Welcome to the third and final part of the story of the Labour Party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer.

Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 initiates Labour’s longest period in opposition and its deepest identity crisis: Bennites to the left, SDP defectors to the right. After Michael Foot leads Labour to its worst vote share since 1918, Neil Kinnock takes on the long and painful job of rebuilding the party in the face of Thatcherism. Following another two defeats, the task of modernisation passes to John Smith but his sudden death enables Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to go even further, determined to transform the party and erase the trauma of 1983.

Labour’s spectacular 1997 landslide seems to confirm the agenda of New Labour and the nebulous political project known as the Third Way. But its many achievements are limited by its caution, duelling egos and ideological vagueness. Is Labour still a socialist party in any meaningful way or has it disowned too much of its heritage? By the time Brown becomes PM in 2007, New Labour is exhausted and rudderless.

History repeats itself: another heavy defeat, another pivot to the left. When Jeremy Corbyn replaces Ed Miliband, the left is in charge for the first time in 80 years — the revenge of the Bennites — but Labour’s fortunes are hostage to the chaos of Brexit. An impressive advance in 2017 turns into a crushing humiliation in 2019. New leader Keir Starmer mounts a speedy recovery but soon finds himself desperately unpopular: accused of squandering a remarkable comeback by lacking vision and waging an unprecedented war against the left. With new challengers to the left and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK threatening to form the most right-wing government in British history, the stakes are once again existentially high.

How did Thatcherism cast Labour into the wilderness? How did Neil Kinnock make the party viable again? Did Tony Blair ever develop a coherent theory of progressive politics? Could Jeremy Corbyn ever have succeeded? Why do Labour’s left and right keep making the same mistakes? What can Labour’s history tell us about Keir Starmer’s current problems? And is it still a party of democratic socialism?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

Histories

• Andy Beckett – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024)

• Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey – Centrism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022)

• Owen Jones – This Land: The Struggle for the Left (2020)

• David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999)

• John O’Farrell – Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter (1998)

• Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire - Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (2020)

• Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010)

• Andrew Rawnsley – Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour (2001)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Origin Story season eight: The Story of Socialism. This week, we continue the tale of the UK Labour Party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer.

It’s 1940 and Clement Attlee’s Labour has joined the wartime coalition with Winston Churchill’s Tories, making it seem for the first time like a natural party of government and paving the way for its surprise 1945 landslide. Despite enormous obstacles at home and abroad, Attlee’s ageing all-stars lay the foundations of post-war Britain, from the NHS to NATO. How did they pull it off?

Losing office in 1951 kicks off the wilderness years. Civil war rages between followers of the left-wing titan Nye Bevan and the revisionist Hugh Gaitskell as Labour struggles to find a purpose in a decade of growing affluence and relative consensus. A new socialism of liberty and equality battles with the old socialism of nationalisation while fresh divisions open up over Europe and the Cold War. After 13 years, the shrewd unifier Harold Wilson leads Labour back to power and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins leads a liberalising revolution in British life. But is social democracy still socialism?

If 1970 is an unexpected defeat, then 1974 is an unexpected victory —and a very mixed blessing. Wilson and his successor James Callaghan preside over five years of crisis and precarity as the post-war consensus cracks and crumbles. The born-again socialist Tony Benn and the liberal Europhile Roy Jenkins represent two poles of an increasingly fractious party. When Margaret Thatcher sweeps to power in 1979, Labour returns to the wilderness and faces its worst identity crisis yet.

Why was the Second World War the making of the Labour Party? Who, or what, killed the post-war consensus? How did Labour governments navigate one crisis after another? How did its theory of socialism evolve to meet a changing electorate? And why does every Labour government leave the left disappointed?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

Histories and Biographies

• Andy Beckett – When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009)

• Andy Beckett – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024)

• John Bew – Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016)

• John Campbell – Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (2015)

• Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey – Centrism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Michael Foot – Aneurin Bevan: A Biography: Volume Two: 1945-1960 (1966)

• Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022)

• Jam Tomorrow podcast, written and presented by Ros Taylor (2023-24)

• Roy Jenkins – A Life at the Centre (1992)

• David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999)

• Ben Pimlott – Harold Wilson (1993)

• Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010)

• Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson (2019)

• Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success and Failure from Butler to Corbyn (2021)

• Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (1996)

• Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party: Fourth Edition (2015)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Origin Story season eight: The Story of Socialism. This week, in the year of its 125th anniversary, we begin the tale of the UK Labour Party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer.

