Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The words that get used are immiserization or pauperization, meaning more and more people are being turned into paupers. But for Marx, that prediction is really key. And even in his own lifetime, there were already hints that, in fact, if you looked sociologically at the really developed working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany, that process was not playing out as he had expected.
In fact, although there have been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering in the early chaotic sort of Wild West stages of capitalism and of industrialization, there had been reform movements as well. And there had been unions which had sought to carve out rules and agreements with employers for how the conditions under which workers labored might be ameliorated.
Moreover, the middle class, rather than dwindling and dwindling, seem to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers of the appearance of new kinds of people like white-collar workers or technical experts.
Well, the... To describe the 19th century as sort of an age of ideologies is very apt because Europe is being racked and being put through the ringer of nationalism, demands for self-expression of peoples who earlier have been in empires or under monarchical rule, demands to redraw the map.
And the tremendous transformations of the Industrial Revolution meant that in the course of about a generation, you would have seen the world around you change in ways that made it entirely unfamiliar. You'd be able to travel across the landscape at speeds that had been unthinkable when you were a child. So it's enormous change and demands for yet more change.
And so it's a great mix of ideas, ideologies, the old and the new, religious ideas, religious revivals, as well as demands for secularization. And stepping into all of this are Marx and Engels together in what has been called, I think with justice, one of the most important and influential intellectual partnerships of history. They were very different men. They were both German by origin.
Marx had trained as an academic. He had married the daughter of a baron. Because of his radical ideas, he had foreclosed or found himself cut off from a possible academic career and went the route of radical journalism. Engels was very different. Engels was the son of an industrialist, and the family owned factories in Germany and in England.
So he was most definitely not a member of the proletariat that he and Marx were celebrating as so significant in their future historical role. There were also huge differences in character between these men. Marx, when people met him, they were astonished by his energy and his dynamism. They also saw him as a man who felt determined to dominate arguments.
He wanted to win arguments and was not one to settle for compromise or a middle road. He was disorderly in his personal habits. We might mention, among other things, that he impregnated the family he made and didn't accept responsibility for the child. He was also not inclined to undertake regular employment in order to support his growing family. That's where Engels came in.
Engels, essentially from his family fortune and then from his journalism afterwards, supported both himself and the Marx family for decades. And so in a sense, Engels made things happen.
In the mysterious way that friendships work, the very differences between these men made them formidable as a dynamic duo because they balanced off one another's idiosyncrasies and turned what might have been faults into potential strengths. British historian A.J.P. Taylor always has a lovely turn of phrase, even when he's wrong about a historical issue. In this case, he was right.
He said that Engels had charm and brilliance. Marx was a genius. And Engels saw himself as definitely the junior partner in this relationship. But here's the paradox. Without Engels, pretty clearly, Marx would not have gone on to have the sort of lasting historical impact in the world of ideas that he had.
I think that it's a part of a great conversation, right? I think that in their works, they're reacting to one another. I mean, Dostoevsky's thought ranges across the condition of modernity, and he definitely has things to say about industrialization. I think that... They react to one another in these oblique ways rather than always being at each other's throats in direct confrontations.
And that's what makes the 19th century so compelling as a story just because of the sheer vitality of the arguments that are taking place in ways big and small. Right.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is definitely a factor in the entire history that we're referencing. Marx and Engels never really shed their identity as Germans.
Many of their preconceptions, even those traces of nationalism that they had within themselves, even as they were condemning nationalism as a fraud against the working class, clearly their entire formation had been affected by their German background. And it's very true, as you point out, that Germany is intended to be the place where these predictions will play out.
Also in Britain, also in France, also eventually in the United States. But it's Germany by virtue of its central location and then its rapid development later than Britain or France in industrialization give it this special role in Marx's worldview.
And so it's a lasting irony or a central irony of this whole story that when a government establishes itself that claims to be following Marxist prescriptions and realizing his vision, it happens in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, a place that did not match the requirements of being industrialized, developed well on its way in this historical process.
And nobody knew this better than the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his colleagues had a keen sense that what they were doing, exciting as it was, was a gamble. It was a risk because, in fact, the revolution to really take hold had to seize power in Germany. And that's why immediately after taking power, they're not sure they're going to last. Their hope, their promise of salvation is that
a workers' revolution will erupt in Germany, defeated Germany, in order to link up with the one that has been launched in this unlikely Russian location. And henceforth, great things will follow that do hew to Marx's historical vision. The last thing to mention about this is that this... predominance of Germany in the thinking of Marx had two other reflections.
Showing 41–60 of 414 · page 3 of 21
← Previous
Next →