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Karl Marx

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Political People

                              Western Philosophy
   19th-century philosophy
   Karl Marx
         Name:       Karl Marx
        Birth:       May 5, 1818 ( Trier, Germany)
        Death:       March 14, 1883 (London)
   School/tradition: Marxism
    Main interests:  Political philosophy, Social philosophy, Philosophy of
                     economics, Politics, Economics, class struggle
    Notable ideas:   Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels), alienation and
                     exploitation of the worker, historical materialism
      Influences:    Aristotle, Democritus, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Sismondi,
                     Stirner, Smith, Ricardo, Rousseau, Goethe, Fourier
      Influenced:    Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Guevara, Sartre, Debord,
                     Frankfurt School, Negri, Fidel Castro, more...

   Karl Heinrich Marx ( May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883,
   London) was an immensely influential philosopher, political economist,
   and socialist revolutionary. While Marx addressed a wide range of
   issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class
   struggles, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the
   Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is
   the history of class struggles."

   At the same time as Friedrich Engels, Marx took part in the political
   and philosophical struggle of his times, writing the Communist
   Manifesto a year before the Revolutions of 1848, although the two
   events had nothing to do with each other. Marx had broken with his
   university environment, German Idealism and the Young Hegelians, and
   took part in the debates of the European workers' movement, in
   particular in relation with the First International founded in 1864. He
   published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867, a few years before
   the 1871 Paris Commune.

   The influence of his ideas, already popular during his life, was given
   added impetus by the victory of the Russian Bolsheviks in the 1917
   October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not
   significantly touched by Marxist ideas in the course of the twentieth
   century. The relation of Marx's own thought to the popular " Marxist"
   interpretations of it during this period is a point of controversy; he
   himself once said that "the only thing I know is that I'm not a
   Marxist" (in response to the views of a French Social-Democratic Party
   calling itself "Marxist").

   While Marx's ideas have declined in popularity, particularly since the
   collapse of the Soviet regime, they are still very influential today,
   both in academic circles, some worker movements, and in political
   practice, and Marxism continues to be the official ideology of some
   Communist states and political movements.

Life

   After studying philosophy and law in Prussia (Germany) being awarded a
   doctorate by the (then) University of Jena, he became a journalist. The
   claims that Marx was initiating what amounted to a religion date from
   correspondence as early as 1842, when Marx was still at the purely
   atheistic stage of his development.

   With his close friend Friedrich Engels, he wrote The Communist
   Manifesto in 1848, followed by numerous other works. Although Marx did
   not invent socialism, he soon dominated the movement, and his theories
   came to be known as Marxism.

   His radical ideas led to successive exiles which forced him to Paris,
   Brussels, and finally London, where he became a British citizen. There,
   Marx spent years reading, researching, and writing in the British
   Museum.

   While Marx was supported financially by Engels, he nevertheless lived
   in poverty with his wife Jenny von Westphalen, their children and maid,
   Helene Demuth. With his wife, Marx had six children, although only
   three survived into adulthood: Jenny (1844-1883), Laura (1846-1911) and
   Eleanor (1856-1898), who was a significant socialist in her own right.
   In addition, Marx fathered a son with Demuth, Frederic (1851-1929), who
   was put out to adoption; Marx never acknowledged his paternity.

   His association with Engels concluded with the three-volume Das
   Kapital, the last two volumes of which Engels wrote from Marx's rough
   notes and manuscripts. Other works by Marx were not published until the
   twentieth century.

Influences on Marx's thought

   Marx's thought was strongly influenced by:
     * The dialectical method and historical orientation of Georg Wilhelm
       Friedrich Hegel;
     * The classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;
     * French socialist and sociological thought, in particular the
       republican conception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Pierre-Joseph
       Proudhon's critique of private property;
     * German Idealism and the young Hegelians, in particular Ludwig
       Feuerbach.
     * Antique materialism ( Democritus and Epicure's theory of clinamen)
     * The anti-capitalist struggle in the English industrial region of
       Lancashire

   Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically
   and discern tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social
   conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded, therefore, that a
   communist revolution was inevitable. This conception, shared by the
   young Marx (who formulated it in the Communist Manifesto but later
   abandoned it), however, did not entail fatalism. In the eleventh Thesis
   on Feuerbach (1845), Marx had famously asserted that "philosophers have
   only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to
   change it"; he thusly opposed praxis (the unity of theory and practice)
   to idealist interpretations which opposed themselves as various
   philosophical Weltanschauung. Marx thus cut with Prussian university in
   order to work with the labour movement in order to try to alter the
   world. Consequently, most followers of Marx have been activists who
   believed that revolutionaries must organize social change.
   G. W. F. Hegel
   Enlarge
   G. W. F. Hegel

   Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism
   (controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism
   by Engels and Lenin, a term never used by Marx himself) is certainly
   influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed
   dialectically. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is
   characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete
   and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater
   rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of
   the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other
   times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals
   against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed
   slavery in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a
   time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their
   civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history,
   Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in
   materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of
   reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet.

   Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which
   rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach.
   In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a
   creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are
   really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the
   material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences,
   not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx
   distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe
   that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on
   the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific
   ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their
   lives clearly.

   The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was
   Engels' book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,
   which led Marx to conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of
   class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most
   progressive force for revolution.

Marx's thought

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   The legacy of Marx's thought is bitterly contested between numerous
   tendencies who claim to be Marx's most accurate interpreters, including
   Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and libertarian Marxism.

   Marx's philosophy hinges on his view of human nature. Along with the
   Hegelian dialectic, Marx inherited a disdain for the notion of an
   underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their
   views by contrasting “nature” with “history”. Sometimes they use the
   phrase “existence precedes consciousness”. The point, in either case,
   is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is — social
   context takes precedence over innate behaviour; or, in other words, one
   of the main features of human nature is adaptability. Nevertheless,
   Marxist thought rests on the fundamental assumption that it is human
   nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation
   " labour " and the capacity to transform nature labour power. For Marx,
   this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is
   intimately tied to the active role of human consciousness:

          A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver,
          and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of
          her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the
          best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in
          imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I,
          Chap. 7, Pt. 1)

   Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how
   one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that
   work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and
   through which people work are socially determined and change over time.

   Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the
   means / forces of production, literally those things, such as land,
   natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the
   production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other
   words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as they
   acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the
   mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the
   mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed
   from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In
   general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly
   than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new
   technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to
   regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic)
   base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption
   and conflict.

   Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not
   only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of
   people, or classes. As a materialist and claiming to be making a
   scientific analysis, Marx did not understand classes as purely
   subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified
   with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective
   criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different
   classes have divergent interests, which is a source of social
   disruption and conflict. Marx proposed to study history (he meant
   written history; Marx and Engels accepted claims by some contemporary
   anthropologists that non-literate societies were not class-stratified)
   in terms of such conflicts:

          The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
          class struggles. (The Communist Manifesto, Chap. 1)

   Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most
   fundamental resource of all, their own labour power. Marx wrote
   extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with
   the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but
   developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that
   one may give up ownership of one's own labour — one's capacity to
   transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own
   nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of
   commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce,
   commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which
   humans and their behaviour merely adapt. This disguises the fact that
   the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and
   reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism,
   social relationships of production, such as among workers or between
   workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including
   labor, that are bought and sold on the market.

   Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false
   consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of
   ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a
   particular class at a particular time in history, but which are
   presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only
   that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important
   political function. Put another way, the control that one class
   exercises over the means of production includes not only the production
   of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as
   well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a
   subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests).
   Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form
   some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief
   that the things people produce are actually more productive than the
   people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact
   (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are
   alienated from their own labour-power. Another example of this sort of
   analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage
   from the preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
   Philosophy of Right:

          Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression
          of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion
          is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless
          world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of
          the people.

   Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social
   function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the
   social function as a way of expressing and coping with social
   inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.

Political economy

   Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity
   fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to
   capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants
   bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of
   production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity —
   when peasants became free to sell their own labor power, and needed to
   do so because they no longer possessed their own land. People sell
   their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever
   work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not
   selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In
   return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows
   them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power are "
   proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone
   who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "
   bourgeoise." The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.

   Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists.
   Merchants buy goods in one market and sell them in another. Since the
   laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often
   a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and
   another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the
   difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists,
   on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor
   market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the
   capitalist. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry
   input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the
   difference " surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its
   source in surplus labour, the difference between what it costs to keep
   workers alive and what they can produce.

   The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth
   because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits
   in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the
   most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the
   means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to
   periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest
   more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since
   Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source
   of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the
   economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the
   result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of
   the economy would collapse. Marx understood that during such a crisis
   the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the
   investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the
   economy.

   Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be
   punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that
   the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the
   enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the
   impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the
   proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage
   social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of
   production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought
   that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a
   massive, well-organized and violent revolution would in general be
   required, because the ruling class would not give up power without
   violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a
   dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the
   working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor -
   must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his Critique of
   the Gotha Program, "between capitalist and communist society there lies
   the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the
   other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in
   which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of
   the proletariat." Yet he was aware of the possibility that in some
   countries, with strong democratic institutional structures (e.g.
   Britain, the US and the Netherlands) this transformation could occur
   through peaceful means, while in countries with a strong centralized
   state-oriented traditions, like France and Germany, the upheaval will
   have to be violent.

Main works

Das Kapital

   Das Kapital (or Capital in English) is written over three volumes, of
   which only the first was complete at the time of Marx's death. As a
   finished work, it represents Marx's most important and comprehensive
   work of economics.

   The work both builds upon and critiques the classical political economy
   of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, whilst presenting
   withering criticism both of the economics of "utopian" socialists and
   "vulgar" bourgeois economists. Alongside the theoretical discussion,
   there is a detailed empirical and historical account of the capitalism
   of his day, especially the social and economic conditions of
   mid-nineteenth century Northern England. The first volume, and
   especially the first chapter of that volume, contains the core of the
   analysis and the critique of commodity fetishism. Hegel's
   methodological legacy is strongly evident, and Marx urges the reader to
   approach the work with that characteristic thoroughness. According to
   his prescriptions, the method of presentation proceeds from the most
   abstract concepts, incorporating one new layer of determination at a
   time and tracing the effects of each such layer, in an effort to arrive
   eventually at a total account of the concrete relationships of everyday
   capitalist society.

Grundrisse

   Marx was involved in a huge ongoing work-in-progress, which was only
   published posthumously over a hundred years later as Grundrisse. These
   sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research
   on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the
   study of " primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production,
   in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than
   heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marx-scholars.
   In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages
   that Hegel explicitly stated (often in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as
   in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History), Marx pursues in these
   research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical
   changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing
   them into a teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal
   productions throughout the world and the critical importance of
   collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism.

   Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and
   appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in
   his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of
   North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; and
   sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and
   indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the
   Ethnological Notebooks that he kept during his last years, all point to
   a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his
   deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological
   straitjacket, including that of Marxism itself (a famously telling
   anecdote is the one in which Marx quipped to Paul Lafargue "All that I
   know is that I'm not a Marxist").

Marx's influence

   Statue of Marx and Engels in the Marx-Engels Forum, Berlin.
   Enlarge
   Statue of Marx and Engels in the Marx-Engels Forum, Berlin.

   Marx and Engels' work covers a wide range of topics and presents a
   complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations.
   Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a
   grand, cohesive theoretical outlook dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there
   have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's
   writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and
   conditions. Moreover, it is important to distinguish between "Marxism"
   and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly before he died in 1883,
   Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to
   his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary
   phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles; "if
   that is Marxism" — paraphrasing what Marx wrote — "then I am not a
   Marxist").

