Original subtitles

Narrator: Dover.

The most dangerous man in Europe

is about to arrive on Britain's shores.

His preachings are so incendiary,

he's been forced out of his native country.

Only liberal Britain will tolerate his presence

on her soil.

He heads to London, to live in exile.

The year is 1849.

And the man is Karl Marx.

Incredibly, this most dangerous of thinkers might offer the key

to understanding the mess we're in today.

Most people know Marx as the father of communism.

You might be surprised to hear

that most of what he wrote was about capitalism.

And today, his ideas about that are being taken seriously

right at the heart of global business.

[indistinct clamouring]

- His analysis was pretty on the button

and explains a lot, I think,

about some of the things that we see going on

around in our economy today.

Narrator: For Marx, the best argument

against capitalism was that it was inherently unfair.

His ideas on inequality

have more resonance than ever, today.

- What Marx did do

is to install this sense of urgency -

things cannot go on forever

the way they are.

Narrator: In this series, we'll explore the lives

and revolutionary thinking

of three extraordinary men,

John Maynard Keynes,

Friedrich Hayek

and Karl Marx.

Their worlds were changing as never before.

They saw that the fate of nations

would hang on the power of money.

And they had radically different ideas

about how to control it.

Today, the stakes could hardly be higher.

Of all the great thinkers who analysed capitalism,

Marx had the most radical advice of all.

Get rid of it.

Narrator: In 1989,

Karl Marx's reputation lay in ruins.

For most of us,

the fall of the Berlin Wall

meant the end of Marx.

Millions rejected the horrors

of a violent and repressive police state.

And because the communist countries

claimed Marx as their inspiration,

his ideas were cast aside, as well.

Marx became associated with communism.

Indelibly associated with communism.

And indelibly associated with communist regimes,

because these regimes did their work

in the name of Marx.

So the association was very, very powerful.

In fact,

it was they who were claiming Marx

rather than Marx, as it were, claiming them.

Narrator: But in the last few years,

something strange has happened.

It's like the global financial crisis

has brought Karl Marx back from the dead.

Now, we still don't care what he said about communism,

but people are going back to see what he said about capitalism.

All its deep-seated flaws,

with a nagging doubt.

Is it all, now, coming true?

When times were good,

Marx was nowhere.

But now the Western economies are in crisis,

he's attracting new interest,

right at the heart of the economic establishment.

From a former IMF chief economist...

- Marx is right on a number of dimensions.

He certainly is right

that income inequality

can be a source of tremendous tension.

Narrator: ..to the man who saw the 2008 crisis coming...

- He understood that there are situations

in which capitalism and globalisation

can lead to economic crisis.

Narrator: ..and an economist at one

of the world's leading banks.

- It's quite hard to convince people

who live in Chelsea or Chelmsford

that this is of great relevance to them,

but, actually, it's worth a bash.

Narrator: Marx's key insight

was that capitalism was inherently unstable.

He said we'd lurch from crisis to crisis,

and that society would become increasingly unequal.

Marx divided the world into bosses and workers.

For him, they would always be at odds,

and that battle was a recipe for crises.

To make profit, bosses squeeze what they pay workers.

The crisis comes

when workers then don't have enough money

to buy what bosses are trying to sell them.

For decades after World War II,

all of that looked completely wrong.

We'd had years of stable growth,

and workers were taking a larger share of the pie.

But not anymore.

- Marx would explain this crisis in terms of the fact

that ordinary people

haven't got enough money to spend.

Why have they got enough money to spend?

Because there's been a big redistribution,

over the last few decades,

away from ordinary people

towards capital, towards wealth.

Narrator: And for Marx, there's no turning back.

Capitalism would produce bigger and bigger crises

and then, it would collapse.

- Marx had a very simple formulation

about crises,

which is that they are manifestations

of the fundamental flaws,

or contradictions, as he called them,

of capitalism.

How would Marx have suggested solving the crisis

is, of course, by abolishing capitalism.

Narrator: To understand the Marxist view

of the mess we're in,

we first have to see the world today

as Marx might have seen it.

Capitalism's most implacable critic was born

in the picture-postcard town of Trier,

in what is now Southwest Germany.

- Marx comes across as a young man,

as this, sort of, energetic,

fiery, hairy figure.

He was known as 'The Wild Boar' or 'The Maw',

which sort of points to his sort of Levantine complex.

He was full of ideas, he was full of debate.

He liked big drinking sessions

and then deep philosophical debate

about the nature of Christ and German Romanticism

and politics.

Narrator: As he studied, Marx came to believe

the world was sharply divided

into those who own the means of production,

the capitalists,

and those who owned nothing, the workers.

The conflict between these two groups,

for Marx, shapes how society works.

- The foundations of Marx's thinking

was materialism.

That when you cut away religion,

ideology, politics, at its root

were the material relations between man.

The need for food,

the need to have a roof over your head,

this is what ultimately drives so much of human interaction.

- What was unique in Marx,

he didn't see economy just as a special sphere.

He saw economy as the structuring principle

of the entire social totality.

And, so that what happens in economy,

the way it structures our ideologies and so on,

this, again, is another lesson today.

Maybe even more pertinent

than in the time of, times of Marx.

Narrator: We might see a complex modern economy,

which all of us have a stake in,

but Marxists would say

the same old rules still apply.

For them, the divided society Marx saw

is still, broadly, here today.

They see workers still slaving away.

And capitalists,

or bourgeoisie,

still exploiting them,

always striving to make more profit.

In Marx's world,

any capitalist that doesn't seek maximum profit

is soon replaced by one who does.

So, the system follows a completely predictable course,

he would say, to its own destruction.

It's not an idea that many people accept.

- He was completely wrong.

Including the idea

that capitalism was merely a phase,

and contained within it

the seeds of its own destruction.

That's not the case.

Well, everything is bound to collapse

if you wait long enough.

I mean, the Earth's going to, you know,

be sucked into the sun, someday. [chuckles]

And, of course, what we're really talking about

when we talk about capitalism,

is individual liberty and property rights.

Could those come to an end?

Well, they have in places. It's possible,

but I'm not seeing any signs of it.

Narrator: You'd be forgiven for thinking

the total collapse of capitalism

sounds a little implausible.

How could seeking profit

be so disastrous,

when it's done such amazing things?

Just look at how we eat, under capitalism.

We get fresh fruit flown in from all over the world.

We can choose from 700 types of breakfast cereal.

We have enough of it,

and it's all safe to eat.

This incredible plenty,

and the technology it depends on,

didn't come from the state.

It's what happens

when you let capitalists compete for profit.

They didn't do it for our benefit,

they did it because it made them rich.

So, at first glance, Marx's idea

that capitalism's search for profit

would be its downfall, sounds absurd.

- Profit may often sound venal, it may often sound wrong,

but it is what pushes progress ahead.

Profit is actually what drives the world forward.

And that's what Marx could never quite handle.

The profit motive is essential.

I mean, after all, what is the profit motive

if it's just a way of achieving

a better society,

by people wanting to better their own individual lot?

In terms of economics,

Marxism is not very much used today,

and that's because he was wrong on several of the fundamentals.

And if you erect a building on cracked foundations,

the building, itself, is cracked.

Narrator: When you think of how, fundamentally,

the profit motive has shaped and enriched our world,

it's no wonder Marx fell out of favour.

But we shouldn't dismiss Dr Marx quite yet.

It's true, he talked quite a lot

about class exploitation,

misery, chaos.

But he didn't think capitalism was all bad.

Far from it.

This cocktail bar in London's Soho

hides a revolutionary past.

It used to be The Red Lion Pub,

site of a clandestine meeting of communists in 1847

that would echo down the ages.

It was at that meeting that they commissioned

Karl Marx and his sidekick, Friedrich Engels,

to write one of the most incendiary pamphlets

of all time,

'The Communist Manifesto'.

It goes through a number of drafts.

Engels is the key drafter on the texts,

but then Marx takes it away,

and in a sort of, you know,

massive essay crisis style,

just sits down and writes the thing.

And that's the beauty of it.

Because it might have been organised by a committee,

but it's written by one man.

And that energy, that brio, that passion

which is in the manifesto, comes from the fact

it has a single author in the final stages,

which is Marx.

Narrator: You may know it for its revolutionary calls

for a new age.

