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.
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]
