Episode
Karl Marx – Part Two – The Father
- Podcast
- Origin Story
- Published
- Oct 8, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 4980
- Processing state
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Summary
Welcome back to Season Eight: The Story of Socialism as we conclude the story of Karl Marx and the birth of Marxism. It’s 1849. In the wake of the failed revolutions in Europe, Marx and his wife Jenny arrive in London for a fresh start. But his magnum opus, Capital, is a long time coming due to chronic illness, the loss of three children and recurring money worries. The great critic of capitalism is such a disaster with finances that his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels has to take a job at his father’s textile company in Manchester to keep the project of communism afloat. Then there are the feuds. So many feuds! Eventually, in the 1860s, a flurry of productivity bears fruit. Capital is finally finished (or volume one at least) and Marx becomes head of the International Working Men’s Association, where he wages war against rival socialists and the fearsome anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. In 1871, Marx’s response to the doomed experiment of the Paris Commune makes him famous at last — and infamous. He’s the “Red Doctor” accused of orchestrating a vast communist conspiracy that doesn’t actually exist. But then he falls quiet, retreating from political activism and writing relatively little. When he dies in 1883, there are only 11 mourners at his funeral. It is left to Engels to simplify and spread the tenets of Marxism, revolutionising European socialism. Where did Capital succeed and fail? What did he get right and wrong about capitalism and why was he so vague about the future of communism? What does Marx’s clash with Bakunin tell us about the dangerous flaws in his theory? Did Engels rewrite Marxism in the process of popularising it? And has any great writer ever been as bad with deadlines as Marx? • Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% of…