In Our Time - Marx

Episode Date: July 14, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Karl Marx. "Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains", "Religion is the opium of the people", and "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". That should be enough for most of you to work out whom Radio 4 listeners have voted as their favourite philosopher: the winner of the In Our Time Greatest Philosopher Vote, chosen from 20 philosophers nominated by listeners and carried through on an electoral tidal wave of 28% of our 'first-past-the-post' vote is the communist theoretician, Karl Marx.So, when you strip away the Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet era and later Marxist theory, who was Karl Marx? Where does he stand in the history of philosophy? He wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it" - which begs the question, is he really a philosopher at all?With Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Francis Wheen, journalist and author of a biography of Karl Marx; Gareth Stedman Jones, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your change. And from each according to his abilities,

to each according to his needs. No further clues needed. The winner of the In Our Time favorite philosopher vote, chosen from 20 philosophers nominated by listeners and carried through on an electoral tidal wave of 28% is the communist theoretician Karl Marx. So when you strip away the Marxist Leninism, the Soviet era and later Marxist theory, who was Karl Marx? Where does he stand in history of philosophy? He wrote in his thesis on Feuerbach, philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however,

is to change it? Which begs the question, is he really a philosopher? And did he change the world? With me to discuss Marx are Gareth Stedman Jones, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University, Francis Wien, journalist and author of a biography of Karl Marx, and A.C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Before we talk about Marx, Anthony Grayling, could you just say a quick word about the, as it were, the list, and particularly the top ten? What does a professional philosopher make of it? Well, it's a very interesting list, actually, because it has on it, all the people who should be on it. It's got the great names. It's got Plato, Socrates, Ares,

Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and Hume. And it's also got a couple of names who are there very probably because we're in the historical period that we're in. So names like Wittgenstein, Popper, and perhaps Aquinas too is rather odd that he's in the top ten, but that may be because the Catholic vote had something to do with it. Francis Wien, you were the advocate for Marx. We chose various people to Antenigranig, Gant and Kant and so on. Were you rather surprised that your man won by such a margin? Well, obviously, this is his campaign manager.

I was delighted. But, yeah, a bit surprised. I think maybe not as surprised as I would have been 10 or 15 years ago, because certainly then in the early 90s, after all those years, Margaret Thatcher saying, there is no alternative, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and so forth, there was almost received wisdom that Marx was now dead and buried under that rubble, and no one need ever bother with him again.

No earth the reason why anyone should ever read him think about him. And it struck me over the last 10 years or so that he has been, been creeping back in, often rather surprising places, and still seems to be mentioned, certainly rather, a lot for someone who's supposedly buried under the rubble. And I think a lot of people are coming to the realisation that he was buried for a large part of the 20th century under all those Stalinist icons. And now, actually, is a very good time to go back to Marx himself from what he said and thought and did rather than what was claimed on his behalf by various spokespersons, let alone campaign managers. So I think he is coming back. And certainly it's

hard to imagine any of the other philosophers on the list provoking what's happened today. The Daily Mail, two-page diatribe, he said he does still have the power to frighten the children. Garretz Stedman-Jones, you've edited and introduced the Communist Manifesto and you're working on your own life of Marx. Why do you think that such an overwhelming majority, which surprised me and all of us who, inside this group, voted for Marx? Well, I think the main reason is probably that if you read the Communist Manifesto, you can't escape the sense that this is a brilliantly powerful document. that it might be written now. It was written in 1848, but all the talk we have now about globalization

and downsizing and world corporations and capitalism breaking, or the world economy moving this way or that, is all there in the text. It's something which has an amazing actuality, which I think very few other documents written in the 19th century possessed. It's only 12,000 words long. It's extraordinary vivid and employs his great powers

as a journalist as well, doesn't it? Phrase after phrase coming out and spinning down the centuries. That's right. And I think it's only probably the first two sections which actually carry that charge. I think when you get to what's wrong with the other forms of socialists and the last bit, which is really unfinished, about what happens in all the different countries, it really just fades out.

But I think there's nothing to compare with the first two sections where the literary devices are so powerful that there were many other manifestos, used in 1848, so this is the only one that people would bother to read today. Okay, let's discuss Karl Marx and start with his life. Francis Ruin, can you fill us in a bit on his background, youth, that sort of thing?