   Essentially, people use the word " Marxist" to describe those who rely
   on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. "mode of production", "class",
   "commodity fetishism") to understand capitalist and other societies, or
   to describe those who believe that a workers' revolution as the only
   means to a communist society. Some, particularly in academic circles,
   who accept much of Marx's theory, but not all its implications, call
   themselves " Marxian" instead.

   Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the " Second
   International" as a base for continued political activism. This
   organization was far more successful than the First International had
   been, containing mass workers' parties, particularly the large and
   successful German Social Democratic Party, which was predominantly
   Marxist in outlook. This international collapsed in 1914, however, in
   part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary"
   socialism, and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War
   I.

   World War I also led to the Russian Revolution in which a left splinter
   of the Second International, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin,
   took power. The revolution influenced workers around the world into
   setting up their own section of the Bolsheviks' " Third International".
   Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx,
   and developed a political program, called " Leninism" or "Bolshevism",
   which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized
   " Communist Party."

   Marx believed that the communist revolution would take place in
   advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany and England, but
   Lenin argued that in the age of imperialism, and due to the "law of
   uneven development", where Russia had on the one hand, an antiquated
   agricultural society, but on the other hand, some of the most
   up-to-date industrial concerns, the "chain" might break at its weakest
   points, that is, in the so-called "backward" countries.

   In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that
   peasants and not just workers could play a leading role in a Communist
   revolution in third world countries still marked by feudalism whose
   majority of workers were peasants, not industrial workers. This was
   termed by Mao as the New Democratic Revolution. As a departure from
   Marx's understanding of the socialist revolution that maintained that
   the revolution must take place with countries that have already gone
   through the capitalist stage of development first and have produced the
   proletarian class as the majority, which is to carry out the
   revolutionary transformation of society into a socialist country and
   communist world. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be
   internationally known as Maoism.

   Under Lenin, and increasingly after the rise to power of Joseph Stalin,
   the actions of the Soviet Union (and later of the People's Republic of
   China) came in many people's mind to be synonymous with Marxism, with
   its attendant suppression of the rights of individuals and workers in
   the name of the struggle against capitalism, including the execution of
   large numbers of people under Stalin, a fact which has been used by
   anti-Communists against Marxism. However, there were throughout
   dissenting Marxist voices — Marxists of the old school of the Second
   International, the left communists who split off from the Third
   International shortly after its formation, and later Leon Trotsky and
   his followers, who set up a " Fourth International" in 1938 to compete
   with that of Stalin, claiming to represent true Bolshevism.
   Statue of Marx and Engels in the Statue Park, Budapest.
   Enlarge
   Statue of Marx and Engels in the Statue Park, Budapest.

   Coming from the Second International milieu, in the 1920s and '30s, a
   group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research
   in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and
   Herbert Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the
   Frankfurt School. Their work is known as Critical Theory, a type of
   Marxist philosophy and cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel,
   Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.

   The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and
   Bolshevism in several key ways. First, writing at the time of the
   ascendance of Stalinism and fascism, they had grave doubts as to the
   traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second,
   unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic
   determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized
   by both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political
   practice for divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and
   turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise.

   Influential Marxists of the same period include the Third
   International's Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the
   Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism.

   In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal
   and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United
   States independent of the Communist Party.

   In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent
   and scientific theory of history by restating its central tenets in the
   language of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism,
   an academic movement which also included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski
   and John Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx
   within the academy, as is the Israeli Shlomo Avineri.

   The following countries had governments at some point in the twentieth
   century who at least nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still
   do as of 2006): Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China, Cuba,
   Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova,
   Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia,
   Somalia, the USSR and its republics, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In addition,
   the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal have had Marxist
   governments.

   Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined
   since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most
   notably Nepal.

   According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and
   1992 Karl Marx was the most cited authority overall, followed by a
   Marxist: Vladimir Lenin.

   Marx was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential
   figures in history, and #3 on the German television show " Unsere
   Besten".

   In July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner of the 'Greatest Philosopher
   of All Time' poll by listeners of the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time.
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