Two of his daughters have married French radicals that he doesn't like.

So Jenny married Charles Longuet and Eleanor married Paul Lafargue. He goes, Longuet is the last Proudhonist and Lafargue is the last Bakunist. May the devil take them. I mean, your own daughters getting married to these representatives of... Politics that you hate. But he rises above these days because he's tired now. He says, I do not reply to pinpricks. In my younger days, I sometimes did some hard hitting. Wisdom comes with age.

And it's like, yeah, no, sometimes you did perhaps overreact, but I'm glad you've grown out of it. So really what he's obsessed with in the 1870s... is like the early history of human civilization as a model for communism and all this is kind of forgotten. And Simon Jones writes about it really interestingly, but it's sort of irrelevant. But he is moving towards this idea that...

Then maybe you could have a revolution in Russia and he's misdiagnosed that. The last important thing he writes, even though, again, it makes no impact at the time, is called Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Because in 1874, there were two German socialist parties. They decide to merge into the party that becomes the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the most successful Marxist party in Europe for decades. So they agree on a united program in the German city of Gotha. Marx is furious at two factions getting together. No, that's not the only reason he's furious. Anyway, so he writes this critique, which has two really, really, really important ideas. So one is...

the transition from capitalism to communism. The first phase is socialism, to each according to his labor. Then communism, where he takes that phrase from Louis Blanc, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The next phrase to describe the transitional phase is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will lead us to a classless society. Now, he had mentioned this phrase, as far as I can tell, in a letter about 20 years earlier.

And that's about it. He really does not elaborate on what the dictatorship of the proletariat is. He's sort of, maybe this will need to happen on the way to the class of society. So once again, we've got this thing, this document, which contains these incredibly important phrases that aren't necessarily picked up under the time and become absolutely foundational for Lenin and so on.

You know, for later on, obviously, it's an incredibly problematic phrase, the tradition of the proletariat, and we know what it leads to. And it sounds... Even if it didn't lead to anything, that's something dreadful. But the thing is that he defined... Remember that the proletariat for him were like God in the Hegel system. He defined them as, quote, the universal class. And because they were the universal... It was like their conditions are the universal suffering. So when they get into...

of power, they create the universal conditions of alleviating the problem. It's just like, it's a category thing. You know what I mean? Obviously, you have a dictatorship of the thing that makes the problem go away. It's really no more complex than that. He's not talking about terror. I mean, I suppose you have to... dictator he's not going like also like purges and massacres which is how it was interpreted later on he really doesn't like to I mean in Russia

there are moments that he supports terrorism. There's one particular assassination that he supports. But outside of Russia, he never supports terrorism. You know, he's just like, no, no, no, that's not what we do. He's basically a respectable, like Victorian... Bourgeois himself. That's just not the game that he's playing. He's not pro-terror. He really isn't, apart from in one instance. What's one Russian assassination? Not much. I mean, who among us have not dabbled?

In terror. Anyway, things are going really horribly wrong for him personally. His wife, Jenny, dies of cancer in December 1881. Carl is too ill to attend the funeral and never recovers. Engels, using Marx's family nicknames, says the Moor is dead too. Yeah. The thing that broke my heart was that, you know, he lives for like another year, a year and three months, I think. But then just before he dies...

His daughter, Jenny, who'd survived to adulthood, dies as well. Cancer as well. Cancer. You see, for some reason, it really upset me. Like, he's clearly on his way out. He's lost his wife. For that to happen...

He was really, I mean, some people would think he was broken from when his young son died, you know, many, many years before. But really at that point, it's just like a degree of tragedy that a human mind can't really withstand. So I think that the end, the final year of his life is a very. grim one indeed. And bizarrely, both his surviving daughters go on to commit suicide later on. Holy shit, I didn't know that.

So on the 14th of March, 1883, Marx suffers a hemorrhage on his lung and dies in his favourite armchair by the fire. He's buried in Highgate Cemetery three days later. There are only 11 mourners and his death is only major news in the socialist newspapers. His estate is valued at just £250. Oh my God. Which is, like I said, would be about £30,000 now.