Yes, he was born in 1818, May 1818, in Trier, in the Rhineland, sitting in the Rhineland, and he was a Jew, among other things. I mean, alienation, obviously, is one of the enduring themes of his work, no doubt we'll talk about it later on. And you can see why, in Marx's case, he was conscious of alienation

almost from childhood onwards because he was in a Jewish family his father was a lawyer but because the Rhineland had, it had been annexed by France in the Napoleonic Wars but was reincorporated back into Prussia by the time Marx was born and came subject to the Prussian

laws not least against Jews practicing in the professions so his father had to convert to Lutheran Christianity simply to practice as a lawyer and so Marx It came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of the family So he was a Jew except he wasn't Because then he was a Christian

Except he wasn't that either And was a minority within a minority Because although it was the official state religion in Prussia Actually the city where he grew up was a Catholic city tria So they were a minority type of Christian within the city And they were Jewish Lutherans So he was some alienated or estranged From the bulk of his local society

From childhood onwards And his father was quite a powerful influence in the early days, because his father during that French occupation had been exposed, like a lot of people too, French ideas, Enlightenment ideas, and got very excited by them. His father was described by one of his daughters as a real 18th century Frenchman who knew his Voltaire and his Liderot by heart. So Marx grew up in a house where at least ideas were discussed. He, as it were, went into the local society very firmly.

When he was taken up, his education was influenced by Baron von Westphalen, the father of one of his school friends. eventually his father-in-law, can you tell us a little about the influence that the Baron had on the young Marx? Yes, the Baron was really a second father to him, and indeed became his father-in-law. Baron Ludwig von Vestvalen was, he was an aristocrat, he was a provincial official in the Prussian government, but he was a liberal, and he, rather like Marx's father, perhaps even more so, was a very cultured man and an enlightenment figure. And he had this, von Vestvalin had a rather goofy song called Edgar, who was a bit of a chump, who was a school, friend of Marx's. And I think the Baron was rather disappointed that his son showed no interest in this,

but then met Marx. Marx's sister was a friend of one of the other children, and discovered that Marx was never happier than when having Homer read to him or Shakespeare or Dante or Gerta, and so was rather adopted by the Baron. They used to go on long walks together, reciting Shakespeare at each other. And Marx throughout his life and work, it's absolutely saturated in literature. He was an omnivorous reader of literature and himself tried his hand in his youth at writing poems and plays and novels. And that, I think, comes directly from that early childhood training from the Baron, this, as I say, liberal aristocrat, whose daughter, Jenny then became Mrs. Marks. So we have this immensely well-educated young man, Anthony Grayling, one can assume that at that time,

enlightenment education, a liberal enlightenment education. Francis Wien has pointed out that the Jewishness becoming a Lutheran and a lot of anti-Semitism in Marx's very odd, but I don't know you have time to talk about that at the moment. Let's talk about when he went to Bonn University, and his PhD in philosophy focused on atomism, so he was trained as a philosopher. Can you tell us why you think he did that, and what relevance that might have?

Well, he went to university to read law, as it happens, and his father was very keen that he should complete that course of study, but he was distracted away to a philosophy as all sensible people, and eventually, as you say, wrote his PhD thesis on the difference between Epicurus and Democritus, the two of the great atomists of antiquity. And it's a very, very interesting thesis, by the way, because the whole opinion...

Can you explain what atomism is? Yes, atomism is the ancient view that the universe is made of, ultimately, of indivisible particles, whose combinations with one another in space and time give rise to all the phenomena that we see in the material universe. So it's a materialistic philosophy, which is very important for Marx.

later and naturalistic. That's to say, believes that the universe operates according to natural laws. Now, the whole weight of opinion from classical antiquity until Marx's own day was that Epicurus had more or less plagiarized Democritus's ideas, and that where he had changed them, he had changed them for the worse. And Marx, being, as it were, a revolutionary in his marrow, wanted to turn this thesis on its head and show that, in fact, Epicurus had a much somewhat subtler and deeper understanding of these things than democratist did. And it's a very, very interesting thesis.