“The British Labour Party is an expression of the Socialist movement adapted to British conditions,” wrote Clement Attlee. But British socialism meant different things to different people. When the Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1900, its socialism was a tense alliance of Marxists and liberals, hard-nosed trade unionists and Fabian intellectuals, puritans and hedonists, pragmatists and romantics. From the start, they were arguing about everything from alcohol to war. It was the job of two remarkable Scotsmen to keep it united: the eccentric idealist Keir Hardie and the canny, charismatic Ramsay MacDonald.

The social upheaval of the First World War turned Labour into a mass party which supplanted the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories and took office for the first time in 1924. MacDonald’s minority government lasted for just over eight months but it proved that Labour could be a respectable party of government and not reckless “wild men” under the spell of Moscow.

MacDonald returned to Number 10 in 1929 but his second government was capsized by the Wall Street Crash and ended two years later in rupture, betrayal and trauma. While some Labour MPs joined MacDonald’s National Government, most lost their seats, leaving the surviving leadership troika of George Lansbury, Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps to rebuild the party amid the turmoil of the Great Depression and rising fascism. The challenge was existential. In 1935, Lansbury was felled by his untimely pacifism and Attlee took the job that nobody predicted he would hold for the next 20 years.

We conclude, as tradition dictates, on the eve of the Second World War: the cataclysm that will be the making of the Labour Party.

Why did British socialism break from Marx? What different traditions did Labour pull together and how did Hardie and MacDonald make them cohere? How did MacDonald go from hero to villain? Has the Labour Party always been at war with itself? And — pub quiz! — which four Labour leaders had the first name James?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: https://incogni.com/originstory

• See Origin Story LIVE at The Tabernacle on November the 13th. Buy tickets here.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

Histories and Biographies

• John Bew – Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016)

• Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024)

• Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022)

• Bob Holman – Keir Hardie: Labour’s Greatest Hero? (2010)

• David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999)

• Henry Pelling – The Origins of the Labour Party 1880-1900: Second Edition (1965)

• Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010)

• Donald Sassoon – One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (1996)

• Andrew Thorpe – A History of the British Labour Party: Fourth Edition (2015)

• David Torrance – The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government (2024)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• See Origin Story LIVE at The Tabernacle on Thur Nov 13. ⁠Buy tickets here.

Welcome to the third and final part of the story of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin: Terror.

It’s 1929 and the age of Stalin has begun. His mission to revolutionise the Soviet economy succeeds at the price of millions of lives: kulaks are murdered en masse while Ukrainians starve in the man-made famine known as the Holodomor. In 1936 he commences the purge known as the Great Terror, which radiates out from the highest levels of the Communist Party to ravage the entire country. Nobody is safe in Stalin’s nightmare state.

While communists abroad excuse or actively endorse Stalin’s atrocities, some socialists and ex-communists recognise that this is the antithesis of what socialism should be and sound the alarm. Stalin has no fiercer critic than Trotsky, but his former rival flounders in exile and meets a sticky end. The USSR’s international reputation is complicated by the rise of Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War. Is Stalin Hitler’s worst enemy, his gullible enabler or his unlikely friend? Turns out it’s all three.

Stalin’s murderous paranoia fails him just once: he ignores warnings that Hitler will break the Nazi-Soviet Pact and launch an invasion in 1941. The war claims as many as 27 million Soviet lives. Victorious, Stalin sets about strangling hopes of post-war liberalisation and taking control of Eastern Europe — the Cold War begins. Trapped in his cult of personality and endless suspicions, he seems set to launch a new, antisemitic purge in 1953 until death mercifully intervenes. He leaves behind a powerful but traumatised country, a very long way from the hopes of 1917.

