All language subtitles for S01E01 - Marx

This is the 19th century...

..a pivotal, tumultuous age that witnessed

revolutions in industry,
technology and politics...

..but also, crucially, in ideas
- big, bold, dangerous ideas that

would bring the world as we know it
kicking and screaming into being.

Three great thinkers led the way
- Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche

and Sigmund Freud.

They lived in a time when old
certainties were breaking down,

regimes were overthrown by mass uprisings,

science was undermining religious authority.

Their challenge was to
figure out what makes us

human in a fast-evolving world.

Emigres, recluses, enemies of
the state - these outsiders

challenged the existential
crisis of their age head-on.

Little was out of bounds.

They had an absolute commitment
to identify the forces

controlling our lives. Their
weapon - the power of their minds.

Their search drove them to extremes,
into poverty, into madness.

Yet their penetrating,
often contentious, ways

of seeing the world still shape how
we make sense of our lives today.

# Arise, ye starvelings, from your slumbers

# Arise, ye criminals, of want

# For reason in revolt now thunders

# And at last ends the age of cant... #

Of all the great historical figures
buried in Highgate Cemetery,

there's one who continues to
divide opinion like no other.

# The Internationale. #

For those who come here year in,

year out to mark the day of his
death, Karl Marx is a keenly

intelligent analyst of capitalism,
a prophet of human emancipation.

But for others, who've actually
attacked this monument with

paints, with hacksaws, even with explosives,

he's a maligned progenitor
of totalitarian regimes,

a man responsible for the death of millions.

Love him or loathe him, what
you cannot dispute is that

Karl Marx dramatically
transformed our world.

Within 70 years of his death, one
third of the world's population

was ruled by governments claiming
Marxism as their doctrine.

Ura!

Marxist ideology claimed to be
liberating but led to dreadful

suffering and brought superpowers
to the brink of Armageddon.

It shall be the policy of
this nation to regard any

nuclear missile launched
from Cuba as an attack by

the Soviet Union on the United States.

Communism was widely discredited,

precipitating its fall in the 1980s and '90s.

But economic crisis

and social unrest have put Marx's
ideas back in the spotlight.

I want to start at the
beginning, not to study Marx

with the hindsight of history,

but to try to understand what motivated him

in the context of his own
times, to discover how a man,

whose life was plagued with
insecurities, with failure,

with tragedy, would end up generating

one of the most influential
ideologies in the human experience.

We tend to think of Marx
as a rather imposing,

greybeard figure staring out
sternly from Soviet propaganda,

but this early image of the young
Marx - dashing, dapper, privileged -

offers a rather different story.

His birthplace, Trier, was
an elegant Rhineland town,

now part of modern Germany.

Born in 1818 to upwardly mobile
parents in this handsome building,

Marx's childhood was, on the face of it,

pretty idyllic and thoroughly bourgeois.

But one day, when Marx was
just 15, his father, Heinrich,

met with a group of respected public
figures here at Trier's Casino Club.

After too much to drink, some of them

began pounding the tables raucously

and singing songs that celebrated
the virtues of the great revolution

that swept through neighbouring France.

A Prussian army officer witnessed
the scene and reported back.

Two of Marx's schoolteachers,
who were also in the room,

were promptly sacked.

Others were charged with subversion

and Marx's father was
tarnished with the disgrace.

The casino was put under surveillance.

Because under the surface calm
of the town there was tension.

Not long before Karl's birth, Trier
had been under Napoleonic control,

which meant that people
like Karl's father had got

a taste of the French
revolutionary principles of

individual liberty and equality.

Under French law, Heinrich had
been free to train as a lawyer,

but he was Jewish and, once
the more autocratic Prussians

were in control, they imposed
civil restrictions on all Jews.

Now, in order to keep
practising his profession,

he had to convert to Christianity.

Marx was growing up in a period

when questions of political authority

and freedom of expression
were highly contested,

when ruling classes across
Europe feared their people would

rise up and overthrow them.

The struggle between the
ideals of the French Revolution

and the intractable conservatives
of the Prussian State would

inspire and motivate Marx.

And from an early age, it was pretty
clear where his allegiance lay.

When he was 17, Marx was packed
off down the Moselle River

to study law at Bonn University.

There was clearly something of the
hell-raiser about the teenage Marx.

He quickly became co-president
of the Trier Tavern Club -

basically a bunch of middle-class bad boys.

