Karl Marx

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Karl Marx

1818-1883

Communist philosopher

Early Years. One of nine children, Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818, in Trier, Prussia.Although both his paternal and maternal grandfathers were Jewish rabbis and Talmudic scholars, after a Prussian decree in 1815 banned Jews from the higher ranks of society, his father, an ambitious and successful lawyer, renounced his Jewish heritage and became a Protestant. At age six Karl and his siblings were baptized as Christians in the Evangelical Established Church. Nine years later Karl was confirmed into the church, and for a time he embraced the Christian faith. He was educated at a recently secularized Jesuit high school, and in 1835 he entered Bonn University, leaving after a year to enroll at the University of Berlin. He studied the classics and philosophy, becoming acquainted with the Hegelian “dialectic” system that explained history as a process driven by the clashing of contrary ideas. After neglecting his studies for radical student activities, Marx submitted his dissertation to the University of Jena, where academic requirement were more lax than in Berlin, and earned a doctorate in 1841. Unable to find an academic post, Marx became editor of a radical Cologne newspaper in 1842. After it was suppressed in early 1843, Marx secured employment in Paris as a journalist. Before leaving Germany he married his childhood girl-friend, Jenny von Westphalen.

Communism. In Paris, Marx became involved in the Communist League and met Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), who became his lifelong friend and frequent collaborator. He was expelled from France in 1845 and went to Brussels, where he was soon joined by Engels. Over the next two years Marx began to develop his theory of history and collaborated with Engels on several works, including their Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848; Manifesto of the Communist Party), which they wrote at the request of the Communist League of London. When the 1848 revolutions began, Marx returned to Paris just in time to avoid expulsion from Belgium. From there he went to the Rhineland, where he and Engels participated in efforts to establish democracy there. When the revolution failed, he was banished in May 1849. After returning to Paris, he was expelled from France, and in August he reached London, where he settled and spent the remaining thirty-four years of his life. In England, Marx was involved in revolutionary politics, helping to organize the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, but most of his time in London was spent in the British Museum collecting material for his major work, Das Kapital. Marx published one volume of Das Kapital in 1867, and the remaining two volumes were published posthumously in 1885 and 1894, after Engels compiled and edited them from Marx’s unfinished manuscripts.

Marx’s Legacy. Marx viewed communism as the most advanced stage in the evolution of human society. He predicted that as workers were increasingly exploited and impoverished by their capitalist bosses, the angry laboring class would rise up in violent revolution against their wealthy oppressors and create an advanced communist system in which a new classless society would bring about the “withering away” of the state. Modern scholars have questioned several of Marx’s basic assumptions. For instance, some have pointed out that workers’ living conditions produced by the Industrial Revolution were often no more deplorable than those they experienced in rural pre-industrial economies. Moreover, contrary to Marx’s predictions, communist revolutions did not begin in the most industrialized capitalist counties. Other critics of Marxism have questioned the ethics of an ideology that leaves no room for competing belief systems and that embraces violence as the means to secure a noble end. Yet, Marx’s philosophy inspired the creation of socialist parties in many European countries, and forms of it were institutionalized in two of the largest countries in the world, Russia and China. Both critics and adherents of Marxism agree that this nineteenth-century philosophy had a major impact on the twentieth-century world.