Biography: Karl MarxKarl Heinrich Marx, b. May 5, 1818, d. Mar. 14, 1883, was a
German economist, philosopher, and revolutionist whose writings
form the basis of the body of ideas known as Marxism. With the
aid of Friedrich Engels he produced much of the theory of modern
Socialism and Communism. Marx's father, Heinrich, was a Jewish
lawyer who had converted his family to Christianity partly in
order to preserve his job in the Prussian state. Karl himself was
baptized in the Evangelical church. As a student at the
University of Berlin, young Marx was strongly influenced by the
philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel and by a radical group called Young
Hegelians, who attempted to apply Hegelian ideas to the movement
against organized religion and the Prussian autocracy. In 1841,
Marx received a doctorate in philosophy.
In 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne,
a liberal democratic newspaper for which he wrote increasingly
radical editorials on social and economic issues. The newspaper
was banned by the Prussian government in 1843, and Marx left for
Paris with his bride, Jenny von Westphalen. There he went further
in his criticism of society, building on the Young Hegelian
criticism of religion. Ludwig Feuerbach had written a book called
The Essence of Christianity (1841; Eng. trans., 1854), arguing
that God had been invented by humans as a projection of their own
ideals. Feuerbach wrote that man, however, in creating God in his
own image, had "alienated himself from himself." He had created
another being in contrast to himself, reducing himself to a
lowly, evil creature who needed both church and government to
guide and control him. If religion were abolished, Feuerbach
claimed, human beings would overcome their Alienation. Marx
applied this idea of alienation to private property, which he
said caused humans to work only for themselves, not for the good
of their species. In his papers of this period (published in 1959
English translation as Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844), he elaborated on the idea that alienation had an economic
base. He called for a communist society to overcome the
dehumanizing effect of private property.
In 1845, Marx moved to Brussels, and in 1847 he went to London.
He had previously made friends with Friedrich Engels, the son of
a wealthy textile manufacturer who, like himself, had been a
Young Hegelian. They collaborated on a book, The Holy Family
(1845; Eng. trans., 1956), which was a criticism of some of their
Young Hegelian friends for their stress on alienation. In 1845,
Marx jotted down some notes, Theses on Feuerbach, which he and
Engels enlarged into a book, The German Ideology (1932; Eng.
trans., 1938), in which they developed their materialistic
conception of history. They argued that human thought was
determined by social and economic forces, particularly those
related to the means of production. They developed a method of
analysis they called Dialectical Materialism, in which the clash
of historical forces leads to changes in society.
In 1847 a London organization of workers invited Marx and Engels
to prepare a program for them. It appeared in 1848 as the
Communist Manifesto. In it they declared that all history was the
history of class struggles. Under Capitalism, the struggle
between the working class and the business class would end in a
new society, a communist one. The outbreak of the Revolutions of
1848 in Europe led Marx to return to Cologne, where he began
publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, but with the failure
of the German liberal democratic movement he moved permanently
(1849) to London. For many years he and his family lived in
poverty, aided by small subventions from Engels and by bequests
from the relatives of Marx's wife. From 1851 to 1862 he
contributed articles and editorials to the New York Tribune, then
edited by Horace Greeley. Most of his time, however, was spent in
the British Museum, studying economic and social history and
developing his theories.
Marx's ideas began to influence a group of workers and German
emigres in London, who established (1864) the International
Workingmen's Association, later known as the First International
By the time of the brief Commune of Paris in 1871, Marx's name
had begun to be well known in European political circles. A struggle
developed within the International between Marx and the Russian
anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whom Marx eventually defeated and expelled,
at the cost of the destruction of the International.
In 1867, Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital (Eng.
trans., 1886). The next two volumes, edited by Engels, were
published after Marx's death. The fourth volume was edited by
Karl Kautsky. Marx's last years were marked by illness and
depression. Marx continued to write treatises on socialism,
urging that his followers disdain soft-hearted bourgeois
tendencies. He took this stand, for example, in The Gotha Program
(1891; Eng. trans., 1922). His wife died in 1881, and his eldest
daughter in 1883, shortly before his own death.
At Marx's funeral in Highgate Cemetery in London, Engels spoke of
him as "the best-hated and most-calumniated man of his time." The
importance of Marx's thought, however, extends far beyond the
revolutionary movements whose prophet he became.
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