Marx was a liberal thinker. There’s not as much difference between Marx or indeed Marxism and liberalism as many people think. This is because if you are against non-constitutional, authoritarian regimes, you are a liberal. That’s what the French Revolution was about, and that’s what the 1848 revolutions were about: they were about bringing constitutionalism and popular sovereignty, and representative and responsible government, to parts of Europe where the rulers and the church were fanatically dedicated to maintaining their own grip. This was only relaxed, rather slowly, in the 1850s and 1860s.

Marx was wholly in favour of popular sovereignty and representative and responsible government. His angle was to keep pushing on the economic side, and to insist that governments needed to take responsibility for the economic welfare of citizens. Essentially, he was a social democrat. But in order to pursue that kind of agenda, you had to be a radical, terrorist revolutionary and prepared to take up a gun. That’s what this flaring up of revolutions was about. It didn’t really hit Russia until about 1905.

The dividing of Marx from his liberalism is something that is projected onto his ideas, and particularly his politics, much later on. Now, in the course of doing this kind of politics, Marx wanted to push liberals into the economic realm. That’s exactly what social democrats do now, and that’s the argument that various political parties had with George Osborne. It’s not that much different, frankly.