Karl Marx: Quotes, Theory, Communist Manifesto, Sociology, Biography, Economics (2000)

Francis Wayne author of Karl Marx a life what led to your interest in this man will I was beaten reasonably interested in cow box but I suppose what really fired it was the assumption in the early 1990s that he was now not worth bothering with at the end of the Cold War after the fall of the Berlin Wall all that some end of history stuff we got all that great helium argument from Fukuyama the assumption was that he was now dead and buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall I thought on the other hand this was the ideal moment to dig him up because he'd been buried long before under all those awful Stalinist monoliths that were created in his honor and that he hadn't had much of a look in for a long time and now that all that had gone we might be able to get back to Marx himself rather than the kind of caricature or the icon or whatever that he'd become where is he from originally from Germany from the Rhineland place called Trier and his parents were Jewish his mother was Dutch in fact but have moved to Germany and both his parents came from a very long line of rabbis Marx's uncle was a Jew is there was a rabbi his grandfather was a rabbi and so on but just before Marx was born his father converted to Christianity mainly a marriage of convenience because as a Jew he was kind of second-class citizen and not allowed practice in the professions and he wanted to be a lawyer so the father then became a Lutheran Christian so by the time Marx was born his father was technically a Christian so Marx himself was sort of a Jew but then again sort of not and sort of a Christian but then again not ready because his father wasn't actually a practicing Christian any more than he'd been a practicing Jew so he was some from the outset I was slightly at one removed from society when they were respectable middle-class family his father was quite wealthy he and vineyards Mosel vineyards and things and they when he could practice as a lawyer he made even more money they moved into a rather large house but at the same time although they were respected for middle-class citizens because of the Jewish background and the anti-jewish laws at the time he was was slightly an outsider which I suppose may explain why he was so interested in ideas of alienation and estrangement because he did feel alienated from an early age he didn't feel part of this society that he lived in intro here's a is it a photograph wasn't painting in the 1860 marks that one is painting I believe Alto where was he in 1860 1860 he was in London he stayed in London for most of his life not just his adult life for most of his life he moved to London at the end of the 1840s having been thrown out of most of the countries in Western Europe and he was buffeted around he left Germany renounced his German citizenship when he moved to Paris in 1844 decided that Germany had nothing more to offer him then he got thrown out of Paris went back to went to Belgium for a while got chucked out of there he went back to Germany at the time of the 1848 revolutions then he was thrown out of Germany he ran a newspaper there briefly that was closed down by the authorities he was expelled again went to Paris got expelled and ended up in London which was the last place willing to take political refugees and so it was full of them I mean Italians Matt seen he lived in London quite a while Germans French they all tended to fetch up in England this sort of revolutionary flotsam and jetsam because it was the only sanctuary left so he as I say he went there at the end of the eighteen forties after the failure of the 1848 revolutions turned up in 18-49 and stayed that he died in 1883 so he was in England for 34 years never became remotely English in any way he didn't really mix very much with English with a few exceptions he saw far more of his fellow German exiled and French exhales but I suppose he was literally um an alien he was a stateless person from 1844 onwards so from the age of 26 he had no States no passport was the kind of embodiment of alienation quite literally what year did you start on the book well about three years ago I think was when I first decided I wanted to do it and it was sparked partly in a spirit of perversity it's mr. an accident that I didn't I suppose because my publisher in London was badgering me to write a book for her and I was trying to fend her off and eventually I said to her the only book I want to write at the moment is a life of Karl Marx and I assumed that she would reel back screaming and they'd say no no no most unpopular unfashionable subject on earth and instead she was very keen and said great right do it as soon can do get on with it so I was I was quite pleased because I did want to do it on the other hand I was surprised because I thought no one was interested in Marx any more but it was a great challenge I thought this is great I can dig the old buy up and perhaps persuade people that he's worth taking interest in that he is whether you agree with him or not a serious and major figure and also a an interesting and human figure I mean full of human failings is is everyday life full of disasters and tragedies as well as a fair amount of comedy where is this picture taken that's in Highgate Cemetery in North London where he fetched up where he was buried along with his wife and housekeeper and one of his children and there is that such a great rather grim monument that was put up that's not the original burial place he was originally buried at the other end of Highgate Cemetery in a rather obscure unconsecrated corner and then in the 1940s the British Communist Party decided they wanted to move him to a more prominent bit at the cemetery and build this great to bust this monument because visiting communists quite often wanted to go and see it and there was nothing to see that wasn't even a gravestone in those days and I found in the public record office in London lots of home office files just on the subject of moving Marx's tomb moving his coffin and all these senior civil servants were saying well it must be done at the dead of night because otherwise it could provoke some sort of disturbance so it was only allowed to be done on condition that they moved the grave at I think three o'clock in the morning because they thought otherwise there might be riots and demonstrations against it in fact I don't think anyone noticed but anyway then it was moved to where it is now near the entrance with that enormous great thing where for years and years of any visitor from the Soviet Union or indeed North Korea or China would be obliged to go and have that picture taken and to this day you still see them visiting tourists making the pill which the few remaining Marxists left in the world we imagined before we started you you met a man at that gravesite that I have met just by riding the train up to New York and what was that what were the circumstances well he's yes he is one of the few surviving American Marxists he's a very great guy called Ike Nahum and i met him a few years ago when i started working on the book I went to Trier to marks his birthplace the house where he was born which is now a museum and almost the only other person there was this American and we kept bumping into each other in the various rooms and after a while he turned to me and introduced himself