What might surprise you is that it also contains

very perceptive and admiring writing about capitalism.

I think what's surprising of a lot of Marx's writing

is that you find, in amongst the communism,

a lot of good analysis of capitalism.

And, actually, you also find within it

quite a lot of praise for capitalism.

Marx's attitude towards capitalism

is basically ambiguous.

At the same time, he was honest here, Marx.

Ultra-fascinated.

He was fully aware that this

is the most productive, dynamic system

in the history of humanity, and so on.

He praises it for its huge force,

for, as far as he can see it, for progress.

For tossing aside the traditions and the customs of the old world

and making way for a new one.

And I think it's quite interesting

the more intelligent modern Marxists

feel much the same way.

Narrator: The truth is, Marx did understand

that the drive for profit

would achieve incredible things.

It's been the first to show

what man's activity can bring about.

It has accomplished wonders far surpassing

Egyptian pyramids,

Roman aqueducts

and Gothic cathedrals.

- He did really get the kind of global aspect.

He got the idea that

people were suddenly being able to get things

from all the way around the world,

in a completely new way, and the impact of that.

Narrator: The need of a constantly expanding market

for its products

chases the bourgeoisie

over the entire surface of the globe.

It must nestle everywhere,

settle everywhere,

establish connections everywhere.

It creates a world after its own image.

But you know, there's got to be a downside

for the bourgeoisie.

Modern bourgeois society is like the sorcerer,

who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld,

whom he has called up by his spells.

What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all,

is its own gravediggers.

Its fall,

and the victory of the proletariat,

are equally inevitable.

How can Marx think capitalism is so brilliant,

and, also, so doomed?

Well, the answer lies in how it treats the workers.

To understand Marx's analysis of crises,

we have to first understand

the capitalism that he knew.

19th century capitalists

might have built wonders surpassing Egyptian pyramids,

but they also forced their workers

to endure terrible conditions and pay.

- It is difficult to overstate the horror

of industrialisation in Europe.

In 1829,

Liverpool, for example,

the life expectancy at birth was about 28 years.

And that was the lowest age since the Black Death.

So, the impact of the Industrial Revolution

on life chances, on life expectancy,

in the great cities of Europe,

in Hamburg, in Berlin,

in Manchester, in Liverpool, in Birmingham, in London,

was absolutely terrifying.

This was a revolutionary epoch of change,

which, for the working classes,

which, for the proletariat, in the 1820s and 1830s,

had devastating consequences for their standards of living.

Marx is certainly revered amongst historians

as the pre-eminent analyst of mid-19th-century capitalism.

No-one before Marx, or possibly since,

had really, has really been able

to get into that system

of mid-19th-century Western-European capitalism,

based on a, kind of,

urban manufacturing set of relationships.

Whether that's relevant today is a very interesting question.

Narrator: The horrors of Victorian working conditions

clearly shaped Marx's economics.

In his time, minimum pay for proles

meant maximum profits for bosses.

And any bosses who did choose to pay more

usually went bust.

Subsistence wages will always be paid

in the Marxian system.

So, now, subsistence wages, of course,

is a little bit of a flexible object, right?

What we think of as the subsistence wage now

might not be the same as Marx thought it was

in the mid-19th century.

But still, there's no obvious way

that wages will arrive above a subsistence level.

He thought there'd always be downward pressure on wages,

and that wages would come down to the minimum

that enabled bare survival.

They couldn't go lower than that,

otherwise the workers would die.

But he thought they'd be depressed

down to that minimum.

The reality, of course, has been the opposite.

It has been a continual advancement

in wages - year in, year out, decade in, decade out.

Narrator: Marx was wrong.

He thought it would all get so bad,

the workers would overthrow the system.

Yet, even as he was writing,

reformers were beginning to get rid

of the worst employment practises.

Capitalism got kinder, not nastier.

But the idea that the competing interests

of bosses and workers would cause crises,

well, that does seem relevant today.

Marx wrote that the ultimate cause

of all real crises

always remained the poverty

and restricted consumption of the masses.

Put simply, if workers aren't paid enough,

they don't have enough money to spend in shops,

and the economy doesn't stay afloat.

Some believe this idea

is very useful in understanding the crisis

we're living through today.

