Background

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, Germany. He was one of nine children born to Heinrich and Henrietta Marx in Trier, Prussia. His father was a successful lawyer who revered Kant and Voltaire, and was a passionate activist for Prussian reform. Although both parents were Jewish with rabbinical ancestry, Karl’s father converted to Christianity in 1816 at the age of 35.

Education

Marx was an average student. He was educated at home until he was 12 and spent five years, from 1830 to 1835, at the Jesuit high school in Trier, at that time known as the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium. The school’s principal, a friend of Marx’s father, was a liberal and a Kantian and was respected by the people of Rhineland but suspect to authorities. The school was under surveillance and was raided in 1832.

In October of 1835, Marx began studying at the University of Bonn. It had a lively and rebellious culture, and Marx enthusiastically took part in student life. In his two semesters there, he was imprisoned for drunkenness and disturbing the peace, incurred debts and participated in a duel. At the end of the year, Marx’s father insisted he enroll in the more serious University of Berlin.

In Berlin, he studied law and philosophy and was introduced to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, who had been a professor at Berlin until his death in 1831. Marx was not initially enamored with Hegel, but he soon became involved with the Young Hegelians, a radical group of students including Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, who criticized the political and religious establishments of the day. He received his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841.

Career

After university Marx turned to writing and journalism to support his family. In 1842 he became editor of the liberal Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, but the Berlin government prohibited it from being published the following year. On August 28, 1844, he befriended Friedrich Engels, who would go on to become one of his confidantes and would later help him shape his philosophical ideas. Soon, the duo began collaborating on a number of literary works and also engaged themselves in the extensive study of the "political economy", a subject that Marx would pursue for the rest of his life.

Marx compiled all his ideas in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, published in August 1844. After "Vorwarts!" shut down, Marx moved from Paris to Brussels in 1845, along with his friend, Engels. They authored the book German Ideology around this time during a brief trip to England, while visiting the leaders of the Chartists, a local socialist movement. After the book was published, Marx wished to implement his ideas and claimed that a revolutionary movement was required from the standpoint of a truly scientific materialist philosophy. During this period he also wrote The Poverty of Philosophy, which was published in 1847. He joined a radical organization along with Engels called the League of the Just. He was sure that this League was his best opportunity to put forth his views for a working class revolution, but to be able to do that, he had to make sure that the league stopped functioning as an underground organization and came out as a full-fledged political party. The members of the League were eventually persuaded in this regard and by 1847, it became an official political party called The Communist League.

All of the books written by Engels-Marx paved way for one of his most important political pamphlets, compiling the new communist ideologies, titled The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. The manifesto advocated the abolition of capitalist society with the vision of replacing it with socialism. The same year, Europe witnessed a series of upheavals as a result of the new communist movement, which came to be known as the Revolution of 1848. It was during this time, he was forced to move back to France. After he returned to France in 1848, he shifted the headquarters of the Communist League to Paris and set up an additional German Workers’ Club for the numerous German socialists living in the city. Hoping to spread anarchy in Germany, he shifted to Cologne, where he published a shorter version of the Communist Manifesto, titled Demands of the Communist Party in Germany. He soon began the publication of a daily newspaper called Nueu Rheinische Zeitung, which offered Marxist interpretation of all world events. He was soon put under the scanner by the police and was arrested for his radical views. The-then Prussian king, Frederick William IV, ordered anti-revolutionary measures and as a result, Marx’s newspaper was suppressed and he was asked to leave the country on May 16, 1849. He moved to London, which would become his home for the rest of his life. Towards the end of 1849, owing to ideological rift in the Communist League, a widespread uprising across Europe ensued and Engels and Marx feared that it would spell doom for the party. Marx soon became involved with the socialist German Workers’ Educational Society, but after fallout with the members of the guild, he resigned on September 17, 1850.

Despite the poverty in his family, Marx devoted himself to re-organizing the revolutionary working class and at the same time worked as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. He soon began writing articles regularly for a source of income. The New York Daily Tribune would eventually become Marx’s greatest medium of earning sympathy and support for his views from across the Atlantic. In 1863, Marx left the New York Tribune and wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napolean, and in 1864 he became involved in the International Workingmen’s Association. One of the most important events during his years with the International Workingmen’s Association was the Paris Commune, when the citizens of Paris tried to overthrow the government and held the city for two months. In response to this bloody uprising, he authored, The War in France, in the defense of the people.

Achievements

• Karl Marx was an eminent political theorist and socialist revolutionary. He published with Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. He also was the author of the movement’s most important book, Capital. These writings and others by Marx and Engels form the basis of the body of thought and belief known as Marxism.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Capital: a Critique of Political Economy

    (Volume 1)

    1867
  • Capital

    (Volume 2)

    1885
  • Capital

    (Volume 3)

    1894
  • The Communist Manifesto 1848
  • The Poverty of Philosophy 1847
  • The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 1844
  • The Manifesto of the Communist Party 1848
  • Class Struggles in France 1850
  • Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 1857
  • Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy Of Right' 1843
  • On Jewish Question 1843
  • The Holy Family: Critique of Critical Critique 1845
  • The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach 1845
  • The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1852
  • Writings on the American Civil War 1861
  • A Contribution to The Critique Of The Political Economy 1883
  • Theories of Surplus Value 1862
  • Value, Price, and Profit 1865
  • The Civil War in France 1871
  • Critique of the Gotha Program 1875

Religion

Marx was raised by Jews who converted to Lutheranism for political reasons. Marx ultimately became an atheist who saw religion as a reflection of a flawed society. His atheism was not only practical but also theoretical. His theoretical atheism is due primarily to philosophical reasons and only secondarily to historical, social and political reasons.