How much of what the USSR became can be pinned on Stalin’s disastrous personality? What was it like to live and die under his regime? What was the relationship between economics and mass murder? How did the Second World War transform Stalin? How similar were Stalinism and Nazism, the two faces of totalitarianism? And why did so many western communists become accomplices to terror?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002)

• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (2003)

• Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (2012)

• Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017)

• Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (1938)

• Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (2008, first published 1968)

• The Death of Stalin, co-written and directed by Armando Iannucci (2017)

• Ian Dunt, How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)

• Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007)

• Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (1977)

• Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Essays (2011)

• Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2008)

• Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2017)

• Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)

• Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s

• Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019)

• Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (1938)

• Mr Jones, written by Andrea Chalupa and directed by Agnieszka Holland (2019)

• George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

• George Orwell, ‘The Freedom of the Press’ (1945, first published 1972)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• See Origin Story LIVE at The Tabernacle, London on Thur Nov 13. ⁠Buy tickets here.

Welcome back to Origin Story: The Story of Socialism as we resume the story of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin in part two: Power.

It’s 1917. The Bolsheviks have seized control of Russia, the world’s first socialist state, but they’re a small party in a very big country, besieged by enemies at home and abroad. No sooner has it extricated itself from the First World War than Russia is plunged into an existentially perilous civil war between the Reds and the Tsarist Whites and, well, everybody else. 

The war accelerates Russia's transformation into a dictatorship, with one-party rule, a secret police force and a ruthless disregard for human life. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 confirms that the dictatorship of the proletariat will brook no dissent.

Meanwhile in Germany, revolutionary hopes are crushed with the murder of German communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. As other communist uprisings also fail, Trotsky’s dream of world revolution fades and Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country” prevails.

As Lenin’s health collapses, a succession battle between Stalin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks begins that will last for most of the decade. It ends in 1929 with Stalin triumphant, Trotsky in exile, the dead Lenin a kind of deity, and the USSR’s age of terror ready to begin.

Could the progress of the revolution have been different without the brutal chaos of the Civil War or was tyranny always part of the plan? How did Stalin outwit his rivals to take over from Lenin, and how did Trotsky blow it? Why didn’t communist revolutions succeed anywhere else but Russia? How was the new regime perceived by socialists around the world? And did Rosa Luxemburg, more than anyone, represent the humane, democratic socialism that might have been?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (1938)

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (1954)

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 (1959)

• Ian Dunt, How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)

• Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988)

• Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

• Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2017)

• Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019)

• Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981)

• Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

• Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004)

• Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

• Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Study of Bolshevism (1939)

• Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: Against Kautsky (1920)

• Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994)

• H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (1920)

• Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1921)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• See Origin Story LIVE at The Tabernacle, London on Thur 13 Nov. ⁠Buy tickets here.

Welcome to Origin Story. The Story of Socialism is our first ever themed season and now we begin our first ever three-part story because there’s just so much to tell: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin.

Vladimir Lenin’s political journey begins in 1887 when he’s 17 and his older brother is executed for plotting to assassinate the Tsar. As Russian socialism pivots from rural agitation to Marxism, Lenin develops his own version of Marxism: violent revolution led by an elite vanguard rather than the masses, leading to a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat (details TBC).

Forced to leave Russia, Lenin wages a power struggle for command of its socialist exiles in Europe, splitting the party into his own aggressive Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks. In the process, he first meets the flamboyant writer and orator Leon Trotsky and the sullen Georgian activist who will become Stalin.

After the failure of Russia’s 1905 revolution, Lenin tightens his grip on the movement. In 1907, the socialists of the Second International pledge not to fight each other in a European war but the Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg predicts that nationalism will trump class solidarity when it comes to the crunch. She’s right. When the First World War begins in 1914, socialists take up arms and the Second International implodes. 