Let's take a look at the last 40 years of history

through the prism of Marx's theories,

to show how they might explain the mess we're in.

An imaginary 'Marxist Broadcasting Corporation'

would see it all as a good old 1970s-style

class struggle.

The fight is over wages.

Capitalists want to pay less, the workers want to get more.

Man: [over megaphone] All those in favour,

please show!

Narrator: In the '70s, powerful trade unions

battled to keep wages high.

But then, we come to the '80s.

Fightback time for the capitalists.

There she is, look, can't you see her now? Look.

Narrator: Marx would have seen

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan

as acting purely in the interests

of the capitalist bosses.

It was their governments that helped business,

by getting rid of the obstacles

that made it hard to cut wages.

- The vilest intimidation we have seen

should never have happened.

It is the work of extremists.

It is the enemy within.

..and if they do not report for work within 48 hours,

they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.

Narrator: So, for the 'Marxist Broadcasting Corporation',

the capitalists won in the 1980s,

and they kept on winning.

The guaranteed high wages and job security

that workers had enjoyed until the '70s had gone.

And downward pressure on wages started to lay the seeds

of the crisis we see today.

It's an appealingly simple story,

but how much truth is there in it?

Well, we know the Marxist view of history

is right about one thing,

at least in Britain and America.

Earnings at the very top have soared

in the last few years,

and everyone else has been squeezed.

In Britain, real earnings have been flat

or falling for the best part of ten years,

since before the crisis.

In America,

that's been happening since the 1970s.

- In the United States,

a full-time male worker,

median income has stagnated

for a third of a century.

No increase.

Household income today

is the same as it was

15 years ago.

All the increase to the income has gone to the top.

The share of income

in the United States,

that was going to the top 1% of the households,

20 years ago,

was around 12%.

Today, that share is closer to 23%.

Narrator: Things haven't gone that far in the UK,

but inequality's certainly creeping up the agenda.

But rather than see it as a deliberate strategy

on the part of greedy capitalists,

we have to recognise there are bigger forces at work.

A lot of it's down to new technology.

Work previously done by hand

is now done by machines.

With fewer workers needed,

there are more competing for every job,

meaning bosses can pay them less.

But perhaps the most significant factor

is globalisation.

With falling barriers to trade around the world,

global business has gained access

to a giant new pool of cheaper labour.

- You have brought into the market, now,

millions and millions of new workers.

In China, in India, in other parts of Asia,

in parts of South America, Brazil, for instance.

So, that process has transformed

the capital labour ratio on a global scale.

- Clearly, competition from countries

around the world

has put pressure on certain jobs,

typically jobs that can be done at a distance.

So for example, an analyst,

can, as well, be sitting

in the Philippines or in Mumbai,

to do the job that is done

at a much higher price in New York.

Narrator: Many workers in the rich countries

are now competing with an industrial reserve army,

running into the billions.

- I think, in emerging market economies,

there'd be an overwhelming vote

in favour of what has happened

because almost everyone

is better off than they were, and would've been.

But that's less evident in the industrialised world,

and many lower-paid people have become even lower paid,

relative to those who've prospered.

And that is a concern.

Narrator: It's an analysis that rings true,

even for the leader of the world's biggest economy.

[applause]

- Long before the recession,

jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores.

Technology made businesses more efficient,

but also made some jobs obsolete.

Folks at the top saw their incomes rise

like never before.

But most hard-working Americans

struggled with costs that were growing,

pay cheques that weren't,

and personal debt that kept piling up.

Narrator: So, for Marx,

low wages would be the root cause

of the crisis we're living through today.

- Even leaving aside

the morality question of whether it's fair

to have a highly unequal distribution

of income and wealth,

even purely in terms of economic efficiency,

having that redistribution of income from labour capital,

from wages to profit,

there's a negative economic effect.

Because it tends to reduce aggregate demand,

because it reduces the income of those who tend to spend more.

Narrator: Of course, in the late 20th century,

that problem could be solved - temporarily, of course.

Step forward, the credit card.

You had more inequality,

you had more concern amongst the public,

and I think that put pressure to do something.

Democracies work well with pressure,

put pressure for the politicians to do something

for the people being left behind.

