WEBVTT - Who Was Karl Marx, and What Were His Philosophies? 0:00:01.920 --> 0:00:07.200 Welcome to Brainstuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, 0:00:07.240 --> 0:00:11.959 Lauren Vogelbaum. Here one quick glance at Karl Marx's curriculum 0:00:12.080 --> 0:00:18.480 vitae says a lot economist, philosopher, journalist, sociologist, political theorist, historian. 0:00:19.079 --> 0:00:22.319 Add to that socialist, communist in the original meaning of 0:00:22.320 --> 0:00:26.759 the word, and revolutionary, and that's just a start. Karl 0:00:26.960 --> 0:00:29.720 Heinrich Marks was one of the most respected minds of 0:00:29.760 --> 0:00:33.600 the nineteenth century. His meditations on how societies work and 0:00:33.640 --> 0:00:36.600 how they should work have informed and challenged humans for 0:00:36.640 --> 0:00:40.440 more than a hundred and fifty years. Yet to the uninitiated, 0:00:40.720 --> 0:00:44.080 Marks maybe only a bushy, mugged symbol of revolution, the 0:00:44.159 --> 0:00:48.160 father of communism, the hater of capitalism. He's considered by many, 0:00:48.320 --> 0:00:51.000 especially in the West, as the man whose ideas spurred 0:00:51.000 --> 0:00:57.040 authoritarian communist regimes in Russia, China and beyond. That again 0:00:57.280 --> 0:01:00.200 is selling the man short, because it's not entirely right. 0:01:01.480 --> 0:01:04.640 In his book Karl Marks, a nineteenth Century Life, author 0:01:04.800 --> 0:01:09.000 Jonathan Sperber wrote, viewed positively, Marx is a far seeing 0:01:09.080 --> 0:01:12.080 profit of social and economic developments and an advocate of 0:01:12.120 --> 0:01:16.800 the emanspiratory transformation of state and society. From a negative viewpoint, 0:01:16.920 --> 0:01:19.880 Marx is one of those most responsible for the pernicious 0:01:19.880 --> 0:01:23.960 and evil features of the modern world. If nothing else, 0:01:24.280 --> 0:01:27.280 Marx was a keen observer of the human condition. He 0:01:27.400 --> 0:01:29.440 was a deep thinker with bold ideas about how to 0:01:29.480 --> 0:01:33.880 make life better. We spoke with Lawrence Dollman, who teaches 0:01:33.880 --> 0:01:35.959 a course on mars and philosophy at the University of 0:01:36.000 --> 0:01:38.240 Chicago and is the co author of a chapter on 0:01:38.319 --> 0:01:42.360 Marx and Marxism in the Rootledge Handbook of Philosophy and Relativism. 0:01:42.680 --> 0:01:46.440 Dolman said Marx himself was first and foremost a kind 0:01:46.440 --> 0:01:49.480 of scientist. He was a student of reality, but he 0:01:49.600 --> 0:01:53.000 himself struggled throughout the course of his career how exactly 0:01:53.040 --> 0:01:57.440 to put his ideas to politics. It's important to note 0:01:57.480 --> 0:02:00.640 that despite his one time lofty standing what was then 0:02:00.680 --> 0:02:03.960 the Soviet Union. Marx was born in Treer in the 0:02:04.080 --> 0:02:07.440 Kingdom of Prussia in eighteen eighteen. That's what's now known 0:02:07.480 --> 0:02:11.040 as the Rhineland area of western Germany. After the failed 0:02:11.080 --> 0:02:14.560 German Revolution of eighteen forty eight, Marx fled to London, 0:02:14.680 --> 0:02:18.320 where he eventually died in eighteen eighty three. He's buried 0:02:18.360 --> 0:02:22.080 beneath a large tomb in London's Highgate Cemetery inscribed with 0:02:22.120 --> 0:02:27.240 the words Workers of All Lands Unite. But Mars grew 0:02:27.320 --> 0:02:30.280 up privileged, the son of well off and liberal parents 0:02:30.400 --> 0:02:32.880 in an ancient town that had been wrapped for decades 0:02:32.960 --> 0:02:37.639 before his birth by war and revolution. That upheaval, cultural, religious, 0:02:37.639 --> 0:02:40.600 and political shaped his parents and was a big part 0:02:40.680 --> 0:02:45.840 of young Marx's upbringing. Later, Mars attended universities studying law 0:02:45.840 --> 0:02:48.919 and philosophy, where he became engaged to and later married, 0:02:49.000 --> 0:02:52.480 a Prussian baroness. It was while studying philosophy in law 0:02:52.520 --> 0:02:55.400 that Marx was introduced to the works of German philosopher 0:02:55.600 --> 0:02:59.960 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas he used to later 0:03:00.120 --> 0:03:03.880 form his take on communism. Marx began a career as 0:03:03.880 --> 0:03:07.320 a journalist in his early twenties, writing for radical newspapers 0:03:07.320 --> 0:03:11.200 in Cologne and Paris. Throughout he consorted with other liberal 0:03:11.200 --> 0:03:15.320 minded philosophers, and by his mid twenties met and collaborated 0:03:15.320 --> 0:03:18.000 with one of the major influences in his life, freed 0:03:18.080 --> 0:03:21.960 Rich Angles. It was Angles who convinced Marx that society's 0:03:22.000 --> 0:03:25.520 working class would be the instrument to fuel revolutions and 0:03:25.560 --> 0:03:29.840 bring about a more fair and just society. In eighteen 0:03:29.880 --> 0:03:32.240 forty eight, the two published a pamphlet that would be 0:03:32.280 --> 0:03:36.120 the basis for a new political movement, the Communist Manifesto. 