The Mark Steel Lectures - Karl Marx

The terms communism, socialism and Marxism have been thrown around a lot lately, especially during the presidential elections, as code words for some scary political movement we'd be better off hating rather than understanding and maybe learning something from. What we often forget is that there is a person behind the 'isms'; someone whose proposals were an intellectual and insightful response to the social and political realities that plagued society not only in the 19th century but even today and the foreseeable tomorrow.

Even if his solutions might not measure up, you might say Marx's keen observations are based on timeless truths of social interaction which, as such, we ought to learn to recognize in our seemingly progressive world, for there might be more that remains the same despite appearances to the contrary...

Check out more of these funny Mark Steel Lectures, or a great conversation with philosopher Peter Singer about Hegel's dialectical philosophy and its influence on Marx, or learn the details about the modern means of production in 'The Story of Stuff.'

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