Marx, Karl (1818–1883)

Karl Marx forever changed the way people around the world thought about historical change, social conflict, and political struggle. Revolutionary movements drawing inspiration from his work still challenge governments on nearly every continent and, until 1989, nearly one third of humanity lived under political systems that claimed, rightly or wrongly, to be the embodiment of his ideas. His own career spanned the professions of philosopher, journalist, political agitator, economic theorist, and satirist. His major written works published in his lifetime include On the Jewish Question (1843), The Holy Family (1845), The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), The Communist Manifesto (1848), Wage Labour and Capital (1849), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital (1867), and The Civil War in France (1871). A profound and systematic thinker, he sought to understand the dramatic and often horrendous social and economic changes occurring before his eyes with the advent of capitalist industrialization, which brought terrible suffering to the working class. He also tried to indicate how capitalism itself planted the seeds of its own passing by creating the conditions and desires necessary for a more egalitarian, and democratic, communist society in the future, which would usher in a new era of humanity and eliminate the exploitation and domination of one class by another. Throughout his life, Marx believed that people could change the world and that, if it were to be at all meaningful, theory had to be related to practice.

Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, the oldest city in Germany and the commercial capital of the Moselle wine region. Three factors helped color his critical attitude to conventional German society. He came from a long line of rabbis (Jewish teachers) on both sides of his family but, while his mother remained piously Jewish, his family's Judaism had to be suppressed if his father was to remain a successful lawyer in Trier. Marx knew religious discrimination firsthand. His father, who was not particularly religious, was a follower of the Enlightenment's critical rationalism as expressed by Voltaire (1694–1778) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), but he converted to Protestantism to keep his government job. The Enlightenment's critical rationalism fed into the third factor: The Rhineland, where Marx lived, was the most industrialized area of Germany, had been annexed by Napoleon (1769–1821), had been influenced by the principles of the French Revolution (1789–1799), and strongly opposed its post-Napoleonic domination by the conservative, militarist, and agrarian Prussian state whose capital was in faraway Berlin. All these factors helped Marx gain a critical distance from conventional middle-class German life.

A mediocre high school student, Marx enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1835 to study law. He spent his first year drinking, dueling, and writing poetry to his sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen (1814–1881) and was caught up in the romantic movement sweeping German universities. Marx's father sent him to the more serious-minded University of Berlin in 1836, hoping that his son would become an earnest student. With an astonishing capacity for rapid assimilation that characterized his whole life, Marx took copious notes on his reading; wrote a new system of metaphysics, a tragic play, and a comic novel; and moved toward the philosophy of Georg Hegel (1770–1831) that dominated the Berlin intellectual scene. As a radical young Hegelian, Marx began a critique of politics using Hegel's philosophical categories and completed a doctoral dissertation in 1841.

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