Politics

Politics to Marx, like religion, is a manifestation of economics and the material world. All of history and the governance of humanity was a struggle between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.” In the beginning, people bartered and traded and lived in collective communities. Then, with farms came personal property. With currency came capitalism and the exploitation of workers for the profit of the property owners. Workers unjustly sold pieces of their lives (hours worked) for less than it was worth, creating surplus value which equates to profits for owners.

Views

Historical materialism - Marx’s theory of history - is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx’s prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal.

Quotations: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

"Democracy is the road to socialism."

"The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs."

"Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand."

"Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time."

"Religion is the opium of the people."

Personality

The contradictory emotions Marx engendered are reflected in the sometimes conflicting aspects of his character. Marx was a combination of the Promethean rebel and the rigorous intellectual. He gave most persons an impression of intellectual arrogance. A Russian writer, Pavel Annenkov, who observed Marx in debate in 1846 recalled that “he spoke only in the imperative, brooking no contradiction,” and seemed to be “the personification of a democratic dictator such as might appear before one in moments of fantasy.” But Marx obviously felt uneasy before mass audiences and avoided the atmosphere of factional controversies at congresses. He went to no demonstrations, his wife remarked, and rarely spoke at public meetings. He kept away from the congresses of the International where the rival socialist groups debated important resolutions. He was a “small groups” man, most at home in the atmosphere of the General Council or on the staff of a newspaper, where his character could impress itself forcefully on a small body of coworkers. At the same time he avoided meeting distinguished scholars with whom he might have discussed questions of economics and sociology on a footing of intellectual equality. Despite his broad intellectual sweep, he was prey to obsessive ideas such as that the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, was an agent of the Russian government. He was determined not to let bourgeois society make “a money-making machine” out of him, yet he submitted to living on the largess of Engels and the bequests of relatives. He remained the eternal student in his personal habits and way of life, even to the point of joining two friends in a students’ prank during which they systematically broke four or five streetlamps in a London street and then fled from the police. Above all, Marx was a fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in the battle for his conception of a better society. He regarded struggle as the law of life and existence.

Physical Characteristics: Karl Marx was short and stocky, with a bushy head of hair and flashing eyes. His skin was swarthy, so that his family and friends called him Mohr in German, or Moor in English. His physique gave an impression of vigor, despite the fact that he was a latent tubercular (four of his younger siblings died of tuberculosis). Marx's excessive smoking, wine drinking, and love of heavily spiced foods may have been contributing causes to his illnesses. In the final dozen years of his life, he could no longer do any continuous intellectual work.

Quotes from others about the person

• "What Marx accomplished was to produce such a comprehensive, dramatic, and fascinating vision that it could withstand innumerable empirical contradictions, logical refutations, and moral revulsions at its effects. The Marxian vision took the overwhelming complexity of the real world and made the parts fall into place, in a way that was intellectually exhilarating and conferred such a sense of moral superiority that opponents could be simply labelled and dismissed as moral lepers or blind reactionaries. Marxism was - and remains - a mighty instrument for the acquisition and maintenance of political power." - Thomas Sowell, 1985
  
  "Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung, the Paris Vorwarts, the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the New York Tribune, and, in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men's Association - this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else." - Frederick Engels, 1883

Interests

• Marx's replies to a set of questions given to him by his daughters Jenny and Laura in 1865:
  
  Your favourite virtue - Simplicity
  
  Your favourite virtue in man - Strength
  
  Your favourite virtue in woman - Weakness
  
  Your chief characteristic - Singleness of purpose
  
  Your idea of happiness - To fight
  
  Your idea of misery - Submission
  
  The vice you excuse most - Gullibility
  
  The vice you detest most - Servility
  
  Your aversion - Martin Tupper
  
  Favourite occupation - Book-worming
  
  Favourite hero - Spartacus, Kepler
  
  Favourite heroine - Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
  
  Favourite flower - Daphne
  
  Favourite colour - Red
  
  Favourite name - Laura, Jenny
  
  Favourite dish - Fish
  
  Favourite maxim - Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
  
  Favourite motto - De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].

• Writers

  Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe, Diderot

Connections

Marx was married to his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen, who was known as the "most beautiful girl in Trier," on June 19, 1843. She was totally devoted to him. She died of cancer on December 2, 1881, at the age of sixty-seven. For Marx it was a blow from which he never recovered.

The Marxes had seven children, four of whom died in infancy or childhood. He deeply loved his daughters, who, in turn, adored him. Of the three surviving daughters - Jenny, Laura, and Eleanor - two married Frenchmen. Both of Marx's sons-in-law became prominent French socialists and members of Parliament. Eleanor was active as a British labor organizer.

Father:

Heinrich Hirschel Marx

Mother:

Henriette Marx

Spouse:

Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny Marx

Daughter:

Jenny Caroline Longuet

Daughter:

Jenny Laura Lafargue

Son:

Edgar Marx

Son:

Henry Edward Guy Marx

Daughter:

Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx

Daughter:

Eleanor Marx

Daughter:

Jenny Eveline Frances Marx

Brother:

Mauritz David Marx

Sister:

Sophie Schmalhausen

Brother:

Hermann Marx

Sister:

Henriette Simons

Sister:

Louise Juta

Sister:

Emilie Conradi

Sister:

Caroline Marx

Brother:

Eduard Marx

colleague:

Bruno Bauer

colleague:

Arnold Ruge

colleague:

Friedrich Engels

References

• Karl Marx: His Life and Environment
• Karl Marx: The Story of His Life
• Marx
• Karl Marx, His Life and Work