BBC Four. Genius of the Modern World, Karl Marx (2016)
He is honoured as one of the greatest thinkers of the modern world together with Nietzsche and Freud. Their ideas came about at a time when the whole world was changing, pre-existing economic models were crumbling, science was changing religious beliefs and people started developing new ideas about life.
In the first of the three episodes, a historian Bettany Hughes tells us the life and times of a 20th-century icon whose idea rocked the world for a good part of the century, Karl Marx (1818-1883).
It is interesting to note that he did not invent Communism. Communism predates his ideas. He got his inspirations from the young Hegelian movement at the University of Berlin and the French Revolution. Growing in a society controlled by the aristocratic Prussian rulers who discriminate his background as a Jew, he postulated that capitalism was a self-defeating and an exploitative system that makes everybody unhappy in the end. The whole basis of capitalism is to fail and to squeeze the workers to maximise profit for the ruling class.
Religion is used as a tool to manipulate the minds of the masses. It retards our real potential. It is opium for the people, a painkiller for something deep rooted.
Unable to get a job in academia due to his harsh criticisms of the Prussian ruling class, journalism was his tool to propagate his ideas with the help of Engels, the son of a capitalistic industrialist from Manchester. He did not claim to be the guru to the answers in life but was a critical analyser of everything that was wrong in modern capitalism. Man's creativity is retarded by mundane, repetitive jobs chained into the production chain. Unlike machines or animal, he can be creative. Bees can only make honey, birds nest but man can make whatever he wants. He admits that the bourgeoisies have shown their might via their mammoth projects, cannot even be rivalled by the mighty Egyptian and Roman civilisations. The rich can move mountains.
A person only needs to work so much to sustain his existence. For the rest of time, he should spend his time doing the things that he likes like fishing, hunting, drinking wine and spend time with friends. We are required much more than we are required. The surplus value of work is the profit that is extracted from the exploitation of the working class.
For most of human civilisation, there have been haves and have nots, through the cooperative society, medieval feudalism and authoritarian rule but in capitalism, the divide is getting wider as industries prosper. The frequent recurrent cycles of ups and down make capitalism an unstable system.
The woes of the society are due to production issues. The capitalist owners are also caught in this quagmire. They cannot cut working hours as it would mean losing to competitors and loss of profit and potentially go bust. The law, religion, culture and arts are exploited by the powers that be to maintain status quo. In our pursuit of happiness, we have created a monster that controls us.
He suggests that the soul would reach perfection by embedding itself in the heart of the society. He did not, however, live to what he preached. Unlike people like Trotsky and Gandhi, who lived the life that they advocated, Marx, even though he wrote about the plight of the proletarians, he lived a relatively bourgeoise one most of his life.
Marx suffered from a debilitating medical condition, probably, hyderanitis suppuritiva which is a chronic inflammatory scarring condition of the sweat glands. He lost three of his children to illness. His lowest ebb in life must have been when he fathered a love child with his home helper especially when his wife, Jenny was too! Every hero has a weak point but in came his friend, Engels, to take the rap. Only eleven mourners turned out at his funeral.
Correctly or not, his writings through his publications, namely 'Communist Manifesto' and 'Das Kapital', were manipulated by people with self-serving intentions to be used as a blueprint for the subsequent communist states like the Soviet Union and China. The experiment apparently proved to be disastrous, causing loss of lives to famine, torture and the detention camps. The collapse of the fall of the Berlin Wall is evidence of another failure of yet another economic model. Marx had created a monster just like how he referred to capitalism.
In the wake of recurrent economic collapse around the world, capitalism is also reevaluated, and Marxian thoughts are given a second thought.
He is honoured as one of the greatest thinkers of the modern world together with Nietzsche and Freud. Their ideas came about at a time when the whole world was changing, pre-existing economic models were crumbling, science was changing religious beliefs and people started developing new ideas about life.
In the first of the three episodes, a historian Bettany Hughes tells us the life and times of a 20th-century icon whose idea rocked the world for a good part of the century, Karl Marx (1818-1883).
It is interesting to note that he did not invent Communism. Communism predates his ideas. He got his inspirations from the young Hegelian movement at the University of Berlin and the French Revolution. Growing in a society controlled by the aristocratic Prussian rulers who discriminate his background as a Jew, he postulated that capitalism was a self-defeating and an exploitative system that makes everybody unhappy in the end. The whole basis of capitalism is to fail and to squeeze the workers to maximise profit for the ruling class.
Religion is used as a tool to manipulate the minds of the masses. It retards our real potential. It is opium for the people, a painkiller for something deep rooted.Unable to get a job in academia due to his harsh criticisms of the Prussian ruling class, journalism was his tool to propagate his ideas with the help of Engels, the son of a capitalistic industrialist from Manchester. He did not claim to be the guru to the answers in life but was a critical analyser of everything that was wrong in modern capitalism. Man's creativity is retarded by mundane, repetitive jobs chained into the production chain. Unlike machines or animal, he can be creative. Bees can only make honey, birds nest but man can make whatever he wants. He admits that the bourgeoisies have shown their might via their mammoth projects, cannot even be rivalled by the mighty Egyptian and Roman civilisations. The rich can move mountains.
A person only needs to work so much to sustain his existence. For the rest of time, he should spend his time doing the things that he likes like fishing, hunting, drinking wine and spend time with friends. We are required much more than we are required. The surplus value of work is the profit that is extracted from the exploitation of the working class.
For most of human civilisation, there have been haves and have nots, through the cooperative society, medieval feudalism and authoritarian rule but in capitalism, the divide is getting wider as industries prosper. The frequent recurrent cycles of ups and down make capitalism an unstable system.
The woes of the society are due to production issues. The capitalist owners are also caught in this quagmire. They cannot cut working hours as it would mean losing to competitors and loss of profit and potentially go bust. The law, religion, culture and arts are exploited by the powers that be to maintain status quo. In our pursuit of happiness, we have created a monster that controls us.
He suggests that the soul would reach perfection by embedding itself in the heart of the society. He did not, however, live to what he preached. Unlike people like Trotsky and Gandhi, who lived the life that they advocated, Marx, even though he wrote about the plight of the proletarians, he lived a relatively bourgeoise one most of his life.
Marx suffered from a debilitating medical condition, probably, hyderanitis suppuritiva which is a chronic inflammatory scarring condition of the sweat glands. He lost three of his children to illness. His lowest ebb in life must have been when he fathered a love child with his home helper especially when his wife, Jenny was too! Every hero has a weak point but in came his friend, Engels, to take the rap. Only eleven mourners turned out at his funeral.
Correctly or not, his writings through his publications, namely 'Communist Manifesto' and 'Das Kapital', were manipulated by people with self-serving intentions to be used as a blueprint for the subsequent communist states like the Soviet Union and China. The experiment apparently proved to be disastrous, causing loss of lives to famine, torture and the detention camps. The collapse of the fall of the Berlin Wall is evidence of another failure of yet another economic model. Marx had created a monster just like how he referred to capitalism.
In the wake of recurrent economic collapse around the world, capitalism is also reevaluated, and Marxian thoughts are given a second thought.
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