The right thing to do, in my view,

would've been focus much more on education,

on skill building.

What happened was a more shorter-term solution,

which was, give them credit.

Narrator: With consumer credit, people can carry on spending,

even if they haven't got the money.

The economy stays afloat,

and the capitalists still make their profit.

As we know, it went well beyond credit cards.

What ultimately brought the crisis to a head

was the billions borrowed on mortgages.

People thought the value of their house

would keep going up forever.

- Housing credit is beautiful.

Because if your house price is increasing,

and you're borrowing

against the increasing value of your house,

you don't feel you're borrowing your way into debt.

Narrator: But, of course, you are.

In America, it happened on a massive scale.

There, as we know,

the capitalists were getting richer and richer.

They couldn't spend all of their extra money.

Driven, as ever,

by the desire to make more profit,

they lent it out, in riskier and riskier ways.

The name given to this lending

might well be familiar -

subprime.

- What we did is, as the incomes of most Americans

were stagnating

or even declining, we said,

"Don't let it bother you.

"Keep spending as if your income was going up."

And they did that very well.

I mean, who would oppose it?

The banks were making money,

the households were getting their house,

the politicians will have happy constituents.

I mean, there is nobody who's going to be unhappy

in this process until it collapses.

Subprime is the endgame, if you like, of...

..the debt solution to the lack of a market.

And it's the culmination of trying to evade crises

which arise out of lack of effective demand

in the market.

And then what you do is you end up

creating a credit crisis, instead.

So subprime is the end of that process.

Narrator: And we all know how it ended.

In retrospect, it seems obvious,

lending to people who couldn't afford it

wasn't a lasting solution to anything.

It led to a housing bubble, which burst,

threatening some of the world's biggest banks.

And thanks to our integrated world,

what started in the United States spread

and infected the entire system,

causing a global recession.

Capital, when it's faced with a problem,

usually seeks to move it around.

It moves it from one sector to another,

or from one geographical region from another.

Any part of the world that's in economic difficulties

will seek to unload those difficulties

on another part of the world.

What will also happen is that,

if there's a problem in the banking system,

they will seek to move it into the state system,

and if it's a problem in the state system,

they'll try and move it

onto the taxation and austerity of the people

to extract the wealth

from a population.

Narrator: It's an extraordinary tale.

And a lot of people would say it's completely wrong.

Marxism doesn't actually work,

but it keeps coming back,

'cause it makes for a good story.

I don't think low wages played any role at all

in causing the crisis.

The crisis was caused

by governments and central banks flooding the market

with cheap credit and cheap money,

because politicians don't like the downturn

in an economy that throws people out of work.

I think it may have, to some degree,

increased the level of indebtedness

that people went into the crisis with,

which I think intensifies how deep the crisis became.

But it wasn't the underlying cause,

it was a contextual factor, which made it a bit worse.

Narrator: But the idea that low wages

may have contributed to the crisis is gaining ground,

in some surprising places.

- It was on this trading floor.

It was probably the weekend before Lehman's went bust

and it's, normally, a little bit noisy.

But at the time, you could hear a pin drop.

It was that deathly quiet.

And I could almost feel, you know,

that the global system was frozen.

And it was quite a scary thought.

It took me back to a lot of the things

that I used to read about and study

when I was much younger,

the days when I actually read Marx for fun.

It was a comment that I posted up on a newswire,

and it was one of the most commented-upon pieces

for quite a few weeks.

But there are a lot of people

who were quite opposed to the idea

that anything that was socialistic or Marxist

you know, could be a tool

considered serious in the mainstream.

A lot of this hate mail, I have to say,

came from the United States

and I was accused of being, you know, an Obama clone.

So there was a lot of negative reaction

from, I think, people that probably,

predictably, you know,

had already tied their own ideological colours

to the mast.

Narrator: But the people who do find value in Marx

aren't necessarily going to follow him all the way.

- I don't think anybody seriously believes

that, you know, this is all about,

the, you know,

dawn of the dictatorship of the proletariat,

or anything like this.

I think Marx helps in framing the problem,

but I think the solutions have to be different,

given the different environment we are in.

Narrator: Except, Marx would insist

the trap is inescapable.

Capitalists must seek profit above all else,

or they'll go out of business.

