Review: A Thorough Account of Socialism’s History

English journalists Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt have produced an engaging and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny journey from the earliest days of socialism to the present. Season Eight of their podcast Origin Story runs nearly 21 hours, covering everything from the birth of the British Labour Party to the arc of Soviet communism.

The podcast is peppered with f-bombs, which are entirely appropriate for describing the horrors of the Holodomor. Lynskey and Dunt have a knack for finding historical details that bring insight and humor not only to the ideas underlying socialism, but to the lives of socialism’s leading figures. Karl Marx’s “idea of misery,” for example, is “submission.” For Friedrich Engels, it’s “going to the dentist.”

They pinpoint what Marx got wrong (the labor theory of value, the historical inevitability of socialism and a classless society, the role of prices in conveying information). Yet they are sharp in explaining why he still matters and how socialism avoided being completely disgraced by the brutality and collapse of the Soviet Union.

The hosts themselves hail from the left, and they credit democratic socialism for improved working conditions and health care. Proponents of free minds and free markets will thus find much to disagree with here. Their political bent, though, adds poignancy to their frustrated criticisms of socialism in practice, even though it’s an ideal they’d like to believe in. Their sympathies shed light on the conditions that produced socialist orthodoxy in the first place.