Four of his children die before him. Now, the bust we see on his grave today wasn't put there until 1956. It just wasn't that big an event, except... to Engels, who gives this famous eulogy about Marx's beliefs. Really more, he's not saying Marx was a great, you know, husband and dad and all that. It's very much just like he is a... prophet of revolution. He declares his name and work will endure through the ages. Well, it turns out he was right. I mean, not wrong. And partly because of Engels.

When I was a teenager, a girl went missing from my hometown, Blackpool. Her name was Charlene Downs. And the story of what happened to her is not what it seems. 22 years after Charlene went missing... I want to try and uncover not just the truth about what happened to her, but the lies too. I'm Nicola Thorpe, and this is Charlene. Somebody knows something. Available now. wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Dorian Linsky from Origin Story. And it's Ian Duncan 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 of November. Dorian is coming as Karl Marx. I am coming as Frederick Engels. And you can come as the masses. Google origin story tabernacle. We hope to see you there.

So Tristram Hunt, the former Labour and Piaz, he was written in very good by a career of angles. He calls him Marx's Bulldog. And the Marxism that catches on in the 1880s is really a hybrid of Marx and Engels. So the most popular and influential book for the rest of the century is nothing that Marx wrote. It's Engels, very short, punchy.

distillation, socialism, utopian and scientific. And the whole thing is to go, utopian socialisms are soppy and vague and idealistic. And dialectical materialism is scientific rigor. And the inevitable collapse of capitalism, he makes it very mechanical. It's Engels who introduces the idea that under communism, the state will wither away. Once there's no gap between the interest of the individual and the interest of the whole, there's no need for the state.

Like, it just seems much more, it's much, much more streamlined. And at the same time, he's aware of the dangers of that. He says, Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. So he's going, look, economics is the most important factor, but it's not like the only factor. And there's quite a lot of talk about...

Vulgar Marxists, which must be Engels in the later capitals, which he edited. It must be his sort of language. He's like the vulgar Marxists who get things wrong. And he insists Marx's whole way of thinking is not so much a doctrine as a method. It provides not so much ready-made dogmas as aids to further investigation.

That's a very nice way of looking at it. It is, right? I don't think he actually believes that, but it's a very nice way of looking at it. And like you said, you quoted that thing where Marx was so annoyed by some French Marxist. He goes, all I know is that I'm not a Marxist if this guy is.

It's complicated because they could be like very, very dogmatic and they could be mechanical. But again and again, they were just like, oh, the importance of doubt, the importance of nuance. It's not how much you're convinced by those sort of caveats. It depends. But it doesn't suit the caricature. But then Engels conspires in the caricature. marx's funeral he's talking about um oh it's basically equivalent to the economic equivalent of darwinism yeah i mean this is their system

I mean, their system is, you know, they say we've explained the mechanism of history. We've fucking done it. You know, here's how it works. This is the engine. This is how it works. And then this is how it's going to go next. And then I think because of their temperament and because.

For a political activist, which they ultimately are, as well as being all the other things, it's an almost impossible system to live in because it makes all of your actions completely redundant. They obviously push back against their own sort of thinking. But nevertheless, it is the only logical conclusion you can come to, given the system that they have described. So the weirdness is that Engels is basically trying to, you know...

protect Marx's reputation until he dies. And then his friend Karl Kautsky actually helped him assemble the final volumes of Capital. He becomes Europe's most important Marxist. He's associated with the German Social Democrats. dominates the second international so on and so forth there are no communist parties yet there are only parties calling them social democrats they're they're the marxists which again historically um from today's vantage point can be quite confusing

So actually, when we talk about Russia coming up, we'll talk a bit more about the ways that people interpreted Marx. But the point is, there is no Bible of Marxism. What somebody like Lenin would have focused on would be the Communist Manifesto, right? The preface to the critique of the political economy. The civil war in France, which has since really fallen out of favor, was really important at the time. The critique of the Gotha program.

more than capital. And then, of course, Engels' book. And then later on, the Soviets published all these manuscripts that weren't available. And then that becomes really influential. And one of them is a line that listeners might know. which the post-work sort of socialists are really into.

Because under communism, you could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening, and write criticism after dinner. This is early humanist Marx, right? Classic early humanist Marx. The German ideology era. And it's just like, without ever becoming one of those things, ever being put in a box.

and capitalism wants to put you in a box and go, this is it, this is all you are. Communism, you could be anything. But that's something that just doesn't come to light until much, much later, until after. uh the russian revolution but then obviously once the bolsheviks hear about it they immediately institute that system that's exactly what it was yeah i mean no spoilers but it works out super great

under Stalin with all the fishing and cowherding and criticism. Especially the criticism. He was hugely keen on that part. But, you know, people are picking up on bits like that. There's another quote from just one of his articles, right? You'll come across a lot.

In general, social reforms can never be brought about by the weakness of the strong. They must and will be called to life by the strength of the weak. That's the saying philanthropy doesn't work. You only really get change if you demand it. And that's been plucked from an article. And that probably wasn't a big deal to Lenin. He's less concerned about philanthropy. Whereas the civil war in France doesn't now seem very relevant at all. People are less agitated about the Paris Commune.

So there is that thing of like, well, what do you mean by Marxism? And you've explained the most coherent version of it. But of course, people do cherry pick. Oh, totally. Yeah. Of course. You could leave out all of alienation if you want. You can't really leave out. And you can leave out all the economics. The one bit that really you can't.

you kind of got to do it's historical materialism. But even there, you can start saying, well, you know, there are other factors as well that matter and therefore it's not inevitable. And I think those people who still... would really associate with this theory that's what they end up doing you know what i mean they end up taking that

core the real heart of the thing and then stripping it of most of its more deterministic more mechanical factors they lose the predictive power most of the time they don't care they would say and i think really And justifiably, this is a lens along the lines of, we know what Engels was saying there.

What happens to the world when you start shining this lens on it? And really interesting things start happening when you start saying, OK, so what's your relationship to the means of production? You know, like really interesting, revealing things happen once you start asking those kinds of questions. not too totalitarian about it. Yeah, because the basic, I mean, I suppose the real blunt critique is that it's basically a sort of an apocalyptic prophecy dressed up as science.

And, you know, that comes across in some really sophisticated writers like Norman Cairn in his sort of history of apocalyptic movements. And on what level you go, yeah, the inevitable crisis. the period of suffering, and then paradise and the end of history, right? Wow, yeah. But it doesn't quite sum up all their thinking in the same way that saying it's just like a pseudoscience doesn't quite sum it up. Or saying that it's just another version of utopia doesn't quite sum it up. Even though...

It is to some extent scientific and to some extent apocalyptic and to some extent utopian with the potential to be authoritarian. But what I found so satisfying about researching these episodes was that...

There's always more going on, and they themselves, Marx and Engels, are aware of the dangers of oversimplification. Let's face it, if it really was that simple, Marx would not even have... He would have condensed it. I mean, the length of capital suggests that he didn't think it was that simple. Even on the predictions, he predicted so many things so well.

We mentioned two of them earlier. A, just the way that mechanization in factories were worked. For instance, under Ford and the division of labor and just the reduction of human labor to the status of barely a machine. Right. Sure, some of that was happening in his lifetime, but it continued and it became much more comprehensive afterwards. The growth of huge multinational companies and the struggles that smaller companies would have in that kind of economy. Absolutely.

And then, for instance, if you then start applying his ideas, think of it this way. If we start saying this thing of like, your class is dictated by your relationship to the means of production. As you would have it. If we start thinking that way, or indeed anyone really that works in the services economy, he didn't understand services as a concept.

You know, he dismissed it. He was aware of it, right? But he dismissed it. Because even then, of course, they still had doctors back then. It's not like it was an unheard of idea. No, but he just didn't. Bureaucrats and professionals, anyone sort of between... The bosses and the proletariat was just a sort of inconvenience. They were like peasants. You know, all the lump and proletariat. They're just like, well, let's just let that shit go away. Exactly.