and said well I think we've seen all this why don't we go for a drink so we then spent the rest of the day in a bar having a very long conversation about all sorts of things and he turned out to be there's some veteran Marxists trade unionists from New York who is an engineer on Amtrak on the railroad and a fantastically well read one as well I mean he'd read all 50 volumes of the collective works of Marx and Engels as far as having read you know all sorts of other things he's a great tumbler autodidact he's currently working his way through every book ever written on the American Civil War I think and um he I was surprised to learn that there was anyone left in America who would actually own up to being a Marxist that there are a few of them scattered about and actually when he just announced himself to me once where he drives those trains up to New York you know riding on the trains that he was a viewer but also one of the last Marxist around what would it mean to be one of the last Marx's what would you believe in if you were a Marxist but it's very hard to say because I think I mean I tend not to use the word Marxist if I can help it mainly because it's become almost meaningless because there are 57 varieties of Marxism from Stalinism to Trotskyism to maoism Marxism Leninism and so on and so on and I think it's become so broad as to be almost meaningless if someone says I mean that Ike says he's a Marxist but who then when someone says that have to spend several hours discovering precisely what they mean by it so I tend to avoid the word and I also think it's been slightly debased by the attachments it's gained now in Marx himself I think guess this was coming even in his lifetime there was a French political party which he didn't approve of and they got in touch with him and said mr. Marx you'll be delighted to hear that we now call ourselves a Marxist party and he said well in that case I at least not a Marxist so I think even before he died he was aware that some disciples self-styled disciples might be the bane of his life and certainly of his death because then of course after his death in the 20th century you had any number of people appointing themselves as his spokesperson if you like from Stalin to Kim il-sung to whoever and each of them claimed to be the true keeper of the faith and they can't all have been telling the truth and I suspect that none of them was because actually if you look at Marx his general approach to life and its attitudes it's hard to believe that he would have had much time for any of them I mean certainly in the Soviet Union given that Marx was just congenitally argumentative critical of everything the Soviet Union where argument and criticism were not really encouraged he would have lasted about five minutes before they threw him into the gulag as I think I have here a little tiny book show the audience what it looks like and it's quite simply stated the Communist Manifesto and actually if you took out all of the the different forwards for the different editions it wouldn't be as big as it is as you can see it's tiny what impact did the Communist Manifesto have on the world discussion well I think it's had a huge impact I'm going to think you could reasonably say it's one of the most it's not the most influential political pamphlet in history and it is just a pamphlet which is one of its strengths it's very readable very short you can read the thing in half an hour and it's written in fairly lively accessible language vigorous pamphleteering is not obscure and impenetrable as some people accused s capital of being I mean this is something anyone can read so even people who've never read anything else by Marx quite often turn out to have read that at some stage and it is a very lively piece of work I think it holds up very well and it's also surprisingly contemporary and modern when you read it now with 21st century eyes it's full of stuff there which reads like an exact description of what's going on in the world about what would now be called globalization I mean the same people who tend to dismiss Marx and say here's nothing of interest to tell us now as often as not on the same sort of wizkid modernized pundits who talk about the third way and say yeah globalization that's the thing you read the Communist Manifesto and it's actually full of globalization all about how the increasing pace of communications and developments in technology will create this global market which will tend to be dominated by the dominant economic forces and you have a world where blaming a couple years ago I was in China in Beijing which is the capital of a supposedly communist state market Leninist I think it's called these days and they are in Beijing you walk down the street you see McDonald's Kentucky Fried Chicken Pizza Hut Chase Manhattan and so on and even the hotel where I was staying which was quite a cheap hotel it wasn't a very grand place because I was paying my own way even this cheap hotel in Beijing there on the desk was a computer and there on the screen was Microsoft Windows so even the heart of the supposedly communist world is no getting away from Bill Gates at all ceremonials are in one of marks as many other points was the tendency of capitalism towards monopoly left to itself know that on the whole is spiteful to talk about competition in the market that the dominant figures in that market would tend to try to squeeze out the other competition and create a monopoly for themselves but in natural none Sanibel and lo and behold is their official the US courts of degree that this is the case with the best known capitalists of them although Bill Gates again what year was he born 1818 what year did he die 1883 and how many times he did marry he married only once he married a beautiful Prussian aristocrat called Jenny von Westphalen her father was a baron she was also descended from Scottish aristocracy the Dukes of Argyll the Earl's of Argyll so very grand upper-class fairness which were that she is yes and she was the belle of the ball in Trier you know the princess of the town had lots of suitors but marks all marks his father and her father became friends they were quite near neighbours so Marx knew her from very early youth I mean he was a baby when he first met his future wife and she was actually a friend of his older sister so he knew her all his life really and they fell in love and she abandoned her fiance who was a know an army officer suitable fiance and threw in her lot with Karl Marx and thereby condemned herself to a life of tremendous poverty and grind and disaster and tragedy in exile and so on and I mean she was depressed for a lot of the time during their marriage as well she might have been but at the same time she was intensely devoted to him and fiercely loyal I mean really tigerish ly protective she never suggested that she would have done anything else had she known what they're in store and if anyone was ever rude about her husband or criticized him she would defend him even more vigorously than he would defend himself which is saying something how many children did they have ha well it depends how you define children because there was an extra child out of wedlock who was born to the housekeeper Helen DeMuth one of the more amazing aspects of the marks story because they were living at the time in two rooms in Soho in the center of London with this some rather large