After one night of boozy
brawling, Marx was banged up

in the local cells for a day,
but there was more to come.

Student life was divided along class

and political lines to the point of conflict.

The liberal Trier Tavern boys attracted

the attention of a gang
of aristocratic cadets.

Those cadets forced them to kneel
down and swear their allegiance

to the Prussian aristocracy, and
the confrontations escalated.

At one point, Marx ended up in a dual
with a sabre wound above his eye -

a scar which this young scrapper
wore as a badge of honour.

Enough, it seems, was
enough for Marx's father.

Heinrich transferred Karl to the more
studious environment of Berlin University.

Yet even here, Marx found other distractions.

Marx met a group of Bohemian
students and lecturers who loved

to discuss the philosophies of
the day late into the night.

He grew a beard and joined
the Young Hegelians,

A group obsessed with the
theories of a university

professor who'd recently died. Georg Hegel.

Marx describes his first encounter with Hegel

as one of a completely extraordinary moment.

He says that when he read Hegel

it was like the curtain
had fallen from his eyes.

And what is it about Hegel?

What's particularly exciting about his ideas?

Berlin is awash with Hegelian ideas

but perhaps the most important idea
of Hegel's that they are completely

captivated by is the idea
of history as this gradual

unfolding of freedom and of reason.

And this gradual dialectic, as he called it,

was made manifest most magnificently
in the French Revolution when,

of course, you had a literal

cracking open of freedom and of reason.

I suppose it is totally
thrilling, this, isn't it?

Because you're being told that
you're part of a big historical

story and that gives you a big historical

- and philosophical canvas to paint on.
- That's right.

And I think that Marx does
absolutely see himself

as kind of standing, as
it were, towards the end

of history that had begun
with the ancient philosophers,

who had talked about the way in
which one's soul could only find...

..perfection if it was properly
embedded in the community.

And do they think that Hegel's
got it absolutely right?

Or is there a sense there's still work to do?

There is absolutely still work to do.

So they think that while
Hegel had got, in his vision,

had got part of the way, that
what they want to do is bring

a total revolution rather than just reform.

They were operating in a world
where the nobility, the privileged,

the aristocracy were still very
much in charge and they were

pushing up against a great kind of
wall of privilege and tradition.

'Marx and the Young Hegelians
believed that the single

'greatest obstacle to human
progress was religion.'

So they set out to critique and to attack it.

Now, you've got to think
how subversive this is.

Some said that the gospels
of the New Testament

were just folktales, not
divine historical truth.

That's really shocking.

Others suggested that God was an illusion

and that as humans we'd
taken the best of our powers

and projected them onto a kind
of fantastical fabricated being

who embodied our finest qualities.

The Young Hegelians believed
that this existential separation,

brought about by religion,
limited our human potential.

Only by abandoning its delusions
could we truly flourish.

Of course, the group's iconoclastic -

many would say blasphemous -
ideas had wider implications.

The relationship between Church and state

was tight to the point of total union.

Criticism of religion was
tantamount to criticism of Prussia.

Marx had aspired to an academic
career but the Prussian

authorities would not tolerate
subversives in their universities.

So he had to find another
platform for his ideas.

His outlet would be the hot, rapidly
expanding business of journalism.

Marx thought that the written
word had transformative power.

And he became editor of the
Rhineland News, based in Cologne.

A mouthpiece for liberal entrepreneurs

pushing for constitutional reform.

He made an immediate impact.

Nicknamed "the Moor" because
of his dark complexion

and thick mane of hair and
beard, it seems he was impetuous,

passionate, with a boundless
energy and self-confidence.

Although some did say he was vindictive

and an intellectual bully.

But whatever his shortcomings, his
drive and acuity got the job done.

Under his tenure, circulation
of the paper rose dramatically.

Marx's journalism took up the cause
of his nouveau riche paymasters

and attacked the old political elite.

Here's a typical example
of his lacerating style.

It's polemic, laced with a
kind of withering sarcasm.

"The aristocracy cannot
be given the form of law

"because they are formations of lawlessness.

"No-one's action ceases to be
wrongful because it's his custom,

"just as the bandit son of
a robber is not exonerated

"because banditry is a family idiosyncrasy."

It's clever, cutting stuff.

Marx gained notoriety through
his thinly veiled attacks

on the Prussian ruling classes.

Journalism also stimulated a new interest
at the other end of the social scale.

In 1842, Marx reported on the conditions

of lower class vine growers
back in his home region.