So what does it have to say to me in my working life? What pertinence is there in my working life and us making this podcast, what our relationship is to the means of production? It is simply not really interesting or pertinent to us in any way. However, if you start thinking about...

mobile phones and AI, means of production is actually quite an interesting lens, right? Like, what is it? What is social media really except basically handing the means of production of a newspaper over to every single individual? You know, what is the camera on a phone? Potentially creating the means of production of making a film. Potentially...

You know, as per our AI episode, you know, what AI could do in terms of giving democratization of means of production of things that previously could only have been done with a huge amount of infrastructure and wealth and staffing costs and handing it to each other.

individual and what is the impact it won't spin-off in a marxist way but it's a really useful prism to start thinking why is all this fucked up stuff happening why does everything seem so chaotic why are relations suddenly in such flux you think well actually well let's start talking about the means of production so all of his

ideas kind of have this element in which they just don't work and they don't lead you somewhere. And then these other elements where they really do work and they really do lead you somewhere. Well, there's a piece of the 90s in The New Yorker by John Cassidy, and he writes, in many ways, Marx's legacy has been obscured by the failure of communism, which wasn't his primary interest. Marx was a student of capitalism, and that is how he should be judged.

And I think on the history of capitalism, he's very good. Prophesying the future is really, really hard. Let's face it, capitalists aren't very good at that either because we wouldn't have had like the Wall Street crash or the 2008 crisis if they could. So it's sort of, you know, where you go, ah, well, he was wrong about this, wrong about that. He's right about, you know, systemic inequality and monopolies and globalization.

And that there will always be crises. You're not going to have an end to boom and bust. And there are other things where you go, okay, like you said, because of the economic orthodoxies at the time, how could he be expected to have a completely different conception of them?

economic universe, where I think, I suppose the fatal errors, I would say, not fatal, the really damning errors, one is that communism would change human nature and eliminate... greed and hierarchy and self-interest, because these are just products of capitalism. And no country on earth has demonstrated that that is true.

There is no socialist or communist country in which those things just disappear. And some have demonstrated very aggressively that it is not true. Yes. And then the other thing, you know, which I find a little bit sadder is the power of internationalism to overcome. religion and nationalism and identity groups. The idea that there would be this sort of commonality. And he didn't really write that much about those things. He said he wasn't really interested in racism. No.

Or kind of nationalism. And in fact, was sort of unthinkingly guilty of racism and nationalism himself. It's about the fact that everyone called him the more because of his, you know, dark complexion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just didn't... And the anti-Semitism being flung in his face relentlessly. And again, you know, so that I think is like, I don't blame him for not understanding that profits wouldn't fall or that working conditions wouldn't inevitably get worse.

I do think he missed something really quite important about human beings on those fronts. There's a point where Bakunin writes about him when he's talking about power. Like, no one could say this if they have any understanding of the reality of man. And I think that it just echoes in your mind when you see what comes from Marxist theories. And it comes from this combination of two defects. The first one is, even though he is himself like sort of perfectly...

you know, civil and I think humane, really, despite being cantankerous. There is just no place for the individual in his system. He's not interested in the individual. It's not the... It's not the classification that he's using. It is about classes. So there is no protection for the individual when they fall outside of the interests of that class or when they have to be just rumbled over so that history can progress.

And then the second is that, as you say, that completely primitive, rudimentary understanding of power. So that then you cannot foresee any of the ways that humans oppress each other on the basis that is not... connected with property like and once those two flaws come together and they will come together very very terrible things indeed

can take place. Is it his fault? Well, sort of, because you are responsible for the ideas that you put forward. And it's not like people around at the time don't have criticisms of this that you're failing to take on board. And it's not like books. are not really dangerous things. Books are dangerous and they create outcomes in the real world that have an effect. But ultimately, it's not so much about whether it's his fault. It's more like...

Did he provide any kind of armory, any kind of defensive conceptual ideas to prevent that kind of slide into conformity and murder and oppression? And the answer is no, they are not. Like I said, he thought so much about capitalism. He doesn't think enough about how to overthrow it, what should replace it. He doesn't really think enough about revolution.

or about the communist system. Like two things that he's famous for. And yet, if actually, if you, I mean, you can't really take the revolution out of Marx, but imagine if you did. A lot of the people that he is rubbing shoulders with, the people that he inspires.