0:03:37.520 --> 0:03:40.960 In eighteen eighty three, after Marx's death, Angles summed up 0:03:40.960 --> 0:03:44.640 the main idea in the Communist Manifesto like this quote, 0:03:45.120 --> 0:03:48.480 that economic production and the structure of society of every 0:03:48.560 --> 0:03:53.560 historical epoch, necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the 0:03:53.560 --> 0:03:58.200 political and intellectual history of that epoch. That consequently, ever 0:03:58.280 --> 0:04:01.440 since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land, 0:04:01.960 --> 0:04:05.280 all history has been a history of class struggles, of 0:04:05.320 --> 0:04:10.400 struggles between exploited and exploiting between dominated and dominating classes 0:04:10.440 --> 0:04:14.000 at various stages of social evolution. That this struggle, however, 0:04:14.400 --> 0:04:17.680 has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class, 0:04:17.880 --> 0:04:21.520 the proletariat, can no longer emancipate itself from the class 0:04:21.520 --> 0:04:25.080 which exploits and oppresses it, the bourgeoisie, without at the 0:04:25.120 --> 0:04:29.120 same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, 0:04:29.360 --> 0:04:35.839 oppression class struggles. Dolman explained, Marx was always concerned to 0:04:35.920 --> 0:04:40.240 understand the real underlying causes of social phenomenon, the events 0:04:40.240 --> 0:04:43.960 and institutions that kind of shape the social world. Marx 0:04:44.000 --> 0:04:46.960 wanted to kind of dig down beneath the appearances and 0:04:47.000 --> 0:04:49.760 see what was really going on. Early on in his 0:04:49.839 --> 0:04:52.000 career he thought that the best arena to do that 0:04:52.040 --> 0:04:55.359 in was philosophy, and then as time went on he 0:04:55.440 --> 0:04:59.559 transitioned more into the social sciences. What's most important about 0:04:59.600 --> 0:05:01.640 Mars is that he very much had a kind of 0:05:01.680 --> 0:05:05.200 engineering mentality about society. He wanted to know what makes 0:05:05.240 --> 0:05:07.760 it work, and how if we want to change it, 0:05:08.040 --> 0:05:10.359 do we change it? What are the levers that we 0:05:10.400 --> 0:05:15.760 have to pull. Marx's eighty seven economics work capital a 0:05:15.760 --> 0:05:20.160 critique of political economy, a takedown of capitalism that decried 0:05:20.240 --> 0:05:23.920 the exploitation of the working class, crystallized a debate one 0:05:23.920 --> 0:05:27.400 that continues today between the West's ruling social and economic 0:05:27.440 --> 0:05:32.200 theory capitalism and Marx's idea of communism. Too many. It's 0:05:32.200 --> 0:05:36.159 a fight that hits rich versus poor, bourgeois e versus proletariat, 0:05:36.440 --> 0:05:39.479 ruling class versus workers. And it's even more than that. 0:05:39.520 --> 0:05:42.120 To those who debate it, it's right versus wrong, an 0:05:42.240 --> 0:05:46.719 argument about the best path to a perfect society. But that, 0:05:47.000 --> 0:05:50.920 of course is very simplistic and doesn't get Marx's thinking right. 0:05:51.839 --> 0:05:55.159 Dallman said, above all else, the association that people have 0:05:55.240 --> 0:05:58.039 with Marx is that he's some utopian pie in the 0:05:58.080 --> 0:06:00.840 sky dreaming of a perfect world that is free of 0:06:00.880 --> 0:06:04.040 all the nastiness we live in now. Really, that couldn't 0:06:04.080 --> 0:06:06.520 be further from the truth. Marx had a kind of 0:06:06.560 --> 0:06:10.039 engineering mindset. He was probably, of all the major figures 0:06:10.040 --> 0:06:12.839 in the history of political thought, the most practical, the 0:06:12.880 --> 0:06:15.800 most realistic. He was the most concerned with what is 0:06:15.880 --> 0:06:20.200 