The war also finishes off the teetering Tsarist regime in February 1917 and a Provisional Government of liberals and socialists takes over, but it’s doomed from the start. Lenin races to Petrograd, where he reconnects with Trotsky and Stalin and convinces the Bolsheviks to stage a second revolution. In October, Petrograd revolts, the government caves in and Lenin takes charge of a vast empire of 125 million people — the world’s first socialist regime. Leninism has triumphed. The dictatorship of the proletariat can begin.

What was Leninism? How did one man redefine Russian Marxism and squash his rivals? How did he see the distinction between socialism and communism? What role did the very different personalities of Trotsky and Stalin play on the road to revolution? Was it only the war that made revolution possible, let alone inevitable? Who predicted years in advance that Bolshevism would mean tyranny? And is this really want Marx wanted? Join us as we begin one of the most earth-shaking stories of the 20 th century

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921 (1954)

• Ian Dunt, How to be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988)

• Oleg V Khlevniuk, Stalin: New biography of a dictator (2015)

• V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902)

• V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’ (aka the April Theses) (1917)

• V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)

• Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981)

• Kevin Morgan, ‘Rummaging in Trotsky’s dustbin or what does the left need with history?’ (2003)

• John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

• Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004)

• Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1932)

• Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994)

• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)
Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978)

• John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997)

• Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953)

• GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975)

• Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009)

• In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005)

• In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022)

• Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888)

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

• Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894)

• Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891)

• Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918)

• Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (2001)

• Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction: Second Edition (2018)

• Jonthan Sperber, Karl Marx: A 19th Century Life (2013)

• Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)

• Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition (1978)

• Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (1999)

• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A spectre is haunting Origin Story — the spectre of Karl Marx. Welcome back to season eight: The Story of Socialism. Last week, we explored the various socialisms that were exciting Europe when Marx was a young man. Now we turn to the man himself, and his close friend and ally Friedrich Engels. The landslide winner of an In Our Time poll to choose the most important philosopher of all time, Marx introduced gigantic new ideas that still inform our thinking whether you’re a Marxist or not.

Born in Prussia in 1818, Marx was on course to become one of many young German philosophers wrestling with the legacy of Hegel. But when he was frozen out of academia, journalism set him on a more confrontational, activist path. His extraordinary intellect was wrapped up in a spectacularly belligerent personality, addicted to vicious feuds and denunciations. He could start a fight in an empty room.

As he moved from Prussia to Paris to Brussels during the 1840s, Marx went on a political journey, too: from liberal to socialist to head of the Communist League. Along the way, he built the basic framework of Marxism: the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the value of labour, the volatile, insatiable energy of capitalism, and the dialectical progress of history. It was nothing less than a new way of understanding the world.

Marx’s first phase culminated in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the same year that revolution swept the great cities of Europe. Explaining its failure was the first task of Marx’s next phase as he left the continent for good, settled in London and embarked on the torturous process of writing his masterwork, Capital.

How did Marx become a communist? What did he owe to Hegel? Why was his friendship with Engels so essential? Why was he more dedicated to waging war on his former friends than his obvious enemies? Which rival socialist called him “the tapeworm of socialism”? And what exactly is dialectical materialism anyway?

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx wrote. “The point is to change it.” This is how he began to change it.

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978)

• John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997)

• Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953)

• GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975)

• Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009)

• In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005)

• In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022)

• Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888)

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

• Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894)

• Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891)

• Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to season eight of Origin Story. This season we’re trying something different: one big narrative across multiple topics. It’s the story of socialism, from the earliest blueprints to the present day, Lenin to Labour, Marx to Mao, Gramsci to Gorbachev and Proudhon to Piketty. We’re talking about the evolution of a powerful idea in all its manifestations and exploring how it came to encompass both Soviet communism and European social democracy. It’s arguably the most earth-shaking political concept of the last 200 years.

H.G. Wells summed up early versions of socialism as “a vast system of questionings and repudiations, political doubts, social doubts, hesitating inquiries, and experiments”. We begin in the wake of the French Revolution with the radical republican Gracchus Babeuf and his “enraged ones” calling for absolute equality. In France, the rebel aristocrat Henri de Saint-Simon imagined a progressive secular technocracy while Charles Fourier dreamt of communes in which the human spirit was liberated from drudgery and oppression. In the UK, the businessman Robert Owen modelled a new society based on cooperation and the fair exchange of labour. These so-called “utopian socialists” inspired numerous attempts to build a better world in miniature.