They are introducing reforms because capitalism only survives by conceding to socialism. And the minimum wage and welfare and public housing and health and state education and inheritance taxes, etc, etc, etc. All of which perhaps Marx would consider some kind of failure because they hadn't led to sort of revolution. Those are the things, you know, I just resist the, it all leads to the gulag. It's like one road does lead to the gulag. And then other roads lead to...

workers just having much better lives than they would have. That's not solely on Marx because the trade union movement obviously exists independently. That's the thing. It's just not clear. I mean, that's definitely true for the socialist movement, socialism. Right, right, right. How much that is to do with Marx or how much there was just this demand for the most compelling...

convincing argument for the urgency of this project, right? You get that in our first episode, you know, it's Fourier or it's Saint-Germain. And this is obviously a much more compelling system. Like if I was around at the time, I would have found this.

infinitely more convincing than anything these guys talk about the sea is going to be made of lemonade and we're all going to be making our own chairs you know you'd say like well this sounds scientific and you know much more rigorous and i think it was much more compelling to people at the time

If he hadn't been around, do we think that those changes wouldn't have happened? No, I just think that that movement would have still been there in a different form, you know, like a less rigid, a form that wasn't claiming this kind of scientific validity. But I think the socialist movement would have still been there, given that...

impetus and that sense of threat ultimately it's about the sense of threat you better fucking you know oh why were there eight hour days because you know starting with owen saying it's eight hours of rest eight hours of leisure eight hours of work, it was about pressure for these changes. And that wasn't necessarily a result of what Marx said, but it was a result of socialists. I have to say, I did warm to the guy.

Marks? Yeah. You just like everyone. At the end, you can't help yourself. It's very rare that you turn against them. Yeah. No, maybe it is. I don't know. I just loved the... I just love the idea that someone was just wrestling, wrestling all the way through with like ideas that it mattered just sort of so much and sort of trying to get it right and a genuine desire to change the world with ideas.

Yeah. You know, I mean, it's good because it's, as we've discovered with like Ayn Rand and Netanyahu, it's no fun spending weeks researching someone you can't stand. So maybe there is a bit of Stockholm syndrome. Or maybe I just love his sick burns. Let's face it. If he'd been around, he would have subtweeted the shit out of you. Oh, he would have fucking hated me. I was just, I mean, just the most vicious, vicious pile on receiving like, yeah, I just have to block him. Stop getting abusive DMs.

But nonetheless, at a safe distance, 142 years after his death, I feel rather warmly towards him. He satisfies your Begbie category. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. You've got a Bigby origin story category. It's basically of people that like, you're sort of like, oh yeah, you're quite for, oh no, I do wish you hadn't done that. That really isn't a necessary way for you to behave. Someone who just kind of, yeah, comes in and causes a ruckus.

Well, look, thank you for listening to these episodes of Orange Story about Karl Marx and his bezzy friend Friedrich Engels. Why not check out the sources in the show notes so you can give us feedback? via all the usual online methods. And you can watch us if you want. And why wouldn't you? Yeah, we don't have carbuncles. You can watch us on Spotify and now on YouTube.

And if you really like the work we're doing, you can support us on Patreon. Check out patreon.com slash origin story pod. Tell a friend or review us on your podcast app with full marks, please. Very good. Thank you. Although I don't like that little smile that was playing on your face. I know that because I know it's bad. I know it's wrong. But it pleases me and I know it pleases you. Are you just trying to discourage people from watching on YouTube? Is that what you're doing?

Thank you very much 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 at Philosophy and Public Policy at Wilson College, Oxford, all of whom helped me immensely with these two episodes. And if you are a patron backer, stick around for the extra bit of the book club where we will just have a very quick chat about some of the books that helped us.

make these episodes. Thank you so, so much for listening. We will see you next time for the first part of, I think our first three-part episode. First ever three-part episode. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. See you then.