So why would they ever choose

to give workers a bigger share of the pie?

- What Marx would say is that

we have to look for ways out of this crisis

which look beyond the restoration

of capitalist-class power.

And I think this is a time

when we actually need to start thinking

about the revolutionary solution again.

Narrator: But who exactly is revolting against whom?

Marx divided the world neatly into workers and capitalists,

but today, his stark distinction is incredibly blurred.

Bosses work for themselves, and workers own shares.

In our modern world,

enough of us do have a stake in the system,

whether mobile phones or pension plans,

to stave off talk of armed revolt.

I think capitalism survives because, at its core, it works.

It pushes progress. It pushes people forward,

it appeals to a basic thing in people's lives,

which is to try and get ahead,

to try and improve things for their children.

The fact that more people win from it than lose from it

is the thing which keeps on pushing it ahead.

Narrator: But what about the people

capitalism's failing?

What does Marx have to say to them?

Incredibly, for all his criticism of capitalism,

he offers us next to no idea

of what a fairer alternative might look like.

As Marx entered his final years,

he seemed quite content with the way things were.

He'd been poor for a lot of his life,

but by 1856, he had enough money to move to London's suburbs.

The young firebrand

now looked like part of the establishment.

- He would spend his day walking around Hampstead Heath.

He would spend his day in correspondence.

He would spend his day, you know, reading 'The Times'.

He would worry about personal finances,

he would worry about his daughters

and the expense of their piano lessons.

I mean, he lived a remarkably bourgeois life,

in many ways.

Narrator: Marx didn't want to rush revolution.

To understand why,

we need to understand his analysis of world history.

He saw the great sweep of humanity's endeavours,

from the caveman

to the slave societies of Greece and Rome,

to the feudalism of kings and castles.

All of which was replaced, in turn,

by our own capitalist system

of bosses and workers.

- Heave, ho! [whip crack]

Narrator: Incredibly unfair,

but also, incredibly productive.

Marx said only when we'd got everything we could

out of capitalism,

could we afford to have a revolution.

In his words,

"The knell of capitalist private property sounds.

"The expropriators are expropriated."

All to be replaced by...

..more or less, nothing.

Irritatingly,

there's next to no alternative laid out.

- Marx, basically,

was not the one who simply gave us a blueprint,

you know, five stages after capitalism, communism,

here you have the basic guidelines,

what to do and so on. No, no!

It's up to us. He just opened up the field.

- Is there an alternative to capitalism?

I've no idea.

Well, I suppose there could be all kinds of alternatives,

dead-silence, starvation...

..or the end of the world or anything.

But I simply have no idea if there is an alternative.

It doesn't occur to me.

It doesn't seem, to me, to be of importance.

It's like saying, is there an alternative to weather?

I think he would have written a lot more,

had he lived ten years more,

on what a socialist republic would look like.

And, who knows?

But that might have saved the world a lot of bother.

[Soviet Russia anthem plays]

Narrator: Without his blueprint, we all know what happened next.

There weren't any revolutions

in the rich, developed countries,

as Marx predicted.

Instead, it happened in one of the world's poorest nations.

Soviet Russia may have left Marx far behind,

but it was an attempt to try something else.

And many have drawn lessons from its failure.

- The truth is, at the moment,

there are different forms of capitalism.

Some have slightly more social democracy,

some are closer to laissez-faire,

and there's a continuum between them.

But on the big argument, about whether you really want

to have a communist system or a capitalist one,

that is pretty much won everywhere, I think.

There are more humane versions of capitalism,

or more barbaric forms of capitalism.

But I don't think there's a systemic alternative

to capitalism.

Will there ever be? Yes, I would think so.

I mean, you know, nothing is forever.

Absolutely nothing.

And capitalism is not forever.

Narrator: But anyone looking for a fairer alternative

knows they can't ever repeat

what happened east of the Berlin Wall.

Dictatorship, political oppression,

and millions of ruined lives.

From 1945 till 1989,

this was the main remand centre for political prisoners

in communist East Germany.

Today, it's been turned into a memorial.

It's possible that places like this

explain why even capitalism's toughest critics today

seldom talk seriously about replacing it.

- You can see, with all of this protest

in Europe, Greece and so on...