A dramatic drop in profits
had plunged them into poverty.

There's an unsettling
poem written at the time

that describes how, unable
to feed their children,

the vine growers were driven to suicide.

"Now the wine's blessing
won't run in your barrel

"You won't sing a song any more
when all is covered with snow."

The workers blamed the authorities
for opening up the market

to greater competition.

The authorities' response
was that a protected market

before had artificially inflated prices.

These were men and women
who were really struggling.

Officially they were no longer
allowed to collect firewood

for free because it was
being consumed in such vast

quantities by the new factories.

They were caught in a
pincer movement of progress.

Marx saw that the vine growers
were losing what little power

they had to determine their own futures.

His journalism opened his
eyes to the complex forces

governing our everyday lives.

He thought it should be possible,
with scientific precision,

to work out what these relations are.

Just listen to what he wrote.

"This can be determined with
almost the same certainty

"as a chemist determines under
which external conditions

"given substances will form a compound."

A clinical deconstruction
of the nature of society

was just the sort of thing the
Prussian authorities feared.

Marx's provocations had ruffled the feathers

of those in power once too often.

His paper was shut down.

So we should picture Marx, aged just 25,

angry, ambitious, criticised.

'Censured in Prussia,

'he resolved to travel to the fulcrum
of game-changing, provocative ideas.'

'The origin of those protest
songs that his father once sang.'

The rallying point of revolution.

Marx's intellectual horizons
expanded exponentially here.

The rebellious fervour of the French
Revolution had never really evaporated

and the streets and bars
were home to radical thinkers

whose ideas threatened to
turn society upside down.

There were libertarian
anarchists who declared

that all property was theft,

utopian socialists who sought
common ownership of the means

of production, and communists who advocated

the creation of workers'
co-operatives known as communes.

'In just over a year of
frenetic discussion and writing,

'the shape of Marx's own
agitating philosophy would

'start to form, and this was a
new chapter in more ways than one.

He'd arrived with his childhood
sweetheart and now wife,

Jenny von Westphalen.

The two had enjoyed the trappings of
a well-to-do lifestyle back in Trier.

She was the daughter of a baron
and her father had introduced Marx

to liberal thinkers and
writers like Shakespeare.

But here in Paris they had to turn their back

on creature comforts and salon society.

The newlyweds lodged here
on Rue Vaneau with friends.

'And it was from here that Marx continued
to agitate for change in Prussia.'

Marx helped launched an ambitious
publication that encouraged

collaboration between French
and Prussian radicals.

Actually, there was only ever one edition

because of the difficulty partly
of smuggling it into Prussia.

But the early essays that Marx
wrote for this failed publication

are both historic gold and pivotal
in the evolution of his ideas.

In these essays, we can start
to piece together Marx's quest

to identify exactly what it is
that limits humanity's freedom.

He's starting to take a different
course from the Young Hegelians.

Rather than seeing religion as
the root cause of our problems,

he describes it simply as
"the opium of the people".

Just a painkiller for something
much more deep-seated.

'The true source of our woes,
as he saw it, was the way that

'society was organised to
supply our material needs.'

The capitalist economy.

There have been decades of
discussion of religion in Germany.

Marx thinks that is relatively superficial,

understanding that really the world
we live in is the world of work,

the world of productivity
and it's this that affects us

and the way that our lives go.

There's a phrase that he uses
which is our species-essence,

and I've never quite understood it.

Can you explain that to me?

The species-essence for Marx primarily

is about the way in which we human
beings differ from other animals.

And the key idea for Marx
is that human beings are

essentially productive beings.

Other animals - bees, beavers
- do produce, but not like us.

Bees can only produce one thing,
beavers produce one thing.

We can produce anything.

Marx thinks that all human
beings are creative in the way

we produce but the tragedy of capitalism

is workers in a factory, they're
simply engaging in repetitive tasks.

They're not doing the things
human beings ought to be doing.

Now, Marx uses this notion of
alienation from our species-essence

to explain not only the way
that the individual worker

is sort of crushed and
chained to the production line

but also the way in which
we human beings are together

collectively dominated by the world.

Even the capitalist, actually, is dominated.

If a capitalist wanted to cut
the working day, that probably

wouldn't be possible because
competitors would exploit workers

just as much as before, they would
lose profit and go out of business.

So, in this way, Marx said under capitalism

we become playthings of alien forces.

It's almost like a monster
that we've created.

It's not something we control.

Now that Marx saw the
world in a different way,

he set out to expose its workings.

With his ferocious intellect

and arguably too the
bold conviction of youth,

he resolved to end degrading injustice

and to reunite people with
their true innate being.

But Marx's philosophical mission
would be beset by personal battles.

Marx suffered bad health, in
particular a painful skin condition.

New research suggests that
what he referred to as "boils"

was in fact something far more serious.

When I read an account of his life,
it was quite an interesting book,

but it said he suffered really
quite badly from a skin complaint.

Naturally I pricked up my ears
and they said that he couldn't

find a place to rest, he couldn't
lie down, he couldn't walk.

For three weeks at one point
he was totally unable to work,

totally unable to think.

I thought, the skin complaint
they said he was suffering from

was just boils.

Well, boils are a bit of a
nuisance but they're not that bad.

And I looked at Marx's letters
over a period of about nine years.

Bit tedious.

But you could see from these
letters he gets them in the groin,

he gets them around the anus.

And then, very diagnostically,
under the arms.

Now, this distribution
only occurs in one disease.

It's a thing called
hidradenitis suppurativa.

Right.

A rather terrible, unpronounceable name.

It sounds as though it's
very debilitating physically.

Absolutely.

Here's, for example, an armpit.

It's scarred where there's
been repeated episodes.

It never really stands still.

Do we know when he developed this?

The first traces I found in the
letters was in his early 40s.

We know it starts in the early 20s,
the average age is about 21 or 22.

So do we think this affected
him psychologically?

When the skin is involved,
our self-image changes.

It produces a self-loathing.

And Marx had this by the gallon.

In a letter here, he writes,

"I took a sharp razor and
lanced the cur myself."

Yeah.

How can you do that?

He regarded his disease as foreign to him.

Some have suggested that this condition

would've added to Marx's sense of alienation.

The new evidence certainly reminds us

that towering thinkers also live
a flesh-and-blood existence.

In 1844, Marx became a
father for the first time.

Jenny took their newborn daughter
to see her family in Trier

and she was obviously genuinely worried

about leaving her husband alone

in a place renowned for its sexual licence.

She wrote anxiously of the
real menace of unfaithfulness.

The seductions and
attractions of a capital city.

Marx did arrange a rendezvous, but
this was purely a meeting of minds.

An appointment with a radical
writer who'd contributed

to Marx's failed journal - Friedrich Engels.

Engels was also from a
bourgeois Prussian family.

Just two years younger than
Marx, tall and handsome.

Both of them had mixed
with a young Hegelian crowd

and had come to similar views on capitalism.

It seems that the
friendship was lubricated by

an enthusiastic consumption of red wine.

The two were inseparable for 10 days.

Talking late into the night
and railing against social,

political, economic injustice.

What Engels called the sheer misery

and material squalor of industrial life.

Engels readily conceded that Marx
was by far the cleverer of the two.

But he had something that Marx lacked.

Engels had been leading
a kind of double life.

Over the last two years, his day job had been

working for his father's textile
business in industrial Manchester.

So he had first-hand experience
of the engine room of capitalism.

Engels' lover was an Irish immigrant
factory worker called Mary Burns.

She'd shown him the slum
districts of Manchester

and so he'd witnessed the
poverty of the urban classes

in ways that thesis-bound Marx never had.

As collaborators and
friends, their joint mission

was to open people's eyes

to what they judged to be the
devastating realities of capitalism.

SIRENS WAIL

But Paris turned out not to be a safe haven.

All Marx's fevered writing
and those boozy conversations

with other agitators had attracted attention.

There were Prussian spies in Paris

and they alerted the French authorities

to the potential danger
that Marx's ideas posed.

He was ordered out of the country.

In January 1845, Marx fled Paris
in haste by postal coach...

..leaving Jenny behind
with their baby daughter

to frantically pack up all their belongings.

Neighbouring Brussels
accepted political refugees

and Marx applied for asylum.

He was granted temporary residence,

but on the strict understanding
that he sign a written pledge

assuring that he wouldn't stir
up dissent with his writing.

In Brussels, Marx still feared

the long arm of the Prussian authorities.

And so to avoid potential extradition,

he renounced his Prussian citizenship.

Marx had been marginalised.

He was stateless and virtually penniless,

but he clearly had no intention
of taking all this lying down.

Despite the stringent
conditions of his residency,

he was about to ramp up
his political activity.

Marx reunited with Engels and, together,

they became part of the clandestine
world of the communists.

Outraged at being exploited
by the ruling classes,

they'd set up secret
groups right across Europe.

These working-class activists
wanted to abolish private property

and to create a revolutionary society.

We know that Marx and Engels
hung out here with communists

in what was once a smoky bar
and has now, rather ironically,

been transformed into an
elegant bourgeois bistro.

The men that Marx met here,

he believed to be the very foot
soldiers of revolutionary change.

Change which, and this is a critical shift,

Marx now actively sought to effect himself.

As he wrote, "Philosophers have
only interpreted the world.

"The point is to change it."

He and Engels matched their words
with deeds and began to coordinate

a network of communists across
Europe from their base in Brussels.

But they didn't stop theorising.

As ever, Marx was determined to
solve big problems with big ideas

and with the power of the written word.

Marx and Engels are working
furiously together here.

What's the quantum shift in their thinking?

The quantum shift is they now see
that it's economic organisations

and the way they change throughout history,

THAT'S what drives history forward.

That's the motor.

And they see the way society
organises itself economically

changing according to new
technological developments.

And they trace movements from
a very early, cooperative -

as they see it - a cooperative society

in which people live in a communal fashion

through slave-owning societies

on into medieval feudalism

with aristocratic landowners and their serfs,

and then the Industrial Revolution
and the birth of capitalism.

- So, this is history as they see it.
- What's the issue here?

I mean, what's the problem with this?

Well, the problem is that
for most of human history,

there have been haves and have-nots.

And that most humans have lost out

to the people who own the property
and who own the means of production.

And he thinks the problem is
getting even worse under capitalism.

So, economics is important, class
is also very important to them

- both at this time, isn't it?
- Hugely.

They see capitalism necessarily
leading to antagonisms

between particularly the bourgeois capitalist

property-owning class and the
proletariat who sell their labour -

because he says capitalism is
intrinsically exploitative.

And more than this, he thinks
that law, religion, politics,

culture, the arts generally,

they're all there to keep the ruling
classes in power and in place.

They are a superstructure, an
ideology to maintain the status quo.

And he thinks that part of his
job is to strip the mask away

so people can see that they've been had.

Marx believed that capitalism

contained the seeds of its own destruction.

All that he had to do was to awaken
what he called the proletariat -

the working classes of industrial society -

to their revolutionary role,
to bring about communism,

the final stage of history, when all
class divisions would be eradicated.

By 1847, events in Europe were on his side.

A revolutionary storm had been brewing.

The failure of wheat and
potato crops across Europe

brought famine, food riots
and political unrest.

So when Marx and Engels
were commissioned to write

a Profession of Faith
by the Communist League,

they had everything to play
for, and they didn't hold back.

In January 1848,

Marx and Engels hurried to
meet their tight deadline.

Written with immense fluency
in just over two weeks

in a fug of cheap cigar smoke,

they produced this little book.

This is the Communist Manifesto.

It's just 30 pages long,

but in those pages is
some of the most infamous

and influential political
propaganda of all-time.

A lot of people think this is just going
to be a kind of hatchet job on capitalism,

but he's actually full of
praise for the bourgeoisie.

And he says that, "it has
accomplished wonders far surpassing

"Egyptian pyramids, Roman
aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals".

That sounds like a great
celebration of the bourgeoisie

- and of capitalism, in a way.
- It is.

He's actually saying
that without the advances

and the things that capitalism can bring,

communist society cannot work.

Because communist society
needs an abundance of goods

that everybody can take advantage of.

And he actually says at one
point just before that quote,

he says, "the bourgeoisie has got
a revolutionary role in history".

And he's really gingering up the language.

Because some of those phrases, "the
spectre of communism is haunting Europe"

and, "all that's solid melts into air" -

- they're incredibly memorable, aren't they?
- Yeah.

"The bourgeoisie creates
its own grave-diggers."

You know, he's a master of prose, really.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

And one thing that troubles me
is when ideas become ideologies.

And that feels like that's
what's happening here.

There's a kind of calcification of ideas,

- so it become quite a dangerous document.
- Yeah.

Just as he said that the
bourgeoisie was like a sorcerer

that's created something that he
can't actually control any more,

perhaps he's doing that.

He's creating something that
he...that he can't control any more,

especially when he's gone.

Despite the radical fervour

and sheer rhetorical power of the
manifesto, it went almost unnoticed.

The ink was still wet on
the first German edition

when revolts erupted across Europe.

Here in Paris, workers
barricaded the streets.

After three days of frenzied fighting,

they overthrew the monarchy
and proclaimed a republic.

You can just imagine the
atmosphere of expectation.

Something equivalent perhaps to
the experience of the Arab Spring.

The world changing in front of your eyes.

People power overturning the status quo.

A domino line of radicalism.

The Belgian authorities, fearing an uprising,

gave Marx just 24 hours to clear out.

He needed a little encouragement to leave

and to take up a lead role
with the revolutionaries.

But the insurrections
quickly collapsed in chaos.

In France, an attempt by the
new Republican government

to quell a workers' protest
spiralled out of control.

Over 10,000 died or were injured.

And across Europe, the old ruling classes

quickly re-established control.

Marx ended up in Prussia,
hoping to ferment revolution.

But he was arrested, put on
trial for inciting rebellion

and narrowly escaped prison.

There was just one haven left.

A relatively stable kingdom
that was still prepared

to take on refugees with radical views.

In August 1849,

Marx set sail for England.

Arriving here aged 32,

Marx consoled himself that the
uprisings of 1848 had failed

because the historical conditions
weren't yet right for change.

The ultimate revolution that
his philosophical theories

predicted was yet to come.

But life in London would offer
little else in the way of solace.

With over two million inhabitants,
this challenging, unforgiving,

dystopian metropolis was the
biggest city in the world.

Even back then, the cost of living
in London was crushingly expensive.

Marx, Jenny and his four children

could only afford to live in
what were then the slums of Soho,

alongside other immigrants in
cramped, debasing conditions.

Jenny actually wrote that it
cost more to rent one room here

for a week than the biggest
house in Germany for a month.

In London, Marx set out to
write a definitive account

of the driving forces of capitalism.

But his plans were complicated by
the turmoil of his personal life,

which was still subject
to Prussian surveillance.

A spy who'd managed to
gain access to Marx's home

described the household
as squalid and chaotic.

"Washing, grooming, and changing
his linen are things he does rarely

"and he often gets drunk.

"Though often idle for days on
end, he will work day and night

"with tireless endurance.

"He has no fixed time for going
to sleep and waking and he often

"stays up all night

"and then lies fully clothed
on the sofa at midday."

Marx's all-consuming theorising
and political agitating

dragged his family down.

Unemployed and destitute,
they pawned everything

and ran up tabs with local businesses

while Jenny went to beg
her parents for a hand-out.

And then we're told Marx made things worse.

Living with the family was a
feisty woman called Helene -

she helped around the house,

she was a fellow radical and a friend.

But Marx slept with her and
fathered an illegitimate son

at the same time that
Jenny was pregnant again.

This was not Marx's finest hour.

Jenny was furious.

They'd all known each other

for a long time, so clearly,

there is some drama and upset that goes on.

And it is really, really heavy going.

Marx is sending notes to Engels, saying,

"I can't go home, because
it's an absolute storm

"and everybody is really
upset and Jenny is furious.

"Please come and have a drink with me
in the pub on Great Russell Street."

You know, he has slept with somebody
who is not his wife. She's pregnant.

This is a terrible stigma
at the time. It's tough now,

it was really, really tough in
the middle of the 19th century.

Well, is it?

Because they are quite
conventionally unconventional

and at that time, illegitimacy -

particularly in the circles

that they were moving in
politically and socially -

isn't such a stigma, but at the same
time, quite a lot of the evidence

points towards the fact that
Jenny wanted it covered up.

So who takes responsibility for all this?

Who makes it OK is Engels.

He even lets it be understood
that he is the father.

And Engels take the rap for his best friend.

What do you think this
incident tells us about Marx?

Marx is a man!

And ultimately, also a Victorian patriarch -

a man like any other that needs
to be understood in context.

And all heroes have their flaws.

Throughout his troubles, Marx
was always propped up by Engels.

He compromised his revolutionary ambitions

and returned to his father's factory -

somewhat paradoxically, to
bankroll Marx's theorising.

But despite this, Marx's family
life was mired in tragedy.

Three of his children died in infancy.

The nadir was the death of
Marx's eight-year-old son, Edgar,

the apple of his eye,

who died in his father's
arms on Good Friday, 1855.

When Edgar's body was lowered
into his grave, other mourners

thought that Marx was so distraught,

he was actually on the brink
of throwing himself in.