It's strongly argued, very detailed. He chose a wonderful grasp of ancient Greek, which was necessary to that study. And it cogently argues that Epicurus, in fact, had very much better grip on, for example, the concepts of time and on astronomy than democratist did. And very interestingly, you get the notions of contradiction, of dialectic, and also even of alienation occurring in this PhD thesis that marked. Stroch is a 20, 21, 22-year-old. The big man in philosophy in Marx's time as a young, as a student, and he was taught by Bruno Bauer as a discipline. And as a disciple of this big man,

who was Hegel at Berlin University. What influence did Hegel have on Marx? Well, I think it was a huge one. I mean, Gareth, who is a great expert on Hegel here, is going to put us right in a minute because you must remember that on his deathbed, Hegel said to his favourite pupil, no one has understood me except you and not even you've got it right,

and then he died, which has left us all in a rather bit of a dilemma. But of course, the Hegelian ideas had, in fact, so steeped themselves into the philosophical debate in the Germany of the day that everybody thought in Hegelian or near-Hagalian terms, either because they agreed

or because they wanted to disagree. And this idea of a deterministic, dialectical process of things, in the case of Hegel, of spirit with a capital S, later in the case of Marx of the material conditions in which people find themselves, but it was so much an assumption, was so much taken for granted, that it provides the very bones of Marx's own later view.

So it was a tremendous influence. And of course, he was part of the young Hagellian radical movement. I mean, this was an era of very, very active, tumultuous, radical politics and a rather repressive state, so that, you know, from very early on in his university career, Marx was exposed to all these cross-currents of ideas where philosophy and politics mixed. Garrette, can you, Garast and when joins, can you tell us briefly the spine of a galenism that Marx took on and why it shook him so much? We understood that when he was reading Hegel, he was disturbed, he had maybe something of a breakdown.

Was this connected with the ideas that were coming in or was it something else? Well, I think the important thing for Marx and for most of his, generation reading Hegel was the idea that reason had a history, that reason wasn't something just eternal, it was something which took different forms in different cultures, in different times. And this is what he says in the letter he writes to his father, the one letter that really survives to his father, and of course typically it's writing because he really wants some more money because he's overspent. He's also trying to justify, no doubt, to his distress father, why he's changing from law to philosophy.

And in order to do that, he tries to explain why he gets so exhilarated by the reading of Hegel. And what he says is that Hegel is the first person to place the idea in reality. That's to say that it's not just philosophy on the page. It's actually beliefs and practices lived out in particular epochs, and that that's what's going to change in the future. And that's why Hegel is the great philosopher for him. And I must say myself, I was disappointed not to see Hegel on the list, but I quite understand why, following Anthony's point.

But beyond that, I think Hegel also sets up the problem which all these young philosophers of the 1830s and 40s then tried to solve. Hegel says he's trying to save Christianity in a way and he says, well, what philosophy says, what my philosophy says, is in concepts the same thing that religion says in picture painting and in anecdotal stories. And the whole problem with the young Hagealians, the whole problem that the young Higalians set out to solve is when Strauss says, well, actually, if you look at the history of the Gospels,

or you try to look at the Gospels at history, it's not at all true that what the Gospels say in pictures and narratives is the same as what Hegel is saying. in his philosophy. And in that sense, we have to modernize Christianity by getting rid of this archaic biography of Christ and concentrate on the ideas. And of course, the Conservatives get really upset at that idea.

And inside the Hegelah, he's introduced the idea of the dialectic, which Handenegrailing has interestingly said, is emergent in his study, Ph.E. Anatomism, and the idea of thesis and antithesis leading to a synthesis, which becomes the synthesis becomes the new thesis, anti-theis synthesis, and the movement forward of history in that way. In Hegel's case, towards an absolute, towards Christianity. But the young group that Marx is around are anti-the-religious element,

and he's reinforced by this Marx by by Feuerbach, when he writes, he publishes his thesis on Feuerbach, who is anti-religious. Can you briefly say what influence, what he got from Feuerbach? Well, Firebuck is tremendously important in setting many of Marx's later approaches. First of all, Fyberk is the first of the young Higalians, not just to criticize Christianity, but to criticize religion and to see Hegel as in a way just an accompaniment to religion, rather than being, as it were, the transcendence of religion.

and what Foybach says is that if you take Hegel's idea of the spirit, it's what the word implies, it's just spirit. But man is a sensuous being. That's to say his body and mind, and that means that man cannot get rid of his body, and because he can't get rid of his body, he is dependent on others. And from this, Foybach deduces what becomes very important for Marx too, that man is a communal being, that humanity is. the unity, he says, of I and thou. And that leads to his criticism of Christianity, where he says that Christianity interposes between this unity, this third figure called Christ. Christ is the mediator in human relations, and therefore what it creates, in effect, is a sort of individualistic attitude of each individual in which the individual is sovereign,

what Luther said that the individual directly relates to God. And that means he doesn't relate to his fellow Christians except through the mediation of the church. And it's an interesting example later, the way that Marx can, through his journalistic skills, turn Foybach's anti-religious into a memorable phrase, religion being the opium of the people, which in a sense is a summary of what Foyabach was doing. Francis Wien, at this stage, having said, some interpret the world,

I want to change it. What action is he taking? journalism is becoming important to him, isn't it? Well, yes, I mean, he stumbles into it almost by accident originally. He wanted an academic career, but that was scuppered because Bruno Bauer, who was going to be his patron, was himself sacked from Bonn University for his attacks on religion. And he then, eventually, after a year of drifting when he got his doctorate, he ended up in Cologne writing for a paper called the Rhinichesha Zitung,

a newly set up paper financed by local bankers, businessmen, people like that, who were agitating for political reform. I mean, no surprise to Marx there, about changes in the economic, in terms of production and so forth, leading to political changes, or at least an old system that can no longer cope with the new rising bourgeoisie, a rather antiquated, ossified absolutist states with censors and police spies and all the rest of it, and a vast creaking bureaucracy. And these people set up this paper to agitate for that. And quite a lot of the contributors were young Higalians that Marx had come across in Berlin,

and he himself started writing for it and was instantly, obviously, by far the most talented and brilliant of them. And it was a perfect moment for him because, of course, one of his criticisms of Feuerbach was that his materialism was, if you like, static. There was all theory, no practice. I mean, most famously in that line about philosophers merely interpreting the world. And Marx's problem was that although he thought it important to root it in actual material conditions, he knew absolutely nothing about the actuality of the world around him, but being a journalist gave him that chance, as he said, to discover and write about real material conditions,

whether it be pieces about the wine farmers in the Moselle or peasants being prosecuted for picking up firewood in private forests, which brought in all questions of private property for the first time he had to grapple with things like that, with all sorts of ideas that then emerge in his later work, and he starts doing that as a journalist in Cologne in 1842. There's a very fateful and important meeting with Engels in Paris. We just have time to say, they met, they got on,

Engels was rich. His father had owned factories in Manchester. They got on intellectually and together in 1848 a year revolutions, as Garo said earlier, time of many manifestos they put through Anthony Grevy, the communist manifesto. What was that converting? What did each give to the other of Engels and Marx? Yes, it's a tremendously interesting in this because they met in, in fact, I think they met in Cologne very briefly without any sparks flying, but then they met again in Paris in 1844. And what's interesting about that is that in the period between 8040 to 1844, Marx was busy working out the philosophical basis, really, of his ideas. And this was something that only came to be appreciated very much later on in the 1920s and 30s when the work that he

did at that time was published eventually. Up until about that time, the 1930s, people thought that the philosopher of the two was really Engels, because in 1870s and 80s, Engels had written a great deal of stuff that provided later Marxists' strict communists with the philosophical basis of their views. It was Engels, for example, who invented the concept of dialectical materialism and so on. But there, in the early 1840s, Marx was working out the basis of his views, and he met Engels at that time. Engels reported later that they had spent something like 10 days, two weeks together, in intense conversation, and they found they agreed on so many things that there was a real meeting of minds there.

And Engels also later said that he was conscious of the fact that he was in the presence of genius and that it was sort of incumbent on him in a way to do everything he could to serve that genius and further the cause that they shared together. And so that was the beginning of this lifelong association between them in which Engels sort of bankrolled marks and made it possible for him to do some of the great work that he did later on. Yes, and Francis I think in his books that one had a wealth of knowledge, the other at a knowledge of wealth. Can I,

Gareth Stamund Jones, when you talked earlier in the programme, you talked quite a bit about the Communist Manifesto. So it begins a spectra's haunting Europe, the spectre of communism. You've discussed it the way it drives through. How much was it a call to arms? Can you tell us that?