I was in Spain, in Greece,

asking, always, the same question.

OK, what do you want?

Apart from some purely moralistic answers,

I didn't get any good, concrete proposals.

You know, answers like, "Oh, money should serve people,

"not people serving money."

My god, Hitler and everyone

would have agreed with this, I'm sure.

You would've thought,

that with this implosion of the banking system

at the heart of the capitalism in the United States,

versus the United Kingdom and so on,

there would be a huge rush

to Marxism and extreme socialism.

That hasn't really happened.

It is quite surprising, and I'm very pleased.

Narrator: But if memories of this place do fade,

could there ever be an alternative to capitalism?

Or should what happened here be a lesson for all time?

- I think, if you remove the free market,

you're removing people's ability, freely,

to trade with each other.

To acquire the things they want,

and sacrifice for them, the things that they value less.

You're removing people's ability

to enrich and improve their lives.

It is a perfectly natural part of the human condition.

Adam Smith said, the effort of every person

to improve their condition.

You know, he thought it was so basic.

If you deny people the opportunity to do that,

then you'll have to build some kind of compulsion into it.

You have to make people behave in a way

in which they would not spontaneously behave.

- If someone wants to seek an alternative to capitalism,

then they're saying, by seeking that alternative,

that capitalism is a system,

rather then a fact of life.

And they're saying that, for instance,

that human nature can be altered.

Fundamentally, they're revealing themselves

as utopian.

And the problem with utopia

is that it can only ever be approached

across a sea of blood,

and you never arrive.

- This is my big mantra,

when we leftists are accused of utopians.

Maybe, but the only real utopia

is to think that, with some cosmetic changes,

things can go on, indefinitely, the way they are now.

[crowd sings 'The Internationale']

♪ Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers ♪

♪ Arise ye criminals of want

♪ For reason in revolt now thunders ♪

♪ And at last ends the age...

Narrator: Marx died in 1883.

In a speech at his grave,

his long-time friend and collaborator,

Friedrich Engels, declared,

"His name and work will endure through the ages."

[singing of 'The Internationale' continues]

Narrator: For most of the 20th century,

his name did endure,

though usually for all the wrong reasons.

Still, there are plenty of people today

who still believe we should strive

for an alternative to capitalism.

- Marx did bring together

concrete economic analysis,

with a certain emancipatory hope.

The message, it's still a beautiful one -

maybe you ordinary people have a chance.

I'm not a great eulogiser, actually,

of anyone, to tell you the truth.

But if one were to write a tribute to him,

one would go back,

to Marx's favourite character in Greek mythology,

Prometheus, who gave the earthlings fire.

And that is what Marx gave citizens

all over the globe.

The fire necessary

to transform their lives, forever.

[singing of 'The Internationale' continues]

Narrator: But what value does Marx have

for those less inclined to revolution?

Fundamentally, Marx reminds us,

if capitalism doesn't work for everyone,

it might not work at all.

- There is no doubt

that there have been significant changes

in inequality

and in the distribution of income,

which make you pause about the benefits

of the developments of output and prosperity that we've seen.

And I don't think you can afford to believe

that the benefits of a market economy

in bringing prosperity will be there,

unless there is a collective commitment

to keep the system going.

And that does require people to believe

that everyone will benefit in the end.

I think some of the ugliness of capitalism

that he saw in the 19th century

seems to be reappearing in the 20th and 21st.

In a way, we have to keep our perspective on this.

Health conditions are much better,

living standards are starting from a higher level,

but it is still the case

that things aren't the way they ought to be,

and they're not moving in the way they should be.

We have to find a way of creating jobs

which are broad-based,

which pay reasonable amounts.

But at the same time, you know,

without sort of going against the basic laws of competition.

Narrator: Marx was right to see capitalism

as inherently unstable,

and often unfair.

Keynes and Hayek saw that, too,

but Marx was the first.

And, unlike them, he didn't think

we should find a way to live with it.

He said capitalism would bounce back

from crises and reinvent itself.

But, in the end, a compelling alternative

would appear, and capitalism would collapse.

For all that rings true, now, in Marx,

on that, he seems to have been dead wrong.

Captioned by Ai-Media ai-media.tv