But after the heartbreak
came a modest reprieve.

Jenny received two inheritances,
allowing them to move to the

relative prosperity of the suburbs.

Yet even here, Marx was
still plagued by debt -

much of it self-inflicted,
as he lavished money

trying to maintain a respectable
middle-class lifestyle

with private education and
dancing lessons for his girls.

You do wonder just how much he was
trying to replicate the bourgeois,

comfortable world that he'd been born into.

By the time Marx turned 40, he was
a regular at the new Reading Room

of the British Museum.

Here, he spent 12 hours a day
gathering evidence for his

definitive critique of
capitalism, Das Kapital.

By the 1860s, Britain was the
world's industrial powerhouse.

The UK population had doubled
since the turn of the century,

with terrible social impact.

Sifting through public records, Marx
would find what he was looking for -

traces of the destructive
consequences of rampant capitalism.

This is a Children's Commission
report, 1863, so exactly

at the right time for Marx
to be writing Kapital.

And there's a nine-year-old
kid, working a 15-hour day.

Marx looks at that and he
understands that in that story

lies the whole secret of
how this system works.

The secret of capitalism is
this idea of surplus value.

Where does profit come from?

Marx says it comes from work.

When this little boy turns up
to work, everything that's gone

into getting him there - the
food, the clothing, maybe the

education, certainly the housing
- cost some money and his

labour is worth all of that.

But the amount of work he does
during that working day, that

15-hour working day, is way
above what he needs to and the

difference between what it should
take, what his work is really worth,

and what he's actually working, is a surplus.

That's where profit comes from
and we know, actually, that

he is trawling through this
stuff for these acute examples of

exploitation, because he
wants to shove the concept of

exploitation right down the
throats of mainstream economics.

Mainstream economics - then and
today - doesn't even accept that

exploitation exists.

When a factory falls on the head

of a bunch of Bangladeshi garment
workers, that's an accident.

To Marx, it's one of the most
fundamental laws of capitalism,

that the capitalist will
extract the maximum amount of

surplus value that they can.

Where's this system heading?

What does he think the
future of capitalism is?

Marx isn't predicting the
imminent doom of capitalism.

He understands that it is
a fully functioning system.

But he identifies the fragility
that in this system based on profit,

where all the profit is extracted
from the work of people,

then you hit limits.

The first limit you hit is the working day,

because you can't extend
the working day forever.

You must innovate.

You must create machines and
the machines squeeze the worker

more and more out of the production
process, then the very source

of all the profit is
squeezed into a tiny area,

so you get repeated crises of profitability.

People in Marx's time were asking whose
fault was it that X, Y, Z company went bust?

Marx says it's not anybody's fault.

It's the fault of the profit system,
which is based on the exploitation

of workers and the exploitation of
workers cannot go on producing the

profit at the rate it is required
to expand the system forever.

Marx believed there were
too many contradictions

within the capitalist
system for it to survive.

The cycle of boom and bust
and expansion and recession

meant that it was inherently unstable.

After 16 years, Das Kapital Volume
I was finally finished in 1867.

But it didn't have the impact
that Marx had hoped for.

Engels actually ghost-wrote some reviews,

to try to drum up interest on the Continent.

Now Marx suspected that
the indifferent response

was a conspiracy of silence
orchestrated by his enemies,

but I think it's probably much
more straightforward than that.

Kapital is really long and although
some of the writing is very vivid,

much of it is dense and demanding

and reading this cover-to-cover
is a serious commitment.

Also, Europe was
experiencing economic growth,

thanks largely to expanding global markets.

While the British government was
passing laws to improve working

conditions, the crisis of capitalism
- the touchpaper of revolution -

showed no sign of arriving.

This seems to me to be one of
the great ironies of Marx's life.

Marx had identified the need for
change but then things did change

at such an exponentially
rapid rate that by the time

he'd worked out a coherent
solution to society's problems,

the world had already moved on -

leaving him behind.

With the help of a generous
pension from Engels, Marx gradually

settled into comfortable,
middle-class respectability.

He spent his time with
his beloved grandchildren

and enjoyed family walks
here on Hampstead Heath.

Marx even admits to speculation
on the stock market, which of

course, you could argue is wildly
hypocritical and at the very least

is probably a sign that he thought
capitalism was here to stay.

In his 60s, he became
crippled by worsening health

and heartbroken by the
death of his wife Jenny.