The 1830s and 1840s produced an explosion of new words to make sense of immense social change: socialism, communism, anarchism, capitalism. Thinkers like the utopian Étienne Cabet, the anarchist Joseph Proudhon and the politician Louis Blanc introduced concepts that are with us to this day, while the scholar Lorenz von Stein was the first to ask: what is the difference between socialism and communism anyway? (We’ll come back to this.) Out on the streets, Louis Blanqui championed revolutionary violence. And in 1848, actual revolution broke out in the great cities of Europe.

Soaking up all these ideas and developing their own version of communism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — the subjects of our next two episodes. But even as Marxism swept Europe at the end of the century, the American journalist Edward Bellamy revived utopian socialism and made it more popular than ever. That dream refused to die. 

What unites all these disparate visions that called themselves socialism? How did they feed into both Marxism and the Labour Party? How did America become the world’s biggest laboratory for socialist experiments? Why did they fail? And can a change in the economic system really transform human nature? Join us as we begin the epic story of socialism.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888, OUP edition 2007)

• James Boyle, What Is Socialism? (1912)

• Étienne Cabet, The Voyage to Icaria (1839)

• G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850 (1959)

• G.D.H Cole: Socialism in Evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• Leslie Holmes, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (2009)

• William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890)

• Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2020)

• John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870)

• Betrand Russell: Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918)

• Robert Service, Comrades: Communism: A World History (2007)

• George Bernard Shaw et al, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889)

• Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)

• H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (1908)

• Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

• Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History, The Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

British Chinese compose nearly one per cent of the British population, but they are culturally and politically ignored with precious little representation in politics or television.

In this Origin Story special edition, we trace the history of the British Chinese community, from the days of Roman Britain to the present day. Along the way, we see the construction of the first Chinatown in London's Limehouse, at the height of Empire, when ports function as joining-places for the world. We witness the racism that hit Chinese communities during the wars, when fear of 'Yellow Peril' and miscegenation resulted in deportation programmes against the very people who had helped Britain in the fight against Germany. And we follow the second triumphant wave of immigration in the 20th Century, in the restaurant business, as Chinese food helps democratise the practice of eating out in Britain.

We then look at the extraordinary accomplishments of the British Chinese in the modern era, particularly in education, culture and the economy. And we start to tease apart a richer, deeper story about multicultural Britain, one which is much more varied and surprising than people allow for in the barren conversation about immigration we read in the newspapers every day.

Support Origin Story on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod

Reading list

• William Poole, The Letters of Shen Fuzong to Thomas Hyde, 1687-88, British Library Journal, volume 2015, article 9

• Earle Gale, Chinese pathfinders paved the way in UK hundreds of years ago, China Daily

• Marc Horne, Extraordinary tale of first Chinese Scotsman, The Times

• Anonymous, William Macao

• Sylvia Hahn, Stanley Nadel (eds) Asian Migrants in Europe: Transcultural Connections

• Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez, The Chinese in Britain, 1800–Present 

• Anonymous, Liverpool Chinatown History

• Jody-Lan Castle, Looking for my Shanghai father, BBC.co.uk

• Anonymous, London by ethnicity: Analysis, The Guardian

• Emily Thomas, British Chinese people say racism against them is 'ignored', BBC.co.uk

• John Hills et al, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE. 

• Tze Ming Mok and Lucinda Platt, All look the same? Diversity of labour market outcomes of Chinese ethnic group populations in the UK, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

• Zain Mohyuddin and Sophie Stowers, Minorities Report: The Attitudes of Britain's Ethnic Minority Population, UK in a Changing Europe

• Anon, Chinese ethnic group: facts and figures, Gov.uk

• Anonymous, Ethnicity pay gaps, UK: 2012 to 2022, ONS• Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices