Marx's Labor Theory and the Organic Composition of Capital

Welcome back to Season Eight: The Story of Socialism as we conclude the story of Karl Marx and the birth of Marxism.

It’s 1849. In the wake of the failed revolutions in Europe, Marx and his wife Jenny arrive in London for a fresh start. But his magnum opus, Capital, is a long time coming due to chronic illness, the loss of three children and recurring money worries. The great critic of capitalism is such a disaster with finances that his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels has to take a job at his father’s textile company in Manchester to keep the project of communism afloat. Then there are the feuds. So many feuds!

Eventually, in the 1860s, a flurry of productivity bears fruit. Capital is finally finished (or volume one at least) and Marx becomes head of the International Working Men’s Association, where he wages war against rival socialists and the fearsome anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

In 1871, Marx’s response to the doomed experiment of the Paris Commune makes him famous at last — and infamous. He’s the “Red Doctor” accused of orchestrating a vast communist conspiracy that doesn’t actually exist. But then he falls quiet, retreating from political activism and writing relatively little. When he dies in 1883, there are only 11 mourners at his funeral. It is left to Engels to simplify and spread the tenets of Marxism, revolutionising European socialism.

Where did Capital succeed and fail? What did he get right and wrong about capitalism and why was he so vague about the future of communism? What does Marx’s clash with Bakunin tell us about the dangerous flaws in his theory? Did Engels rewrite Marxism in the process

of popularising it? And has any great writer ever been as bad with deadlines as Marx?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978)

• John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997)

• Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953)

• GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975)

• Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009)

• In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005)

• In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022)

• Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888)

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

• Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894)

• Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891)

• Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918)

• Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (2001)

• Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction: Second Edition (2018)

• Jonthan Sperber, Karl Marx: A 19th Century Life (2013)

• Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)

• Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition (1978)

• Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (1999)

• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices