Marx, Karl (1818–1883)

The Formation of a Radical

Karl Marx grew up as the second son of nine children in Trier, Prussia, a city now in the western part of Germany. His paternal and maternal grandfathers were both Jewish rabbis. His father converted the entire family to Lutheranism, the state's dominant religion, when Marx was 6 years old, to continue practicing law in the civil service. