The Last Years of Karl Marx

Revolutionary Left Radio

Breht O'Shea

Communism, Politics, Liberalism, Society & Culture, Philosophy, News, History, Leftwing, Socialism, Marxism

4.8 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2024

⏱️ 100 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Author and Scholar Marcello Musto joins the show to discuss his book "The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography".

Together, Marcello and Breht explore the last couple years of Karl Marx's life, including his personal tragedies and illnesses as well as his continued study, travels, and theoretical development. They discuss and counter the criticisms that Marx was irredeemably euro-centric, didn't wrestle with the question of colonialism, or was a class reductionist, while also diving into his relationship with his wife and children, his best friend and colleague Engels, his analysis of Russia, and finally, his own death.

Marcello Musto is a Professor of Sociological Theory at York University, in Toronto – Canada, where he is the founding director of the Laboratory for Alternative Theories. He is acknowledged globally as one of the authors who has made significant contributions to the revival of Marx studies over the last decade and his research interests also include Socialist thought, the history of labour movement, and alternative socio-economic systems. His work has been translated worldwide in twenty-five languages and among his publications there are four single-authored books and twelve edited volumes.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. We have a really fascinating
0:10.1	discussion for you today. Today we have on this scholar Marcello Musto to talk
0:16.2	about his book The Last Years of Carl Marx and Intellectual Biography in which he
0:22.3	masterfully weaves together the theoretical intellectual
0:26.1	work of Karl Marx, political work of Karl Marx, and his personal life, particularly in the last
0:31.2	two years of his life. He corrects a lot of misconceptions about
0:35.6	Marx, the idea that Marx was Eurocentric, the idea that he was a class reductionist,
0:41.5	you know, all these critiques we hear about Marx. He
0:44.5	corrects a lot of those. He also shows the human side of Marx. Marx losing
0:48.6	his beloved wife, Marx losing his daughter a few months before Marx himself passed away the deep relationship
0:55.4	that he had throughout his life with angles and how Angles beautifully after Marx's death
1:01.4	not only spoke about Marx but continue to work the rest of his life to ensuring
1:07.1	that that Marx and him and Engels has worked together would live on and a lot of his stuff that wasn't published would get published
1:15.1	that the works of theirs would be translated that political leaders or
1:19.6	around the continent would have you know the direct access to what Marx actually
1:25.2	thought and Engels would continue to clarify Marx's thought. So just a
1:29.5	really fascinating interweaving of the intellectual work that Marx was doing at the end of his life as well as his personal life.
1:36.2	Mark's his health issues, his attempts to travel at the end of his life to try to find respite from his illnesses, always, always with the ultimate goal being
1:46.5	that he would be able to get better so that he could finish capital.
1:50.0	Of course we know now he wasn't fully able to do but thank goodness that Angles lived another 12 years after Marx's death and could continue to build on his work and get his work out to the world and continue to influence people to this very day.
2:04.0	So I couldn't ask for a better guess. This is a really fascinating wide-ranging discussion.
2:08.0	We didn't even get to all the questions. There are some, there are still things I want to talk about, so we definitely going to have a Marcello back on the show
	...

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