household of husband wife children housekeeper all crammed into the two rooms but there was a brief period where his wife Jenny went off to Holland try and get some money out of an uncle at one of marks his uncle's and during this period amazing enough nine months later the housekeeper gives birth to a boy Freddie this is this is Jenny on the screen right now up here in the top this is some but as Marx his wife oh yes there she is yes that's Jenny yes and right below that is the housekeeper is the housekeeper yes that's Helen the mother of little Freddie and this boy Freddie was given away for adoption to her family in the East End of London and there was what can only be described as a cover-up I think I say in the book the first one of the more successful cover-ups organized for the good of the Communist cause Marx was aware that his enemies would use this against him if it got out angles stepped into the breach and pretended that he was the father and the baby was then given away for adoption anyway and lived for the rest of his life he didn't die till 1929 this illegitimate son unaware that his real father was the man who bothered by then lion was you know notorious all over the world so there was this extra child Freddy who had I mean it's not Fox's finest hour and there are many moments there not his finest hour but certainly the business of impregnating Helen DeMuth and then giving the child away I did think reflect very well on the other hand it's hard to see how they could have accommodated any more children they had quite enough trouble with their own children three children died in infancy and then of the others there were the three surviving daughters I mean over six altogether three of them died as small children and three others Jenny Laura and Eleanor Jenny died before her father Jenny Chandler jr. Jenny and the two children who outlived him Laura and Ellen are both committed suicide so this this is Jenny that was sitting with her father that's Jenny the daughter yes it's rather confusing they're all called Jenny and that family even one of the grandchildren was called January Jenny who committed suicide Laura and Ellen are the only two children who outlived Marx this is a photograph right here of Laura yes and when why did she commit suicide well it's hard to say they basically she and her husband died when they were in their 60s when they did it they'd had three children in quick succession when they married all three died almost immediately and they then had rather gloomy lives as bare as you could say full of frustration they were also I mean frankly sponges when Marx dies he'd been subsidized for most of his life by angles and Laura just assumed that this would be inherited the subsidy and so she was forever writing to angles and her husband Paul would write triangles saying could you send us ten pounds please so he found he had to support the next generation as well because they were too indigent to look after themselves but I think they reached a point where they both well as far as one could tell they both just decided that they were in their 60s life had nothing more to offer them they were weary and they decided to end it all in a suicide pact and at their funeral in France there was a visiting speaker who gave a narration from the Russian Communist Party a man called vladimir Ilyich Lenin not enough which is the only sort of direct line edge one can trace between Marx himself and the Soviet communists whether he had been there while representing the Russian communists because this was the funeral of the daughter of Karl Marx the Russian Communist Party wanted to send a representative to the funeral to make a little speech and then in was the man who got it what about Eleanor which she also Helen there was a much sadder tale much much sadder tale Ellender as you can see from the picture very attractive bright lively girl but had a lot of troubles partly marks his fault yet again you have to say because Marx had two French sons in Lourdes his daughter Jenny and Laura both married French socialists marks on the whole not very well disposed towards French socialists he was always arguing with them quarreling actually thought they were Hana kists and then Eleanor fell in love with a man called mr. Gary another dashing French revolutionary a Marx put his foot down he said I don't gonna have three of my daughter's married to French socialists I can't stand them so he more or less forbad this Union he wouldn't bet Eleanor see her lover and she was ordered to break it off and she never really recovered from this and she she was ill for a long time she had a kind of anorexic stage where she wouldn't eat for long piers and then she took up with the most unsuitable and ghastly man called Edward Aveling who was tremendously ugly but very successful with women he used to say if I have a half hours head start I could have any woman in London and um he somehow obviously had some sort of magnetic appeal though certainly a lot of people who knew him found him not only physically disgusting but disgusting in character he was a vile person who treated Ellender terribly he got secretly married while supposedly living with Eleanor they lived together unmarried but as most of their friends were Bohemians this was sort of acceptable and she then discovered that he had secretly a year earlier got married to somebody else without telling her and he'd been maintaining these two households a wife on the side was kind of reversed the usual thing we have the mistress on the side in his case he was living with a mistress but also kept a secret wife tucked away Elna was distraught and he then agreed that he behaved very badly and he's we'll look let's end it all let's have the suicide pact so they got some PRASA Cassatt and the idea was that they were going to die together tragically and then he failed to keep his path the bargain Ellen that took the plastic asses and dies and he didn't he just left the house and carried on as if I think it happened I think he was very lucky not to be charged with manslaughter so quite frankly since he had clearly killed her in any meaningful sense of the phrase but that was the end of poor Elmer it's a terrible tragic tale especially because she had so much to offer she was very bright talented actress translator writer had lots of friends Bernard Shaw was a great friend of hers she met him in the British Museum and she was a good speaker she was politically very active from in the East End of London and places but died of a broken heart essentially you said that he just lived a couple of miles from Charles Darwin well a few miles yes Marx lived in London Darwin lived down in Kent it's more than a couple of miles but not very far away and it is quite striking that I suppose you'd have to say the two most the two 19th century thinkers who were most influential in the 20th century probably were Marx and Darwin in their different ways and there they were living quite near each other and so there has been a temptation to try and link them in some way and there is one slight think which is that mark sent Darwin a copy of Das Kapital and Darwin sent him back a polite thank-you letter saying dear dr. Marx thank you so much for your fascinating book the Marx is quite excited thought the Darwin really had read it and had marred it and if you go because they'll find it today if you go to Darwin's house