What Is Historical Materialism?

A spectre is haunting Origin Story — the spectre of Karl Marx. Welcome back to season eight: The Story of Socialism. Last week, we explored the various socialisms that were exciting Europe when Marx was a young man. Now we turn to the man himself, and his close friend and ally Friedrich Engels. The landslide winner of an In Our Time poll to choose the most important philosopher of all time, Marx introduced gigantic new ideas that still inform our thinking whether you’re a Marxist or not.

Born in Prussia in 1818, Marx was on course to become one of many young German philosophers wrestling with the legacy of Hegel. But when he was frozen out of academia, journalism set him on a more confrontational, activist path. His extraordinary intellect was wrapped up in a spectacularly belligerent personality, addicted to vicious feuds and denunciations. He could start a fight in an empty room.

As he moved from Prussia to Paris to Brussels during the 1840s, Marx went on a political journey, too: from liberal to socialist to head of the Communist League. Along the way, he built the basic framework of Marxism: the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the value of labour, the volatile, insatiable energy of capitalism, and the dialectical progress of history. It was nothing less than a new way of understanding the world.

Marx’s first phase culminated in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the same year that revolution swept the great cities of Europe. Explaining its failure was the first task of Marx’s next phase as he left the continent for good, settled in London and embarked on the torturous process of writing his masterwork, Capital.

How did Marx become a communist? What did he owe to Hegel? Why was his friendship with Engels so essential? Why was he more dedicated to waging war on his former friends than his obvious enemies? Which rival socialist called him “the tapeworm of socialism”? And what exactly is dialectical materialism anyway?

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx wrote. “The point is to change it.” This is how he began to change it.

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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)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

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

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