PG Woodhouse once said that if you randomly send to anybody a telegram saying flee, all is discovered,

nine out of ten people will immediately get up and leave the country.

As the date for this lecture has grown closer, that sensation of the need to run away and the exposure of one's own imposture has grown stronger and stronger and so much so

that when news came out the other day that Lord Lucan had been spotted propping up the bar I think it

was in Namibia I was thinking well you know that doesn't sound so bad I've become increasingly

conscious of the crazed hubris involved in taking on a subject of this scale.

A subject was not only a gigantic primary literature in the text of Marx himself, but also what can

without exaggeration be called the biggest secondary literature on any subject in the world.

And here, of all places, mere feet away from where he wrote his biggest and most consequential book

so i think i should begin with multiple caveats the first and most obvious is that i'm not an

expert marx was an economist a philosopher and a historian and i am none of the above. I'm neither a Marxist nor a Marxian,

that's to say, I'm neither a fully paid up subscriber to Marx's ideas nor an expert in an all-serious

scholar of his work. When I write about subjects, I approach them from the outside, and deliberately so, and describe them as an outsider coming to the subject for the first time.

And I do that for a number of reasons, the main one of which is that if it's fresh to me, genuinely fresh to me, I think it's more likely to seem fresh to the reader.

In the case of Marx, though, it's possible, I say this before subjecting me to my thoughts on the subject, but it's possible that that's not the right way to do it.

I'm going to try to keep close to a primary encounter with Marx and his ideas, but it may be

that actually the accumulated expertise and knowledge in Marx scholarship,

combined with the difficulty of some of those primary texts.

I mean, actually, in fact, I think they're not quite as difficult as they're sometimes said to be

if you're given the time and space to think through what Marx is saying.

But they're still, they're pretty difficult. And combined with the accretion of argument

and appropriation around Marx, they make him a subject or maybe which you want a fully

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