Knowing he was nearing his end,
he had this photograph taken as

a lasting memory for his daughters,

before symbolically shaving off
his trademark beard and hair.

When Marx finally died in March
1883, a photograph of his father,

who had strived to give his son a
good start in life, was found in the

breast pocket of his jacket
and it was buried together with

Marx in a simple grave here in a
remote corner of Highgate Cemetery.

Engels paid for Marx's original burial plot.

Just 11 mourners attended the funeral.

Engels' words by Marx's graveside -

"His name and work will
endure through the ages" -

must have seemed more
optimistic than prophetic,

but as it turned out,

he was absolutely right.

Marx's ideas were codified
and clarified by Engels,

promoting Marx as a great thinker.

Socialist movements across the world

started to translate Marx's persuasive works.

His ideas began to gain momentum.

Finally, in one country, a
Communist revolution succeeded.

'A human sea, joyous and wrathful,
overflowed out of the city streets

'in mighty demonstrations. The
revolutionary fire of the masses

'was finally unleashed.'

But it defied all Marxist logic,

because the conditions for change -

a highly developed capitalist
economy - had barely emerged.

Russian communism had been kick-started

by the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow in 1917

and seven decades later, it
became crashing down here

with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Revolution wasn't just powered
by the proletariat as Karl Marx

had predicted, but by a whole
range of radicals and agitators.

Top-down revolutionaries,
notably Stalin, claimed to be

disciples of Marx and his theories.

But their authoritarian ideologies

crushed the liberty that Marx cherished.

Paradoxically, he would have
been condemned by their regimes.

Their distorted appropriation of Marx

is demonstrated by recent
analysis of one famous text -

The German Ideology.

Well, we've got Engels'
handwriting here and he had

quite good handwriting.

Marx's handwriting was absolutely terrible.

And so, we can tell from this page

that Marx is making insertions

into Engels' draft.

And what's it actually aiming to
do? What are they working on here?

Well, from the draft by Engels,

we get this story about communist society -

will it allow people to do what they want?

Because they would not be constrained

by the economically
imposed division of labour.

So, he's developing a vision

which includes livestock herding,

hunting and fishing, but I think he
gets a very sharp message from Marx,

saying, "Let's get back on track here."

And he does it in a kind of indirect way.

He doesn't just write, "Well, you're wrong."

He writes something quite sarcastic,

so he inserts the words,
"and criticise after dinner".

This work-in-progress draft was
rejected by Marx and Engels.

But in the 1920s, it was
resurrected, taken at face value

as a blueprint for communism
and printed in smooth text,

obscuring its knock-about origins.

So this is very much a draft and
yet, this will become the kind

of foundations for a big political ideology.

Yes, and a lot of people have an
investment in making him simple

and making him dogmatic and
you can get political mileage

out of that, but we don't have to do that.

He was a man with questions
and went looking for answers.

He wasn't a man who had a big idea,

one answer, and then that's
what he found everywhere.

He actually went on the record
saying he didn't want to be

a kind of guru or prophet or great teacher.

So when we look at evidence like this,

should we remember Marx - should
we think about him differently?

Yes, I hope so and I think
we need to be prepared

for a much more exploratory,
much less dogmatic Marx.

I think Marx's genius lies in his determination
to think abstractly about capitalism -

to look beneath the surface
reality, to ask about its destiny.

The idea that I find most compelling

is his idea about the alienation of labour.

If you're cut off from
the fruits of your labour,

if you're cut off from your creativity,

then you lose your sense of self.

The challenge he leaves us with is -

can we live under a capitalist
system and retain healthy,

functional, non-exploitative
human relationships?

Marx stated that communism is
the riddle of history solved.

I'd argue that that is demonstrably untrue.

His prediction that a communist
utopia would emerge to

emancipate humanity is yet to
be realised and as a historian,

I just can't accept that one
single idea can solve the

complex riddle of the human experience.

There's a dreadful paradox that
the man who said that he hated

ideology inspired one of the
most rigid ideologies in history.

It seems to me that Marx's
life-story trumpets a warning that

ideas can acquire their own
inherent power and that charismatic,

explosive thoughts - particularly
if set down on the page as writing -

can be twisted from their original intention

and manipulated for malign ends.

But Marx's desire to find the
root cause of human distress,

of suffering and inequality,

is surely a laudable goal.

So whether you choose to read
Marx as a hero or a villain,

his philosophical journey must be
interrogated and never forgotten.

If the mind of Marx has made
you think, then explore further

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