at down in Kent there on the bookshelves is the copy that Marx sent him and you open it and only about the first hundred pages have actually been cut out of the eight hundred pages let's clear the Darwin just cut the first few pages glanced at them his German wasn't that good anyway and I'm sent the polite letter so I didn't think he was a great fan of Marx's what year was the Communist Manifesto 1848 issued an ending of 1848 February 1848 in 1848 he lived where he was well at that stage he was in Belgium when he wrote the Communist Manifesto in Brussels but he was on the move was about to be on the move again because 1848 was of course one of the big years of Lucian's when most of Europe had revolutions of one kind or another with the exception of Britain time in France Italy Germany there were revolutions all over the place they didn't last ever they were followed immediately by counter-revolutions but for a brief period there were these uprisings it was one of those historic years and so Marx wanted to be in the thick of it so he moved on he spent large part of 1848 in Germany because that was where he wanted to be in Cologne running a newspaper fomenting revolution he also has been quite a bit of time in France he was invited back to France by the provisional government the revolutionary provisional government but then of course after the counter-revolution had kicked out again say he spends 18 48 and 49 shuttling between Brussels and Paris and cologne being expelled from each one after the other and eventually was kicked out of France for the last time and had to get to London yeah you see a road there's an in 1848 just before the revolution started pure coincidence I don't think they started because of that the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 in Russia what what did this have to do with that anything huh well I suppose you could reasonably say it had something to do with it in the sense that the key figures in the Bolshevik Revolution Lenin and the rest of them obviously had read it I mean they'd grown up on it so yes I mean the the Russian Communist Party was founded and led by people who certainly had read the communist manifesto and had read capital and had read quite a few of the other books the argument is whether they had read it correctly or indeed whether they'd missed something or whether they had willfully misread parts of it let me ask you about Das Kapital what year did he write that what he was writing it from based of his life he I mean it finally the first volume came out in German in 1867 but another 20 years after the Commish benefit but he was working on his off and on for um most of those 20 years I mean the evening before the Communist Manifesto in the mid 1840s when he first met angles angles came to Paris and stopped off where Marx was living at the time met Marx and they had a drink in a cafe and it and into several drinks I like then went back to Marc's his apartment has stayed there for ten days let me start because we should ask you about this man Friedrich Engels we're at war again did he meeting they miss in Paris and as I say they had this conversation that ended up lasting for 10 days what was meant to be a drink in a cafe and at the end of that it's very frustrating then that there was never much of a detailed account of this after all rather important meeting and the only thing angles ever wrote about it was while I met Marx in Paris we talked for 10 days at the end of that it became clear that we were pretty much in complete agreement on most things and we would work together from then on that's all he said and there's no account of what went on in these 10 days just that at the end of it they decided they got on so well and they were in such agreement that they would be collaborators where a mr. angles from he was from place called Wuppertal he was some in World War II in Germany oh yeah they were both German he was some the son of a fairly wealthy textile man his father angle senior owned cotton factories in Lancashire and we started in Germany but he then expanded into Lancashire which was at the time the center of the cotton trade so he ran textile firm in Germany but also had this outpost in Manchester with his partners at a German family called Hermann and Engels junior Friedrich Engels Marx his friend when Marx ended up in England in exile he summoned Engels to join him which he did then it became clear that Marx couldn't survive he had no money angles then volunteered to go to Manchester and join the family firm because his father had been very keen to for him to work in this so the father was very pleased oh my boy following my example great you get a Manchester and on the factory there which Engels did for 20 years but his only reason for doing that was to make enough money to subsidize Marx I mean not that he didn't enjoy it he had quite a good time with Manchester he behaved like a local captain of industry he kept several horses and went out fox hunting and had large wine cellar and so on but nevertheless it was all for a rather different cause which certainly his business associates wouldn't have known that he was busily corresponding every day with Marx sending him money but also sending him ideas arguing about ideas even ghosts writing for him I mean quite often if Marx was too ill or too distracted to write some bit of journalism he had to do particularly when he was writing his columns in the New York Tribune and they Tribune angles would just act as ghostwriter if the Tribune got in touch and said to Marx right we want a piece on military strategy or something or other Marx wasn't very good on that whereas Engels was mad on military matters so he would write it so Marx would send it in under his name so much so much so that the editors in New York thought they spent Marx he's an absolute genius Ferris generals have sent us fan letters saying your correspondent in England is brilliant on matters of military strategy little guessing that it was old Engels all wrong any way of knowing how much money and Karl Marx's life he got from Friedrich English angles you can't get a definite exact total because some letters have gone missing and also they may well have been occasions where Engels was handing over money in person and no record was kept but certainly for some periods you can go through their correspondence and in the letter angles will say I enclose five pounds I enclose one pounds one pound and it was usually well well over 100 pounds a year which was quite a decent sum in those days and then when Engels in the in the late 1860's about 1869 70 angles sold his stake in the family business and retards down to London at long last after 20 years in Manchester to vini remarks and he set Marx up with the kind of pension of three hundred and fifty pounds a year which was a very decent salary in those days I mean that was you know what a comfortably off middle-class family would live on very comfortably off and Marx was then got this annuity thanks to Engels of 350 pounds a year for the rest of his life very nice - why did he do it why did angles do it yeah well because he believed in Marx and he well he would sometimes say and rise that when you meet genius you have to acknowledges and he clearly believed Marx was some kind of genius or their angles himself very intelligent man in many ways better than Marx certainly more proficient writing more efficient