[Music] this is the 19th century a pivotal shoe mulcher aside the 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 Karma's 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 Emma grace 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 they're penetrating some contentious ways of seeing the world still shape how we make sense of our lives today [Music] [Music] of all the great historical figures buried in Highgate Cemetery there's one who continues to divide opinion like no other [Music] 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 axles even with explosives he's a malign progenitor of totalitarian regimes a man responsible for the death of millions loved him or loathe him what you cannot dispute is that Karl Marx dramatically transformed our world within seventy years of his death one-third of the world's population was ruled by governments claiming Marxism as their doctrine Marxist ideology he claimed to be liberating but led to dreadful suffering and brought superpowers to the brink of Armageddon 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 the economic crisis and social unrest have put Marx's ideas back in the spotlight I want to start at the beginning not to study marks 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 played with insecurities failure with tragedy would end up generating one of the most influential ideologies and human experience [Music] 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 tree air was an elegant Rhineland town now part of modern Germany born in 1818 two upwardly mobile parents in this handsome building marks his childhood was on the face of it pretty idyllic and thoroughly bourgeois but one day when Marx was just 15 his father high rating met with a group who respected public figures here at Trier's casino club [Music] 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 neighboring France a Prussian Army officer witnessed the scene and reported back to of Marxist school teachers who were also in the room were promptly sacked others were charged with subversion and marks his 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 Carl's birth tree heir had been under Napoleonic control which meant that people like Carl's father have 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 once the more autocratic Prussians were in control they imposed civil restrictions on all Jews now in order to keep practicing 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 conservativism of the Prussian state would inspire and motivate Mars an early age it was pretty clear where his allegiance lay when he was seventeen Marx was packed off down the Moselle River to study law at Bonn University [Music] there was clearly something at the hellraiser about the teenage Marx he quickly became co-president of the tree air Tavern club basically a bunch of middle-class bear boys after one night of boozy brawling Marx was banged up in the local sales 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 trio 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 duel 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 Marty's father [Music] Henryk transferred Carl to the more studious environments of Berlin University yet even here Marx found other distractions [Music] 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 it when he read Hegel it was like the curtain had fallen from his eyes and what is it about Hegel what's what's particularly exciting about his ideas Berlin is awash with a galleon ideas but perhaps the most important idea of Hegel's but 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 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 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 that there's still work to do there's 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 privilege the aristocracy was 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've taken the best of our powers and projected them onto a kind of fantastical fabricated being who embodied our finest qualities [Music] 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 have 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 Russian 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 mall 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 that he was vindictive in an intellectual bully but whatever his shortcomings his Drive and acuity got the job done under his tenure circulation of the paper rose dramatically Marxist 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 splenic 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 bandits 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 marks 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 wines blessing won't run in your barrel you won't sing a song anymore 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 has been consumed in sad vast quantities by the new factories they were caught in a pincer movement of progress mark saw that the fine 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 or form a compound but a clinical deconstruction of the nature of society was just the sort of thing the Prussian authorities feared Martha's provocations and ruffled the feathers of those in power once too often his paper was shut down so we should picture marks aged just 25 angry ambitious criticized 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 fervor of the French Revolution had never really evaporated in 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 cooperatives 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 sweethearts and their wife Jenny von Westphalen the turd enjoyed the trappings of a well-to-do lifestyle back entry ere 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 launched here on reuben o with friends and it was from here that marks continued to agitate for change in prussia marx helped launch 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 us into Prussia but the early essays that Marx wrote for this failed publication are both historic goals and pivotal in the evolution of his ideas in these essays we can start to piece together marks his quest to identify exactly what it is that limits humanity's freedom he started to take a different course from a 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 or something much more deep-seated [Music] the true source of our woes as he saw it was the way that society was organized to supply our material needs the capitalist economy moving decades of discussion of religion Germany Marx thinks that that is relatively superficial understanding that really the world we live in is the world of work a 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 species essence to Marx primarily is about the way in which we human beings differ from other animals and the key idea Marx is that human beings are essentially productive beings other animals bees beavers do produce but not like us that bees can only produce one thing beavers produce one thing we can produce anything Marx thinks that all human beings are creative 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 that 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 you'd lose profits you'd go out of business and 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 [Music] now that Marx saw the world in a different way he set out to expose its workings with his ferocious intellect and our drily to 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 the painful skin condition new research suggests that what he referred to as boils was in fact something far more serious well I'm reading account of his life it was quite an interesting book but he said he suffered really quite badly from a stinking brain look not my hair they said that you 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 myself it was skin complaint they said that he was suffering but was just boils well I was a bit of a nuisance but they're not that bad and I looked to Marx's letters both appeared about nine years bit tedious but you could see from these letters he gets something Lemoine's he gets some of how many Amos and then very diagnostically under the arms now this distribution only occurs in one disease it's a thing called hidradenitis suppurativa right rather terrible unpronounceable name it sounds as though it's very debilitating physically absolutely here's for example an armpit it's scarred with as being repeated episodes it never really stands still did we know when he developed this the first traces I found in the letters was in his early forties we know it starts in the early twenties the average age about 21 22 so do you we think that 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 he in a letter here he writes I took a sharp razor and launched the curve myself how can you do that he regarded his disease as fond to him summer suggested that this condition would have added to Marx's sense of alienation the new evidence certainly reminds us that towering thinkers also live a flesh-and-blood existence [Music] in 1844 marks became a father for the first time Jenny took their newborn daughter to see her family in tree air and she was obviously genuinely worried about leaving her husband alone in a place renowned for its sexual license she wrote anxiously of the real menace of unfaithfulness the seductions and attractions of a capital city [Music] Marx did arrange a rendezvous but this was purely a meeting of minds an appointment with a radical writer who contributed to Marx's failed journal Frederick 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 younger gayen 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 angles called the sheer misery and material squalor of industrial life [Music] angles readily conceded that Marx was by far the clever of the two that he had something that Marx lacks angles have been leading a kind of double life over the last two years his day job had been working for his father's textile business an industrial Manchester so he had first-hand experience of the engine room of capitalism angles lover was an Irish immigrant factory worker code 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 marks 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 [Music] but Paris turned out not to be a safe haven all Marxist fevered rioting and those boozy conversations with other agitators had attracted attention they were Prussian spies in Paris and they alerted the French authorities to the potential danger that marked his ideas posed he was ordered out of the country [Music] 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 neighboring Brussels accepted political refugees and marks applied for asylum he was granted temporary residence but on the strength understanding that he sign a written pledge assuring that he wouldn't stir up dissent with his writing in Brussels marks still feared the long arm of the Prussian authorities and so to avoid potential extradition he announced his Prussian citizenship Marx had been marginalized 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 marks were United with angles 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 but 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 affect himself as you wrote philosophers have only interpreted the world the point is to change it he and angles match their words with deeds and began to coordinate a network of communists across europe from their base in brussels but they didn't stop theorizing 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 organizations and the way they change throughout history that's what drives history forward that's the motor and they see the way society organized herself economically changing according to new technological developments and they trace movements from a very early cooperative as they see 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 I mean so economics is important class is also very important to them both at this time as man well hugely they see capitalism necessarily leading to antagonisms between particularly the bourgeois capitalist property-owning class and the proletariat who sell though labor 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 there are a superstructure and 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 Marx believed that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction oh that he had to do was to awaken what he called the proletariat of 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 crops Europe brought famine and food riots 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 marks and angles hurried to meet their tight deadlines [Music] written with immense fluency in just over two weeks in a fog 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 gonna be a kind of hatchet job on capitalism but he's actually he's full of praise for the bourgeois saying he says that it's accomplished wonders faster passing Egyptian pyramids Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals I mean that sounds like great celebration of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism in a way well it is I mean he's actually saying that without the advances and the things that couplers can bring communist society can't cannot work because communist society needs an abundance of goods that everybody can couldn't take advantage of and he actually said at one point so just before that quote he says that the bourgeoisie has got a revolutionary role in history and he's really ginger about the language when cuz some of those raising the specter of communism is haunting Europe and all that solid melts into their incredibly memorable a yeah the bourgeoisie creates its own gravediggers yeah you know he's a master of prose really exactly what he's doing the one thing that troubles me though 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 becomes quite a dangerous document yeah if you study said that the he said the bourgeoisie it was like a sorcerer that's created something that he can't control anymore perhaps he's doing that he's creating something that he that he can't control anymore especially when he's gone [Music] despite the radical fervor 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 the Domino line of radicalism the Belgian authorities fearing an uprising gave marks just 24 hours to clear out he needed little encouragement to leave and to take up a leave 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 spiraled out of control over 10,000 died or were injured and across Europe the old ruling classes quickly re-established control marks 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 18-49 Marx set sail for England [Music] arriving here aged thirty two marks consoled himself that the uprisings of 1848 had failed because the historical conditions were yet wait 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 refreshing ly expensive marks Jenny and his four children could only afford to live in what were then the slums of Soho alongside other immigrants in cramped debating conditions Jenny actually wrote that it costs more to rent one room here for a week than the biggest house in Germany 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 you managed to gain access to Marx's home described the household as squalid and chaotic washing grooming and changing his linen of things he does rarely and he often gets drunk they're 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 [Music] marx is all-consuming theorizing 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 handout and then we're told Marx made things worse living with a family was a feisty woman called Elaine she helps 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 an upset that goes on and it is really really heavy going Marx's sending notes to Engel 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 I'm great Russell Street you know he has slept with somebody who's not his wife she's pregnant this is a terrible stigma at the time it's tough now it was really really tough middle of the 19th century well is it because they are quite conventionally unconventional and at that time a legitimacy particularly in the circles that they were moving in politically and socially isn't such a statement but at the same time quite a lot of the evidence points towards the fact that that Jenny wanted it covered up so who takes responsibility for all this who makes it ok is Engles he lets it be understood that he is the father and angles who takes the rap for his best friend what do you think this incident tells us about Mars Marx is a man and ultimately also a Victorian patriarchy 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 angles he compromised his revolutionary ambitions and returned to his father's factory somewhat paradoxically to bankroll Marx's theorizing but despite this Marx's family life was mired in tragedy [Music] three of his children died in infancy [Music] 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 Edith body was lowered into his grave other mourners thought that Marx was so distraught he was actually on the brink of throwing himself in [Music] but after the heartbreak him a modest reprieve Jenny received two inheritances allowing them to move to the relative prosperity of the suburbs yet even here marks were still plagued by debt much of it self-inflicted 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 boardwalk 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 dusk capital 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 right in capital and there's a nine-year-old kid working a 15 hour a 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 costs 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 is 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 - 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 we're asking whose fault was it that XYZ 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 [Music] Marx believed there were too many contradictions within the capitalist system for it to survive the cycle of boom who asked expansion and recession meant that it was inherently unstable [Music] after 16 years Das Kapital vol 1 was finally finished in 1867 but it didn't have the impact that Marx had hoped for angles are actually ghostwrote 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 I think it's probably much more straightforward than that capital 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 Revolution showed no sign of arriving this seems to me to be one of the great ironies of Mark's life Mark's had identified the need for change but then things did change 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 angles marks gradually settled into comfortable middle-class respectability he spent his time with his beloved grandchildren and enjoyed family walks here on Hampstead Heath marks 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 sixties 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 [Music] when marks finally died in March 1883 a photograph of his father who strived to give his son a good start in life was found in the breast pocket of his jacket it was buried together with marks in a simple grave in a remote corner of Highgate Cemetery angles paid for Marx's original burial plot just eleven mourners attended the funeral angles 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 [Music] Marx's ideas were codified and clarified by Engles 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 human see joyous and wrathful overflowed onto the city streets in mighty demonstrations a revolutionary fire of the masses was finally ending I defied all Marxist logic because the conditions for change the 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 came 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 [Applause] 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 angles as handwriting here and he has quite good handwriting Marx's handwriting was absolutely terrible and we can tell from this page there's Marx is making insertions into angles this draw I mean what's it actually aiming to do and what what are they working on here well from the draft by angles we get this story about communist society would allow people to do what they want because they would not be constrained by the economically imposed division of labor so he's developing a vision which includes livestock herding hunting and fishing but I think he gets 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 criticized 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 knockabout 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 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 a great teacher when we look at evidence like this should we remember Marx we 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 [Music] I think Marx's genius lies in his determination to think abstractly about capital 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 Labor if you're cut off from the fruits of your labor if you're cut off from your creativity then you lose your sense of self challenge he leaves us with is can we live under a capitalist system and retain healthy functional non exploitative human relationships [Music] mark 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 realized 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 pages writing can be twisted from their original intention and manipulated from the line 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 [Music] if the mind of marked has made you think then explore further with the Open University to discover how other great minds have influenced our world today go to the address at the bottom of the screen to follow the links to the Open University [Music] you