really possible in the real world. What marks to find 0:06:20.240 --> 0:06:23.880 as communism but boiled down. A society that produces goods 0:06:23.880 --> 0:06:26.480 only for human need, not for profit, and in which 0:06:26.520 --> 0:06:30.279 there is no master slave, royalty, peasants, owner worker relationship 0:06:30.560 --> 0:06:34.719 and therefore no need to overthrow anybody certainly clashes with 0:06:34.800 --> 0:06:39.120 the materialism of capitalism, but it's a long way from 0:06:39.160 --> 0:06:43.839 what many today see as communism too. After the Russian 0:06:43.839 --> 0:06:47.440 Revolution of nineteen seventeen and later under Joseph Stalin's reign, 0:06:47.880 --> 0:06:50.640 some of Marx's ideas, along with those of Vladimir Lenin, 0:06:50.920 --> 0:06:54.640 were used to build a New Empire. Millions were killed 0:06:54.680 --> 0:06:58.120 along the way. Similarly, millions died in China under the 0:06:58.200 --> 0:07:02.919 rule of Malzadom's Communist Party. Dolman acknowledged it's hard to 0:07:03.000 --> 0:07:05.960 even talk about what Marks thought of communism without dragging 0:07:06.000 --> 0:07:09.360 in all the weight from Soviet Russia and communist China, 0:07:09.480 --> 0:07:13.080 and obviously a lot of people hold Marks responsible for that. 0:07:14.480 --> 0:07:17.960 Authoritarian rules like Stalins and Maus were not what Marx 0:07:18.000 --> 0:07:20.920 had in mind. It's important to note, too, that Marx 0:07:21.000 --> 0:07:24.360 did not hate capitalism. He actually saw some virtue in 0:07:24.360 --> 0:07:28.800 the system. He saw it as a necessary precursor to communism, 0:07:28.800 --> 0:07:33.239 and he envisioned some of the technological challenges automation unseating workers, 0:07:33.240 --> 0:07:38.400 for example, that are true today. Doloman explained, Mars was 0:07:38.520 --> 0:07:42.360 very impressed with the kind of progressive character of capitalism. 0:07:42.360 --> 0:07:44.960 By forcing people from all different walks of life into 0:07:45.000 --> 0:07:48.240 the same workplaces, capitalism kind of breaks down the old 0:07:48.240 --> 0:07:51.680 divides between communities, and so things like race and gender 0:07:51.680 --> 0:07:54.800 and religion divide people less. The more people are forced 0:07:54.800 --> 0:07:58.520 to see each other as equals in the workplace. Marks 0:07:58.640 --> 0:08:02.760 recognized and marveled the economical and technological growth the capitalism 0:08:02.760 --> 0:08:06.360 begets and saw it as an improvement from previous societies. 0:08:07.000 --> 0:08:09.840 Later in life, Dolman says Mark suggested that a growth 0:08:09.840 --> 0:08:12.960 in capitalism might be a way to move toward communism 0:08:13.000 --> 0:08:16.720 instead of all out revolution, but he still saw communism 0:08:16.800 --> 0:08:21.280 with no master slave dynamic as the end goal. In 0:08:21.320 --> 0:08:24.800 that way and in others, Marx's idea of communism was 0:08:24.880 --> 0:08:27.080 far from the atrocities that have been committed in the 0:08:27.160 --> 0:08:31.120 name of communism elsewhere, and his ideas are still, perhaps 0:08:31.120 --> 0:08:33.800 strangely too many a beacon in a search for a 0:08:33.840 --> 0:08:37.520 better way of life, in that this practical and deep 0:08:37.559 --> 0:08:40.960 thinker of the nineteenth century still has relevance in today's world. 0:08:41.960 --> 0:08:45.400 Dolman said, Mars was so committed to giving a kind 0:08:45.440 --> 0:08:48.760 of rational criticism of everything, not just the enemy, but 0:08:48.880 --> 0:08:52.040 to himself and everything. He was willing to criticize the 0:08:52.040 --> 0:08:54.640 old modes of life and show how capitalism kind of 0:08:54.679 --> 0:08:57.520 improved on them. But he was also willing to criticize 0:08:57.559 --> 0:09:01.240 capitalism and show how we could foresee the improvement coming 0:09:01.240 --> 0:09:09.960 in the future. That is still a hopeful vision. Today's 0:09:09.960 --> 0:09:12.520 episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. 0:09:12.960 --> 0:09:15.000 For more on this, lots of other curious topics, is it, 0:09:15.040 --> 0:09:17.599 how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I 0:09:17.679 --> 0:09:20.160 heart Radio. For more podcasts of my heart Radio, visit 0:09:20.200 --> 0:09:22.720 the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you 0:09:22.760 --> 0:09:23.960 listen to your favorite shows.