And then we can move on to discuss ideas in it. Well, part of the brilliance of the manifesto was that I should imagine in Germany in 1848 there were less than a thousand communists and that would be a generous estimate. It was a very small movement indeed when Marx was writing about it. But it is certainly true that there was quite a lot of literature in the German press which was about the spectre, communism as a specter. And what they meant by this primarily was that the 1840s was a period of social crisis, of hunger,

the potato famine, which is also in Germany as well as Ireland, mass unemployment, poverty in the cities, destitution. And what the bourgeois press of the time constantly reiterated was the hostility of these people to private property, the idea that these people would attack if allowed, and the very fact then that some people try to articulate this as communism becomes the great scare story in the German press and to a certain extent in France and elsewhere.

So he's quite right to use the specter because what it does is to magnify communism over the capital sea from a very small movement indeed into something which looks as if it's overshadowing the whole of Europe in 1848. Anthony Grayling, just one moment, can I come back to you? He says the history of all hitherto existing societies

is the history of class struggle. Is this a clear adaptation of Hegel's? theory? Well, yes, in an important sense, that looking for the motor that drives history along, he transposed the idea of this

great set of contradictions between ideas that for Hegel was the motor change, leading eventually to the realization of the absolute which people say Hegel thought was the Prussian state. In the case of Marx, it was material conditions

that really mattered. And So the dialectic is one between different modes of production, the different periods in history embodied in relationships between different groups of people, those who hold power because they have wealth and those who don't repressed. Well, I mean, it's one very powerful way of looking at it. It's one very powerful way of understanding how feudalism has developed into the bourgeois society and the rise of capitalism and how capitalism itself has brought about this. conflict which has very, very often been apparent to us between the working classes, those who have nothing, and those who hold wealth in their hands. And so it's an extremely powerful instrument for looking at that. And it may not be the whole truth. And it certainly may not be right to think that the only key to understanding the way society's development history is the economic conditions of that society. But it certainly provided immense lever for looking at the world in a quite different way.

The year after he published a communist manifest, Francis Ween, Marx came and settled in London, and England became in many ways his laboratory. Engels was bringing him news from the north and the factories. He was in the British Library, which was a natural habitat from what you said. What kind of culture did he find here? What did he find, what fed him while he was here before we move on to Das Kapitán? Well, he never became very English, although he lived here for, most of his life, not even most of his adult life, but most of his life.

London was the last refuge, really, for emigrates. He'd already been chucked out of Prussia, France, twice, and Belgium. So he fetched up in London for it to me or because that was where you went as an exile. The 19th century Victorian governments were actually rather, I think they'd come rather well out of Marxist story. There were endless attempts to get him chucked out. The Prussians sent police spies and then complained to British ministers that there was this dangerous man in London, and they should do something about it. And again and again, Victorian ministers said, well, you see no.

problem here. He's pursuing perfectly legal activity, discussing the overthrow of this, that and the other. But obviously that was, I mean, Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Engels was based in Manchester, the family textile firm, Lancashire, which was

the capital of the textile trade, and again, even more of the birthplace, within the birthplace, the Industrial Revolution. So he got all these first-hand reports from Engels about what actually went on, because Marx himself did not visit many factories, as it has to be said. So, but he got a lot that from Engels. While he was

meanwhile in the British Museum, one of the great assets of living in London was that the British government produced all these official reports. He'd blue books, factory inspectors' reports, health inspectors' reports, all this material. He couldn't believe that the official organs of the state would make this

available to him for his own uses. And there were things like The Economist magazine, which had just started up, which he became a keen reader, devoured newspapers. It all went down in the notebooks, might come in use for one day as a report on child labour in the north of England or something. So it was the perfect place from which to conduct his studies.

And at the same time, it was a place full of agitators of various kinds. The Communist League was based in London, which was the successor to the underground thing called the League of the Just in Paris. And he wrote the Communist Manifesto basically as a statement of aims for the new open democratic Communist League. And so that was based in London. There was a thing called Workers Educational Association. There were lots of exiled then as now, all sorts of exiled revolutionists. So it was a place where there were lots of ideas and people he could argue with. And my goodness, he did argue with him.

