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Origin Story

Origin Story

By: Podmasters
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 What are the real stories behind the most misunderstood and abused ideas in politics? From Conspiracy Theory to Woke to Centrism and beyond, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey dig into the astonishing secret histories of concepts you thought you knew. Want to support us in making future seasons? There are now two ways you can help out: • Patreon – Get early episodes, live Zooms, merchandise and more from just £5 per month. • Apple Podcasts – Want everything in one place with one easy payment? Subscribe to our premium feed on Apple Podcasts for ad-free shows early and bonus editions too. From Podmasters, the makers of Oh God, What Now?, American Friction and The Bunker.Podmasters / Ian Dunt & Dorian Lynskey 2022 Politics & Government Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Karl Marx – Part Two – The Father

    Karl Marx – Part Two – The Father
    Oct 8 2025
    Welcome back to Season Eight: The Story of Socialism as we conclude the story of Karl Marx and the birth of Marxism. It’s 1849. In the wake of the failed revolutions in Europe, Marx and his wife Jenny arrive in London for a fresh start. But his magnum opus, Capital, is a long time coming due to chronic illness, the loss of three children and recurring money worries. The great critic of capitalism is such a disaster with finances that his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels has to take a job at his father’s textile company in Manchester to keep the project of communism afloat. Then there are the feuds. So many feuds! Eventually, in the 1860s, a flurry of productivity bears fruit. Capital is finally finished (or volume one at least) and Marx becomes head of the International Working Men’s Association, where he wages war against rival socialists and the fearsome anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. In 1871, Marx’s response to the doomed experiment of the Paris Commune makes him famous at last — and infamous. He’s the “Red Doctor” accused of orchestrating a vast communist conspiracy that doesn’t actually exist. But then he falls quiet, retreating from political activism and writing relatively little. When he dies in 1883, there are only 11 mourners at his funeral. It is left to Engels to simplify and spread the tenets of Marxism, revolutionising European socialism. Where did Capital succeed and fail? What did he get right and wrong about capitalism and why was he so vague about the future of communism? What does Marx’s clash with Bakunin tell us about the dangerous flaws in his theory? Did Engels rewrite Marxism in the process of popularising it? And has any great writer ever been as bad with deadlines as Marx? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978) • John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997) • Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953) • GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938) • Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) • E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962) • E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975) • Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009) • In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005) • In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022) • Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888) • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) • Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) • Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859) • Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894) • Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871) • Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891) • Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918) • Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (2001) • Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction: Second Edition (2018) • Jonthan Sperber, Karl Marx: A 19th Century Life (2013) • Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016) • Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition (1978) • Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (1999) • Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr and 23 mins
  • Karl Marx – Part One – The Fighter

    Karl Marx – Part One – The Fighter
    Oct 1 2025
    A spectre is haunting Origin Story — the spectre of Karl Marx. Welcome back to season eight: The Story of Socialism. Last week, we explored the various socialisms that were exciting Europe when Marx was a young man. Now we turn to the man himself, and his close friend and ally Friedrich Engels. The landslide winner of an In Our Time poll to choose the most important philosopher of all time, Marx introduced gigantic new ideas that still inform our thinking whether you’re a Marxist or not. Born in Prussia in 1818, Marx was on course to become one of many young German philosophers wrestling with the legacy of Hegel. But when he was frozen out of academia, journalism set him on a more confrontational, activist path. His extraordinary intellect was wrapped up in a spectacularly belligerent personality, addicted to vicious feuds and denunciations. He could start a fight in an empty room. As he moved from Prussia to Paris to Brussels during the 1840s, Marx went on a political journey, too: from liberal to socialist to head of the Communist League. Along the way, he built the basic framework of Marxism: the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the value of labour, the volatile, insatiable energy of capitalism, and the dialectical progress of history. It was nothing less than a new way of understanding the world. Marx’s first phase culminated in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the same year that revolution swept the great cities of Europe. Explaining its failure was the first task of Marx’s next phase as he left the continent for good, settled in London and embarked on the torturous process of writing his masterwork, Capital. How did Marx become a communist? What did he owe to Hegel? Why was his friendship with Engels so essential? Why was he more dedicated to waging war on his former friends than his obvious enemies? Which rival socialist called him “the tapeworm of socialism”? And what exactly is dialectical materialism anyway? “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx wrote. “The point is to change it.” This is how he began to change it. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978) • John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997) • Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953) • GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938) • Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) • E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962) • E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975) • Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009) • In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005) • In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022) • Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888) • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) • Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) • Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859) • Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894) • Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871) • Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891) • Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918) ... Reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr and 29 mins
  • The Birth of Socialism – A Better World is Possible

    The Birth of Socialism – A Better World is Possible
    Sep 24 2025
    Welcome to season eight of Origin Story. This season we’re trying something different: one big narrative across multiple topics. It’s the story of socialism, from the earliest blueprints to the present day, Lenin to Labour, Marx to Mao, Gramsci to Gorbachev and Proudhon to Piketty. We’re talking about the evolution of a powerful idea in all its manifestations and exploring how it came to encompass both Soviet communism and European social democracy. It’s arguably the most earth-shaking political concept of the last 200 years. H.G. Wells summed up early versions of socialism as “a vast system of questionings and repudiations, political doubts, social doubts, hesitating inquiries, and experiments”. We begin in the wake of the French Revolution with the radical republican Gracchus Babeuf and his “enraged ones” calling for absolute equality. In France, the rebel aristocrat Henri de Saint-Simon imagined a progressive secular technocracy while Charles Fourier dreamt of communes in which the human spirit was liberated from drudgery and oppression. In the UK, the businessman Robert Owen modelled a new society based on cooperation and the fair exchange of labour. These so-called “utopian socialists” inspired numerous attempts to build a better world in miniature. The 1830s and 1840s produced an explosion of new words to make sense of immense social change: socialism, communism, anarchism, capitalism. Thinkers like the utopian Étienne Cabet, the anarchist Joseph Proudhon and the politician Louis Blanc introduced concepts that are with us to this day, while the scholar Lorenz von Stein was the first to ask: what is the difference between socialism and communism anyway? (We’ll come back to this.) Out on the streets, Louis Blanqui championed revolutionary violence. And in 1848, actual revolution broke out in the great cities of Europe. Soaking up all these ideas and developing their own version of communism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — the subjects of our next two episodes. But even as Marxism swept Europe at the end of the century, the American journalist Edward Bellamy revived utopian socialism and made it more popular than ever. That dream refused to die. What unites all these disparate visions that called themselves socialism? How did they feed into both Marxism and the Labour Party? How did America become the world’s biggest laboratory for socialist experiments? Why did they fail? And can a change in the economic system really transform human nature? Join us as we begin the epic story of socialism. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory Reading list • Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888, OUP edition 2007) • James Boyle, What Is Socialism? (1912) • Étienne Cabet, The Voyage to Icaria (1839) • G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850 (1959) • G.D.H Cole: Socialism in Evolution (1938) • Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) • Leslie Holmes, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (2009) • William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890) • Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2020) • John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870) • Betrand Russell: Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918) • Robert Service, Comrades: Communism: A World History (2007) • George Bernard Shaw et al, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889) • Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016) • H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (1908) • Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) • Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History, The Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    1 hr and 32 mins
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