as well he actually could meet his deadlines and get his pieces finished on time even though he was running a business as well full time whereas Marx was a great procrastinator this is why capital took so many years to write because he would get on with it and then by the time he got near what he thought was the end he would decide that the beginning was no good he would start all over again so discard the first half of the manuscript by the time he'd read a map from scratch the second half would be no good and so I mean he would never have finished it at all if angles hadn't kept bullying him saying that you've just got a break off and send it to the printers and be done with it so angles was every complimented marks very well I think in terms of organization but also as a great intellectual partner of his and Bengals although very bright and quite interesting nevertheless realized that he was always going to be second fiddle because he thought he detected in March they marks a genuinely original mind which must be encouraged and nurtured and he obviously decided it was his life's duty to subsidize this man but also act as a kind of intellectual companion for him because Marx was rather lonely intellectually for long periods because he fell out with so many of his comrades that jangles was almost the only person who consistently could argue through ideas with him let me read this is not fun to read and it won't be fun to hear but I want to read this just because it it it's obviously you read things like this throughout the whole book I want you to explain it 200 page 287 you're talking about the manuscript of capital the demands of his family talking about Karl Marx the demands of his family and creditors and of course those blossoming boils on his bum which were more prolific than ever he hacked away at them with a cutthroat razor watching with vicious satisfaction as the bad blood spurted over the carpet what is this lawyer he's like ah not a pretty sight I mean how much of that did you find in his life a loss what what explain what that is he was a pretty ill man one way or another he was prey to all sorts of things and a lot of it was just to do with his way of life he had an incredibly bad diet and an unhealthy lifestyle I mean he drank heavily he changed smoked really foul cheap cigars he would sit up half the night's working and then lie down in the morning and doze for a couple of hours on a sofa and then return to work he going partly he didn't have any money so he couldn't afford to live that well but even when he did have money I mean he tended to not bother much about his diet and of course you know in general terms of Hygiene he scarcely ever washed as I suppose a lot of people didn't in those days I mean in when they were living in their rooms and so how their upstairs rooms if they wanted to get any water to wash with you would have to go all the way down to the basement with a bucket finish up and go back upstairs so on the whole not exactly much the way a bath thing in a showering went on and that combined with perhaps some sort of predisposition to illness anyway but mainly I think the condition of his life meant that he had boils he got chest pains he had pleurisy at one time or another he would get all sorts of things endless colds and coughs really bad bronchial troubles and especially these wretched boils were the bane of his life just as he got rid of one lot they would reappear somewhere else on his body I mean when he was finishing capital the last few pages the manuscript he had to write it standing up because it was too painful to sit down and he stood there writing his last few pages and then wrote a letter to angles he somehow held the bourgeoisie personally responsible for his boils and he said those bourgeoisie will remember like carbuncles for the rest of their life what's mine they are but my book full guarantee that they remote they never forget my boils I don't know quite why he thought it was their fault except that they kept him in this condition to poverty therefore he couldn't afford to eat properly I don't know why he blamed them for his general unhealthiness though since a lot of it was more to do with his smoking and drinking habits I think you caught a Russian police spy as saying the following he leads the existence of a real bohemian intellectual washing grooming and changing his Lennon are things he does rarely and he likes to get drunk though he is often idle for days on end he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do he has no fixed times for going to sleep or waking up he often stays up all night and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening untroubled by comings and goings of the whole world you think you would have liked to be around him I wouldn't have liked to live with him I must say I would very much like to have had a drink with him or two in his case I think he well how could one not and especially if I was having written his biography of course I would love to meet him and I would certainly like to go out on perhaps not on a pub crawl with him which he did tend to go in for sometimes drinking a pint of beer in every pub in one stretch of road and since there were 18 pubs by the time he got to the end he tended to be a bit boisterous and I'm start throwing stones at the lamp posts and things maybe that would have been the point at which I made my excuses and left I certainly wouldn't have wanted to live with him of his domestic arrangements were just a nightmare and I suspect I would have fallen out with him because most people did even people who had been quite close collaborators sooner or later tended to fall foul of him because of some perceived shortcomings in them or because he felt that they had taken a wrong turning and he was pretty brutal in argument and in his assessments of his fellow socialists I mean it's some long tradition in the left-wing movement that people on the left a far more vicious towards their supposed comrades and they are towards the supposed common enemy then as now over the whole history of the left is a history of splits and splinter movements and internecine warfare of every possible kind and Marx said they went in for a lot of that because there were so many different varieties of socialist and all in one way or another failed to come up to what he regarded as his standards chapter one here in the Communist Manifesto the version that I have from 1964 bourgeois and/or bourgeoisie and and proletarians what is a bourgeois well I suppose the synonym usually is middle class but more specifically when he writes about the bourgeoisie and especially in the Communist Manifesto there he is writing about it has a revolutionary force the Communist Manifesto one thing that sometimes surprises people is how complimentary he is about the bourgeoisie he pays tremendous tribute to them it's kind of lyrical him in parts to the achievements of the bourgeoisie and the Industrial Revolution the Industrial class if you like just realizing class because the bourgeoisie had basically toppled the old feudal era Socratic order therefore he regarded them and says and Commodus manifested that they played a tremendously progressive role in the 19th century in bringing about a bourgeois democracy as well as border our capitalism under this was a vast improvement on the old landed feudal system but of course in the Marxian view