Garland-Jolm Jones, he's in London. He's got Engels who's supporting him, basically, although he's writing for New York. Let's leave Alder to one side for the moment. And they started on Das Capital, the big work, and this information that Francis, as talked about, with the structure that Anthony was telling us about. If we're to believe his own theory, he was seeing capitalism in its greatest bloom,

and it ought to have led to the next stage. If ever a state was ready to move to the next stage, it was Britain then, we've gone from feudalism to mercantilism, and now we've got capitalism, and it was inevitably to read to the triumph of the proletariat, with or without a revolution. Now, there was no revolution. There was no triumph of the proletariat. and the capitalism grew and grew.

So did he feel that was a problem when he was writing Gas Capital. I think great, though, he was, his thought really remained stuck in the 1840s in many ways. I think one thing going back is that the great insight that Engels offered from his year in Manchester was the importance of the Industrial Revolution. Marx seized on that to generalize and say, this could mean the end of scarcity for mankind. And if we have the end of scarcity for mankind, we don't need class society anymore, we don't need a state anymore. So it's very important industrial revolution in Marxist theory.

And that's part of the reason why he sets out after 1848 to try to specify, not just as this brilliant journalism of the Communist Manifesto did, but actually try and justify his propositions. I think he found he had to do two things which were important. One was to show that capitalism was indeed a mode of production which, like others, came and went. And the second was to show that there was something afterwards which could be viable, a post-capitalist society. And I think these are the two things he, at the outset, he sets himself to try and solve in capital. Do you think he solves these two problems, that capitalism, if it's kept, how does he show that he's going to go? He painted a doring picture of capitalism, really. And secondly, could he find a dynamic?

as strong of capitalism to replace it. You say these are two great problems. That's what you're saying, aren't they? Two problems he faced. What do you other think of that? Please go on. Say first, I think the great problem was that, of course, there were these former modes of production, as he called them,

former modes of property and so on, the ancient, the feudal, etc., etc. But the basic point was that capitalism was immensely stronger than these previous forms. and what motored the thing, what powered the thing, above all, was the market. The bourgeoisie, as he said in the Communist Manifesto, are compelled to carry on revolutionising production all the time. They're driven forward.

They're like the sorcerer's apprentice. They can't actually control what they do anymore. And that's going to, he thought, generate this society of the future. But the problem was the society of the future, according to him, was not going to have a market. It was all going to be rational decision-making and plans instead. And I think he never actually found a way in which this post-capitalist society could reproduce the dynamism of capitalist society. Yes, I think that, I mean, arguably the point Garth makes there about being stuck in the 1840s mindset,

this idea that the historical process is deterministic, that it must produce the consequences implicit in a current state of affairs. And part of his thinking there was that what capitalism does is it ventuates in the organentuates in the organisation. of the working class because capitalism has to force onto workers modes of organization, which in the end will help the working class to liberate themselves from capitalism. But what he didn't see was that capitalism was also capable of organizing itself in response to the organization of the working class, and also that it had other imperatives operating on it as well. For example, its response to its consumers. So the idea of scarcity has to be supplemented with the idea of the idea of,

marketers and publicity people creating artificial scarcities by creating desires all wants by telling people that they need, for example, lipstick or home meal bread or something like that and creating new markets and being very responsive in that way. What he therefore seems perhaps not to have noticed was

the adaptability, the ingenuity of the capitalist system to keep itself going. Yes. I think there's a tension, the contradiction, if you like, in Marx's work between this recognition of just how powerful and dynamic bourgeois capitalism is.

I mean, the Communist Manifesto in particular, as him have praised the achievements of the bourgeoisie, more magical than the pyramids and outstanding and all the rest of it. And it's swept away all these dreadful old forms, and it's absolutely pitiless and unsentimental, and he's full of praise for that. So he sees how strong it is. So in a sense he doesn't underestimate its resilience,

because he describes, as well as anyone, just how powerful and adaptable in some ways it is. And given that it's, the most powerful form of economic organisation yet. It might seem absurd that he thinks it can topple so quickly, so soon after Industrial Revolution, and half the time he doesn't. But then, of course, there's a gap between the intellect and the will, if you like. And so he's sort of foreseeing the downfall of capitalism with great relish,

while at the same time elsewhere in his work. I mean, actually, even in Das Capital, volume two of Das Capital ends with a kind of economic model which shows, because until then he's suggested that capitalism is inherently unstable system. You have the boom-bust cycles, and you must. to have this because it always leads to overproduction and so forth. But then actually at the end of volume two, he produces a model of a capitalist economy with steady growth,

which doesn't succumb to all that. And so he does accept that as a possibility, and that actually, that's more or less to a degree what came to pass. I mean, actually we have had boom-bust cycles, but the resilience of the middle classes, Engels, was actually rather good on this. He got very frustrated with England because it ought to have been the most advanced.

It was the most advanced country, therefore, the most ready for revolution, except it was also let down by the fact that it had this wretched English middle. class and Engels complained that what this most bourgeois of all countries is aiming at is not only a bourgeois middle class, but a bourgeois upper class and a bourgeois working class until the whole country becomes bourgeois. And actually, if you've written today, it's a very accurate description to a degree of what's happening. It is a fairly, I'm going to move on from this, but finally, on this particular point, Gareth, the idea of full bloom of capitalism inevitably should have happened in this country, according to his theory in the late 19th century, Now, if it happened, if it can have a direct relationship,

it happened in a deeply backward agrarian country in 1917. It didn't happen in the circumstances in which he predicted. Now, does that say his thesis is wrong, or that came from, the Russian Revolution came by another route and just called itself Marxists and so on? Well, I think what he found difficult to accommodate within his theory is that political forms are, in fact, very important, that you can't just read off these things from the fact that it's capitalism there.

You have to see what sort of constitutional rights people have, whether trade unions can legally exist or not, all these sorts of things which happened in Western Europe enabled there to be a legally recognised workers' movement making the sort of demands that they did, whereas in Russia, of course, all that was illegal, and the revolutionary robe was the only one possible. I have to come to the point now.

people think of Marx as being an influence in the 20th century on revolutions, many of which had terrible consequences. And Marx, they were Marxist revolutions. Now, how far did you go along with that, Anthony Grohling? Well, I mean, it's certainly the case that Marx was the magical name that people invoked on behalf of the revolutions that they were organizing and effecting. And there was a certain point in the 20th century when half of mankind was governed. by parties who claimed that Marx was their ancestor. I mean, that's a pretty extraordinary historical fact, isn't it? Mao and all... Exactly.

But in the case of the Russian Revolution, as it just pointed out, it needed the St. Paul of Lenin, and the communist revolution in China needed Mao to adapt it to local conditions, to turn it on its side, on its head, to supplement it in ways that was required because the conditions were precisely not those that Marx had said,

the revolution would happen in. So, you know, he's tremendously distorted. Francis talked today about the two-page spread in one of the newspapers, Marx's monster, and the sort of box on one of the pages says, you know, the genocide of Pol Pot and of Stalin and this, that, and the other is all the result of Marxism and so on. And it's obviously not the result of Marx. It's not Marx's fault. It's the fault of all these people who took and adapted and twisted and applied and invoked his name, but it's not really Marxism. Marx himself said when he was looking at one of the French socialist parties who claimed to be Marxist, he said,

if they're Marxist, then I'm not a Marxist. So how did we get in this, but I said, Francis? Well, I think what happened in the Soviet Union, you could say, actually vindicated Marx's point about revolutions in countries where the proletariat had not developed and advanced to a point where it was clamoring and organizing for a revolution because he said if you do that,

the alternative to that is a revolution. imposed from above by a small group of self-appointed people and by heroes on horseback, as he put it, and he was very mistrustful of this sort of Stalin-Lenin like figures, let alone a Pol Pot-like figure, and even his own lifetime. He was very wary of people who said, follow me, and I shall lead the revolution, and then we'll impose it on them,

and they'll discover it's awfully good for them, really. Because he said again and again, that leads to effectively a police state, at least a suppression of criticism. It cannot be done without extreme violence and without what actually happens at the European Union. his favorite motto was de omnibus dubitandum, question everything, which frankly was not the motto of Soviet Russia,

even at last five seconds there, but it was a negation, I think, of everything he stood for, and most of the things he argued for. I agree with a lot of what Francis said, but just one point I think ought to be thrown in, and that is that his last 10 years, as far as we can see, he spent most of his time reading up on Russia. And also, it seems, I mean, I think, we tend to forget what a burden there must have been upon him.

