Karl Marx

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"Marx" redirects here. For other uses, see Marx
(disambiguation) and Karl Marx (disambiguation).
Karl Marx[a] (German: [ˈkaʁl ˈmaʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14
March 1883) was a German philosopher, political
theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary
socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet The
Communist Manifesto (written with Friedrich Engels),
and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894), a
critique of classical political economy which employs his
theory of historical materialism in an analysis of
capitalism, in the culmination of his life's work. Marx's
ideas and their subsequent development, collectively
known as Marxism, have had enormous influence.

Karl Marx
FRSA[1]
Black-and-white portrait photograph of Marx sitting
Marx in 1875
Born
Carl Marx[a]
5 May 1818
Trier, Prussia
Died
14 March 1883 (aged 64)
London, England
Burial place
Tomb of Karl Marx
Citizenship
Prussian (1818–1845)
Stateless (after 1845)
Political party
Communist Correspondence Committee
Communist League
International Workingmen's Association
Spouse
Jenny von Westphalen

(m. 1843; died 1881)

Children
At least 7,[3] including Jenny, Laura and Eleanor
Parents
Heinrich Marx
Henriette Pressburg
Education
Alma mater
University of Bonn
University of Berlin
University of Jena
Thesis
The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean
Philosophy of Nature (1841)
Doctoral advisor
Bruno Bauer
Philosophical work
Era
19th-century philosophy
Region
Western philosophy
School
Political economy
Main interests
Philosophyeconomicshistorypolitics
Notable ideas
Alienation and exploitation of the worker
Class conflict
Historical materialism
Value form
Signature

Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at

the universities of Bonn and Berlin, and received a
doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena in
1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the
philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both
critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as
The German Ideology (written 1846) and the Grundrisse
(written 1857–1858). While in Paris, Marx wrote his
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and met
Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator.
After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the
Communist League, and in 1848 they wrote The
Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx's ideas
and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was
expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849
moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital.
From 1864, Marx was involved in the International
Workingmen's Association (First International), in which
he fought the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail
Bakunin. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875),
Marx wrote on revolution, the state and the transition to
communism. He died stateless in 1883 and was buried
in Highgate Cemetery.

Marx's critiques of history, society and political economy

hold that human societies develop through class conflict.
In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself
in the conflict between the ruling classes (the
bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and
the working classes (the proletariat) that enable these
means by selling their labour power for wages.[4]
Employing his historical materialist approach, Marx
predicted that capitalism produced internal tensions like
previous socioeconomic systems and that these
tensions would lead to its self-destruction and
replacement by a new system known as the socialist
mode of production. For Marx, class antagonisms under
capitalism—owing in part to its instability and
crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the working
class's development of class consciousness, leading to
their conquest of political power and eventually the
establishment of a classless, communist society
constituted by a free association of producers.[5] Marx
actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the
working class should carry out organised proletarian
revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about
socio-economic emancipation.[6]

Marx has been described as one of the most influential

figures of the modern era, and his work has been both
lauded and criticised.[7] Marxism has exerted major
influence on socialist thought and political movements,
with Marxist schools of thought such as
Marxism–Leninism and its offshoots becoming the
guiding ideologies of revolutions that took power in
many countries during the 20th century, forming
communist states. Marx's work in economics has had a
strong influence on modern heterodox theories of labour
and capital,[8][9][10] and he is often cited as one of the
principal architects of modern sociology.[11][12]

Contents
Biography
Childhood and early education: 1818–1836

Marx's birthplace, now Brückenstraße 10, in Trier. The

family occupied two rooms on the ground floor and three
on the first floor.[13] Purchased by the Social
Democratic Party of Germany in 1928, it now houses a
museum devoted to him.[14]
Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx and
Henriette Pressburg, at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, then
part of the Kingdom of Prussia.[15] Marx's family was
originally non-religious Jewish but had converted
formally to Christianity before his birth. His maternal
grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line
had supplied Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by
his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx.[16] His father was
the first in the line to receive a secular education. He
became a lawyer with a comfortably upper middle class
income and the family owned a number of Moselle
vineyards, in addition to his income as an attorney. After
Prussia's annexation of the Rhineland in 1815 and the
subsequent abrogation of Jewish emancipation,[17]
Heinrich converted from Judaism to the state
Evangelical Church of Prussia in order to retain his
career as a lawyer.[18]

Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the

Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the
philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. A classical
liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and
reforms in Prussia, which was then an absolute
monarchy.[19] In 1815, Heinrich Marx began working as
an attorney and in 1819 moved his family to a ten-room
property near the Porta Nigra.[20] His wife, Henriette
Pressburg, was a Dutch Jew from a prosperous
business family that later founded the company Philips
Electronics. Her sister Sophie Pressburg married Lion
Philips and was the grandmother of both Gerard and
Anton Philips and great-grandmother to Frits Philips.
Lion Philips was a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer
and industrialist, upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would
later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled
in London.[21]

Little is known of Marx's childhood.[22] The third of nine

children, he became the eldest son when his brother
Moritz died in 1819.[23] Marx and his surviving siblings
were baptised into the Lutheran Church on 28 August
1824,[24] and their mother in November 1825.[25] Marx
was privately educated by his father until 1830 when he
entered Trier High School (Trier High School [de]),
whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of
his father. By employing many liberal humanists as
teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local
conservative government. In 1832, police raided the
school and discovered that literature promoting political
liberalism was being distributed among the students.
Viewing the distribution of such material as a seditious
act, the authorities implemented reforms and replaced
several members of the staff during Marx's time at the
school.[26]

In October 1835 at the age of 16, Marx travelled to the

University of Bonn wishing to study philosophy and
literature, but his father insisted on law as a more
practical field.[27] Due to a condition referred to as a
"weak chest",[28] Marx was excused from military duty
when he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn,
Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political
radicals that were monitored by the police.[29] Marx also
joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one
point served as the club's co-president.[30][31] In
August 1836 he took part in a duel with a member of the
university's Borussian Korps.[32] Although his grades in
the first term were good, they soon deteriorated, leading
his father to force a transfer to the more serious and
academic University of Berlin.[33]

Hegelianism and early journalism: 1836–1843

Jenny von Westphalen in the 1830s

Trierer students in front of the White Horse, among

them, Karl Marx

Karl Marx (detail)

A famous lithograph by David Levi Elkan, simply known
as "Die Trierer", depicts several students, and among
them, Karl Marx, in front of the White Horse in 1836.[b]
Spending summer and autumn 1836 in Trier, Marx
became more serious about his studies and his life. He
became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, an
educated member of the petty nobility who had known
Marx since childhood. As she had broken off her
engagement with a young aristocrat to be with Marx,
their relationship was socially controversial owing to the
differences between their religious and class origins, but
Marx befriended her father Ludwig von Westphalen (a
liberal aristocrat) and later dedicated his doctoral thesis
to him.[35] Seven years after their engagement, on 19
June 1843, they married in a Protestant church in
Kreuznach.[36]

In October 1836, Marx arrived in Berlin, matriculating in

the university's faculty of law and renting a room in the
Mittelstrasse.[37] During the first term, Marx attended
lectures of Eduard Gans (who represented the
progressive Hegelian standpoint, elaborated on rational
development in history by emphasising particularly its
libertarian aspects, and the importance of social
question) and of Karl von Savigny (who represented the
Historical School of Law).[38] Although studying law, he
was fascinated by philosophy and looked for a way to
combine the two, believing that "without philosophy
nothing could be accomplished".[39] Marx became
interested in the recently deceased German philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas were then
widely debated among European philosophical
circles.[40] During a convalescence in Stralau, he joined
the Doctors Club, a student group which discussed
Hegelian ideas, and through them became involved with
a group of radical thinkers known as the Young
Hegelians in 1837. They gathered around Ludwig
Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, with Marx developing a
particularly close friendship with Adolf Rutenberg. Like
Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of Hegel's
metaphysical assumptions but adopted his dialectical
method to criticise established society, politics and
religion from a left-wing perspective.[41] Marx's father
died in May 1838, resulting in a diminished income for
the family.[42] Marx had been emotionally close to his
father and treasured his memory after his death.[43]

Inscription at the University of Jena commemorating the

PhD he was awarded there in 1841

Doctoral certificate for Karl Marx from the University of

Jena, April 15, 1841
By 1837, Marx had completed a short novel, Scorpion
and Felix; a drama, Oulanem; and a number of love
poems dedicated to his wife. None of this early work
was published during his lifetime.[44] The love poems
were published posthumously in the Collected Works of
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Volume 1.[45] Marx
soon abandoned fiction for other pursuits, including the
study of English and Italian, art history and the
translation of Latin classics.[46] He began co-operating
with Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel's Philosophy of
Religion in 1840. Marx was also engaged in writing his
doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the
Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,[47]
which he completed in 1841. It was described as "a
daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out
to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom
of philosophy".[48] The essay was controversial,
particularly among the conservative professors at the
University of Berlin. Marx decided instead to submit his
thesis to the more liberal University of Jena, whose
faculty awarded him his Ph.D. in April 1841.[49] As Marx
and Bauer were both atheists, in March 1841 they
began plans for a journal entitled Archiv des Atheismus
(Atheistic Archives), but it never came to fruition. In July,
Marx and Bauer took a trip to Bonn from Berlin. There
they scandalised their class by getting drunk, laughing in
church and galloping through the streets on
donkeys.[50]

Marx was considering an academic career, but this path

was barred by the government's growing opposition to
classical liberalism and the Young Hegelians.[51] Marx
moved to Cologne in 1842, where he became a
journalist, writing for the radical newspaper Rheinische
Zeitung (Rhineland News), expressing his early views
on socialism and his developing interest in economics.
Marx criticised right-wing European governments as well
as figures in the liberal and socialist movements, whom
he thought ineffective or counter-productive.[52] The
newspaper attracted the attention of the Prussian
government censors, who checked every issue for
seditious material before printing, which Marx lamented:
"Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be
sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything
un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not
allowed to appear".[53] After the Rheinische Zeitung
published an article strongly criticising the Russian
monarchy, Tsar Nicholas I requested it be banned, and
Prussia's government complied in 1843.[54]

Paris: 1843–1845
In 1843, Marx became co-editor of a new, radical
left-wing Parisian newspaper, the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), then being set up
by the German activist Arnold Ruge to bring together
German and French radicals.[55] Therefore Marx and
his wife moved to Paris in October 1843. Initially living
with Ruge and his wife communally at 23 Rue Vaneau,
they found the living conditions difficult, so moved out
following the birth of their daughter Jenny in 1844.[56]
Although intended to attract writers from both France
and the German states, the Jahrbücher was dominated
by the latter and the only non-German writer was the
exiled Russian anarchist collectivist Mikhail Bakunin.[57]
Marx contributed two essays to the paper, "Introduction
to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right"[58] and "On the Jewish Question",[59] the latter
introducing his belief that the proletariat were a
revolutionary force and marking his embrace of
communism.[60] Only one issue was published, but it
was relatively successful, largely owing to the inclusion
of Heinrich Heine's satirical odes on King Ludwig of
Bavaria, leading the German states to ban it and seize
imported copies (Ruge nevertheless refused to fund the
publication of further issues and his friendship with Marx
broke down).[61]

After Jahrbücher's collapse, Marx began writing for

Vorwärts! (Forwards!), the only remaining uncensored
German-language radical newspaper. Based in Paris,
the paper was connected to the League of the Just, a
utopian socialist secret society of workers and artisans.
Marx attended some of their meetings but did not
join.[62] In Vorwärts!, Marx refined his views on
socialism based upon Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideas
of dialectical materialism, at the same time criticising
liberals and other socialists operating in Europe.[63]

Friedrich Engels, whom Marx met in 1844; the two

became lifelong friends and collaborators.
On 28 August 1844, Marx met the German socialist
Friedrich Engels at the Café de la Régence, beginning a
lifelong friendship.[64] Engels showed Marx his recently
published The Condition of the Working Class in
England in 1844,[65][66] convincing Marx that the
working class would be the agent and instrument of the
final revolution in history.[67][68] Soon, Marx and Engels
were collaborating on a criticism of the philosophical
ideas of Marx's former friend, Bruno Bauer. This work
was published in 1845 as The Holy Family.[69][70]
Although critical of Bauer, Marx was increasingly
influenced by the ideas of the Young Hegelians Max
Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach, but eventually Marx and
Engels abandoned Feuerbachian materialism as
well.[71]

During the time that he lived at 38 Rue Vaneau in Paris

(from October 1843 until January 1845),[72] Marx
engaged in an intensive study of political economy
(Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill, etc.),[73] the
French socialists (especially Claude Henri St. Simon
and Charles Fourier)[74] and the history of France.[75]
The study of, and critique, of political economy is a
project that Marx would pursue for the rest of his life[76]
and would result in his major economic work—the
three-volume series called Das Kapital.[77] Marxism is
based in large part on three influences: Hegel's
dialectics, French utopian socialism and British political
economy. Together with his earlier study of Hegel's
dialectics, the studying that Marx did during this time in
Paris meant that all major components of "Marxism"
were in place by the autumn of 1844.[78] Marx was
constantly being pulled away from his critique of political
economy—not only by the usual daily demands of the
time, but additionally by editing a radical newspaper and
later by organising and directing the efforts of a political
party during years of potentially revolutionary popular
uprisings of the citizenry. Still, Marx was always drawn
back to his studies where he sought "to understand the
inner workings of capitalism".[75]