although he pays them this great tribute and said I mean he's genuine he says and means it that their technological innovations are marvels and miracles and worthy of great admiration but this is merely the transitional stage before the next class down I mean the argument he has is that throughout history the the supreme class is then threatened by the class immediately below it and as that class gains more economic power so it takes over political power as has been shown you know bit by bit over the years with kings and aristocrats and clergy and feudal Nobles and ultimately by the bourgeoisie and so he then extrapolated from that to say well the next thing that will happen is that the rising proletariat as it becomes more economically important will naturally carry out the same sort of function towards the bourgeoisie as the bourgeoisie did towards the aristocracy and the previous ruling class that was where I think come you could reasonably say he failed to spot one or two points mostly the enduring resilience of emotionally and just how well-established it could become by colonizing other classes in a way that perhaps hadn't happened before that you would have him in Engels somewhere does writes that in Britain which drove the Mad Britain because it was the rock on which all these revolutionary waves broke in vain because Britain was so utterly unrealistic he says in Britain they have not only of a bourgeois bourgeoisie but they have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat now the whole country is just becoming bourgeois which is true and we now even have a bourgeois monarchy in England where you have Prince Charles and well Prince William and Harry going around in baseball caps and spending their holidays at Euro Disney and going to eat in McDonald's so we do I'm afraid so we have borne out what Engels suggested might well happen to find the proletariat well the proletariat certainly in Marxist terms was the industrial proletariat it was the new class created by the Industrial Revolution and Marx's point about the proletariat was that before the Industrial Revolution you know you had all sorts of disparate people over the country who were working in one way or another on the land or whatever but were isolated and the Industrial Revolution by creating by bringing people into the cities and creating these large factories and so forth had brought together these people and so according to his account fits the bourgeoisie who created this Industrial Revolution had actually dug its own grave because it had facilitated the means whereby the proletariat could actually organize collectively because there were all these people now working together in large factories and industries and it was inevitable that they would then combine and start asserting their power so that was his line of approaches to complete the circle did your friend Ike who drives the Amtrak trains the engineer did he consider himself to be a member the proletariat I should think he does yes he certainly would call himself a worker yes as he is in the Communist Manifesto there are 10 points as you know that he suggests that all countries most countries would would live under if they lived under the Communist Manifesto and as one name some of them and ask you to expand on one abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes to a heavy progressive or graduated income tax three abolition of all right of inheritance for confiscation of the property of all immigrants and rebels 5 centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a National Bank with State Capitol annex and an exclusive monopoly so far as we read that any country in the world have this today uh looks like Oh No Cuba possibly China not even in China I think no six centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state well that actually I'm to a certain degree has come false in lots of places where you have a state transport system extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state they're bringing into cultivation of wastelands and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan at seven eight equal liability of all to labor establishment of industrial armies especially for agriculture happen anywhere and duster loam is perhaps lost I mean in the as you look back I mean if he were here today well this yes I mean I think what do you think how did this patter this fair in history well I think one thing you do have says that that is as it says in the title a manifesto it is a pamphlet a manifesto written very quickly at a specific point in history at the beginning of 1848 when he thought upheavals were coming he dashed it off in a few days and wrote it as a manifesto and I mean I think you don't expect manifestos necessarily to hold up indefinitely I mean I think it's amazing is still in print after 150 years most manifestos have forgotten about a year after they're published so then and certainly not obeyed by the people who were elected on those manifestos so I think you have to look at this as I mean he didn't write it as a kind of a message for all time and he'd changed his ideas and developed his ideas a lot after that he this was something he dashed off at that time this was his immediate ten point plan he adapted that in many many ways over subsequent years so there were endless arguments about the precise nature of central banks for example than what should be done with agricultural rents and the nationalization of land and also there was far more and his later work also about democratization and about the democratic nature this thing and actually if you look for example that some of his later documents which set out lists of demands I mean rod like the English Chartists which was the Socialist Movement inning that the Marx got quite involved with a lot of the demands there and in the plans or manifesto as the mark subsequently issued and now common practice among social democratic governments and even not very social democratic governments like um universal franchise for well in that and in fact in his case for men over the age of 21 whereas some I don't think they've even thought about women getting the vote and paying parliamentarians elected politicians of salary so that working-class people wouldn't be excluded from it because they didn't have the money of course he hadn't quite anticipated how much it would cost to run an American presidential campaign the president may get a salary but it doesn't mean that any old person with no money can stand and be elected but nevertheless you know it was in his view a progressive thing trained for it haven't paid politicians so that you you wouldn't need a private income to do it and they're awful you know very moderate demands suggesting that there should be some sort of state education service state welfare benefits for people who have fallen through the net and are unable to live otherwise or unable to work and awful lot of these things are now hardly seem very revolutionary they've been adopted in the twentieth century by an awful lot of firm governments that certainly wouldn't call themselves marxist in any shape or form including in Britain and France and Germany and elsewhere in the back of your book and a little bio under your picture it says Frances Wayne is a British journalist and broadcaster who was named columnist of the year in 1997 for his Wiens world page which appears weekly in The Guardian newspaper in London does it still appear there oh yes yes except this week I'm not there to do it but what do you write about most the time pretty well everything it's mostly politics but by no means all politics some anything that occurs to be rarely it's sort of half muckraking and crusading and half amusing I hope it's I mean it's not just pure punditry I mean I do actually try to give some information as well I mean I regard journalism as being the them the informing of the reader so it's not just one of those some holding fourth type columns some saying well isn't it disgraceful such such I do also try to find things out and report them but I try to do it in a vaguely entertaining way and then you're right he lives amid the rural idiocy that's what Marx thought of the countryside yes of East Anglia with his lover several children and a large menagerie of animals now I know those things don't get in there without approval the author I assume I see him not slow that line now why would you write what's that mean he lives amid the rural idiocy of with his her several children and a large menagerie around well the rural idiocy if it was just a joke because Marx was pretty rude about the countryside regard it as place where primitives lived he was very much a metropolitan man had the Metropolitan prejudice against the countryside which I believe persists to this day possibly even in Washington some parts of Washington DC let alone New York and and I suppose I do live in the countryside and he's staying there whenever I go to London some of my friends who had devoted Londoners will poke fun at me and say what would Marx make of you living out in the sticks there with your Pig and your chickens and your ducks call yourself a sophisticate look at you you're a yokel so I just put that ink as marks but of regard it is real idiocy and the business about the lover and the children is just true I mean number is one of there's some problems of terminology since we're not married I can't recall her my wife at some part that makes it sound as if she might be the business part there are some kind how long you been with her very good question since the beginning of 1993 so someone of it years and I made children dear well boy we have five children living with us altogether she has three older children which she brought up single-handedly by a previous marriage and her previous husband left her when the youngest was one year old so she brought them up alone and they're now very big then our 21 and 19 and 17 and then we have two more children who are five and three Bertie and Archie and so we have quite a houseful three teenagers and two toddlers and you dedicate the book to four Julia is that that is up there it is Julia Jones now how did you go about writing this but biography or researching it and how many of these what was the last time there was a full biography of Karl Marx well in the very early 70s I think about 1971 was the last one which was David McClelland and that was one in about 1969 by Michael Robert Payne those are the only other two ones that I'm aware of in say the last 40 years or 50 years really I mean there have been remarkably few and as I say none really since 1971 since the MacLennan book and it seemed to me that from the Vantage bunch of of now it was perhaps easier to to see what was worth retrieving from Marx and to strip away an awful lot of the 20th century layers with which he become he or his reputation of becoming crusted and also I very much wanted to write a life of Marx aimed at if you like the intelligent general reader because most books on Marx tend to be written by academics or zealots or both for an audience of academics or zealots or both so they assume a great deal of not prior knowledge they write it most in jargon and also they're not that interested in the man and the life they want to skip through that as quickly as possible so they can have five hundred pages on arguments about the labor theory of value or something really sexy like that and I want I had a feeling that there were lots of people who might surprise themselves by actually becoming quite interested if they were given an accessible and readable life of Marx which didn't assume any previous knowledge just as I mean people read biographies of other Victorian sages of various kinds whether it's Dickens or Carlyle or whoever without necessarily being great experts on the work and I thought well maybe they could give Marx a try I'm how many places did you travel to see where Marx had either lived or worked well luckily not that many my task has made a lot easier by the fact that most of Marx's papers are in Amsterdam which is an accident of history when Marx died they passed two angles when he died Marx his daughter Eleanor and this dreadful evening her lover took over and they started sorting them out then when they died the papers were given to the German Social Democratic Party which in those days was a much more left-wing party than its that it is now but then in the 1930s when the Nazis came to power the German Social Democrats panicked and thought we've got to get these out of the country you know the Nazis have already burned them all so they packed them off to Amsterdam to an institute there called the Institute for social history where they remained to this day the Germans never asked them back so and they were all sweetly had this idea that of course the Dutch would be safe because the Nazis would never invade Holland needless to say the Nazis did invade Holland but apparently didn't notice or didn't care that all Marx his manuscripts and letters were hidden away there so there they are these days it makes very easy if you're researching box an awful lot of it can be done in Amsterdam go to the Institute of social history and you fill in your slip and there come up all these wonderful files you know you could actually get his old laundry lists practically or scraps of paper on which he wrote little messages to himself he kept everything I mean given the chaos of his domestic arrangements it's quite surprising and impressive that's so much survived I think it's partly because he was incapable of throwing anything away you haven't you have 12 chapters and I just want to read and we don't have much time so I need a very quick reaction to but the titles of these chapters for instance the little wild boar what was that that's Chapter two well that was what Jenny Marx's future wife called him when they were first engaged she wrote in these love letters when he was away in Bonn and Cologne in places and she tended to refer to him as my little wild boar chapter 3 the grass-eating king well that's to do with a story that Heinrich Heine told as a kind of warning Tamar Heine the great German poet was a friend of marks but was rather wary of marks his some politics and told this sort of parable of a king who ended up reducing himself the level of cattle and eating grass chapter 4 the mouse in the Attic that was a book that Marx wrote called the German ideology and when he had finished it he couldn't find a publisher and so as he said he put it away in in the attic and consigned it to the knowing criticism of the mice and if you look at the manuscript today it does actually have little nibbles around the edges as if it really was liberally eaten by the mice chapter 5 the frightful Hobgoblin well that's the Communist Manifesto