He had very insecure employment. He was dependent on Engels. There was Mrs. Marks, who was quite a strong character, I think. He had to justify himself, so he had to be writing this theory, the great theory which is going to change the world. In fact, he leaves it unfinished. And the last few years, as I say,

he turns to other things. We can only surmise what that meant. But I think it did mean partly that he'd given up some of his confidence in what would happen in Western. in Europe. You're all people who think and write books and so on and it is true that a lot of the great things that have

changed in the world have changed come through books. Are you slightly, or maybe more than slightly, washing Marx whiter than white? Can he be absolved from connections with the Russian Revolution, with the Chinese Revolution? Can he just be, he, oh, they got on with it, but Marx stays pure? Just before we move on from this, are you sure you're right about this?

I think yes, because he personally, he cannot be blamed for some of the things that were done in the early, middle, late 20th century. I mean, getting what Francis said there about his great suspicion of imposed revolutions from top down, in his criticisms of contemporary socialism in his own time, he said some of these socialisms want to reduce everybody to the condition of the working class, whereas what we want to do is to raise them to the condition of rational comfort where there isn't oppression, unfairness, and the deprivation of the majority by the minority of what's owing to them.

So, you know, his view of the world and what it was that he hoped for stands at odds, really, with what happened when his ideas were appropriated, misappropriated and applied later. And also became Marxism became a sort of tablet of stone, ten commandments, graven on it, which is the opposite of what it is. I mean, Marxism seems to me to be a continuing dynamic. It's a method, if you like, a way of looking at the world, a way of arguing with the world, of criticising the world.

It's a continuing thing. It's not some fixed, rigid dogma, which it became in many people's hands. Finally, as this programme is dealing in ideas, do you think that his notion that even ideas are the product of their economic context? Do you think that holds water, Garrette? Well, in a very general sense it does, because I think ideas do appear at a time when the conditions around enable those ideas to appear. That sounds torsological, but it's true, I think. And one of the things that I think is of enduring importance with Marx is that human affliction, human suffering is not, as it were, caused by God's anger and it's not caused by nature.

It's actually in the hands of human beings to do something about it. And that's an idea which I think only appears in the 19th century when perhaps they could begin to do something about it. Economic conditions certainly determine which ideas get heard and expressed, get an outlet. And very often very good ideas and sometimes we hope very bad ideas don't get out there into the public domain because the people don't have access to the roots. So that's something that is determined by economic conditions. But if Marx teaches, if Marx's legacy is a really great lesson for us now, it is that it's not economic conditions that determine things ultimately, but ideologies, the ideologies that lie behind them. And I think in our contemporary world, we are seeing that. I mean, there are people in the world today who are not motivated by economic concerns, so much as by ideological ones as it might be an ideology of faith, to do things that seem not to make sense to those of us who have been bred up,

to think that it's economics that is the ultimate determiner of what we do. On the other hand, you remember Clinton's 1992 successful presidential campaign in the war room, that huge slogan they had, it's the economy stupid. I mean, what is that, if not the materialist conception of history? And it worked. You've got two terms. Yes, that's getting people to vote from it, which isn't the same thing as influencing people's ideas. No, no, no, but I was just talking on the business of the economic foundations

and the importance, the centrality of economic conditions. Certainly that was what they... I think Francis is right about that, because, I mean, Who is the bigger Marxist in the late 20th century than Mrs Thatcher for precisely that reason? You're going to have to unravel that just one more bit, Anthony, before we call it a day or a morning. Because her famous remark about, you know, what is society, there isn't society, there are only individuals. And individuals stand in relation to one another fundamentally on the basis of their economic relations. And that is a very distinctive Marxist idea.

Well, that's an ending. Thank you very much. Just the last programme of this season. We'll be back in September. Thanks for taking it on. It's a huge subject. Anyway, thank you very much. Thanks to Gareth Stedman Jones, Francis Wien and Anthony Grayling. A.C. Grayling, we'll be back in September with the new series,

when among other subjects we'll be looking at the search for Graviton, the Oristaya, the history of magnetism, and the Abbasid Caliphs. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.