I mean the first line of the comment is manifesto which is quite famous is a specter is stalking Europe the spectre of communism but the very first English translation in 1850 which appeared in a newspaper called the red Republican done by a vice Chartist woman started a frightful Hobgoblin is stalking arif but I never caught on unfortunately the frightful hog goblin number six they Megalosaurus to way pronounce it the Megalosaurus yes that's a line from Dickens's novel Bleak House the very opening scene there he has this wonderful picture of London in the fog and the mud and the wet and everything and he says you know so much for guns so much appearing that it would not be a wonder if a Megalosaurus was seen walking along home and he'll because it seemed or was primeval swamp like nature of London and this is the London to which Marx moved in 18-49 the London of Dickens and the London of T super fogs and mud and chaos and in which he might find a Megalosaurus never staring the hungry wolves well as his creditors as I say he was always short of money and the butcher the baker the candlestick maker would say but not going to supply with any more until he pay our bills and bailiffs were banging at his door sometimes the bailiffs would come round and say you're three months behind with your rent we've got to see your husband mrs. marks and she say oh no afraid he's gone away on business for a few days and in fact he would be upstairs hiding under his desk until the bailiffs are gone and he referred to his creditors as the hungry wolves chapter 7 is chapter 8 was the hero on horseback well that's Mark's approach marks his attitude to people like LaSalle Ferdinand Lassalle the German socialist who regarded himself as the hero who would leave the German masses into revolution and Marx is very against this of the great man view of history the idea that you needed a Napoleonic figure to lead the workers to their salvation he said no the workers must lead themselves to their salvation if you put your trust in heroes on horseback or princes even socialist princes then you're lost the ninth chapter is the Bulldogs and the hyena that is a very obscure reference the Bulldogs are John Bull the British bulldog and the hyena is an Austrian monster called general Heino a torturer who came to London on holiday and was attacked by the English workers and chased through London and d-bags and this caused great amazement because it wasn't thought that the English workers had any sense of international solidarity or internationalism number 10 is the shaggy dog that's that's capital that's my reading of des capital which is I suggest not a straight economic treatise but a shaggy dog story almost more like a novel in the tradition of tristram shandy or a satyr like Gulliver's Travels and that if you read it as that a lot of the oddities in it become much clearer because you realise they're entirely deliberate number L the rogue elephant that is bakunin the enormous Russian anarchists with whom Marx had this great showdown and he was often referred to as an elephant just because of his great size the Russian elephant when did he live and what impact did he ever on Karl Marx bakunin yes well he his main impact on Karl Marx was to annoy him intensely and provoke this great fight which basically brought about the end of the International workingmen's association Bakunin and Marx although they had been friendly early on then had this some duel to the death and Marx won but at the price of killing off the International which he helped to create chapter 12 the last chapter the shaven porcupine well that's Marx himself a year before he died in his last couple of years he was pretty ill all the time and went round spa towns and resorts in search of ozone and cures and things and one of these trips the year before he died was to Algiers and from there and that photo you have there is the very last picture taken of him in 1882 being rather genial and father Christmasy the very day after he took that photo in Algiers he went to a barber shop had his beard and hair shaved off sent a letter home saying I have sacrificed my Mane on the altar of my fleece on the altar of an Algerian barber and it was almost a sort of Samson like symbolic gesture of renouncing his powers and the mitting that he had really abandoned any hope of doing any more work so he came home clean shaven and bald but he made sure that no one ever saw him like that or remembered him like that rather because he'd had this last picture taken which is the one you showed there so we never saw Marx clean-shaven a bald face in 1875 a picture of him there's another one very shaggy looking figure I mean he would lose a lot of his sort of iconic resonance I think I mean that gravestone and I get cemetery if he didn't have the beard and the hair he would have a very different effect on people I think he knew the impact it had he said he used it he played up to being a sort of Old Testament prophet or Greek godlike figure he'd he actually thought he looked like Jupiter because a friend had a bust of Jupiter and said it looks just like you that beard and he's very proud of this he would stand next to it saying or do you think we look alike what was your biggest surprise in this book goodness gracious it was full of surprises in a way just the little incidental human details of marks certainly to those who've been brought up upon him as his grim forbidding figure are a constant surprise though I mean to me they became less of a surprise because I knew more about him I suppose but just to know all the business of his going off and getting drunk and playing chess sitting up all night playing chess because he was so determined to beat his opponent liebknecht and kept trying to work out new systems which would allow him to win at chess and his justice his sense of fun actually and the family man going walking up to Hampstead Heath in North London on Sundays for a picnic lunch every week and taking the children sitting there having pickly lodged them playing games on the heath and walking back reciting Shakespeare to the children and singing Negro spirituals or old German folk songs or goodness knows what but I think it's a side of Marx that perhaps hasn't been much noticed even ever postscript to Proust questionnaire that Marcel Proust pops up again what's this about well that was a parlor game that was very popular at the time called confessions which is a bit like the Bruce questionnaire where you have to answer various questions and what is your favorite virtue what's your favorite author your favorite color that sort of thing and this is one that his his children forced him to fill in and his motto in there I think was de omnibus Juba tandem everything was be doubted we're out of time this is the cover of the book it's called Karl Marx a life by Frances Wien and we thank you very much for joining us a pleasure

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Keywords: Karl Marx (Author), The Communist Manifesto (Book), Sociology (Field Of Study), Communism (Political Ideology), Theory (Quotation Subject), World, History, Ww2, Documentary, Germany, Wwii, Adolf, Culture, Nazi Germany (Country), Museum, Civil, Army, National, Army (Film), Project, Heritage, America, Historical, Civil War (Literature Subject)

Id: VnJMEPQ8dRo

Length: 57min 2sec (3422 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2015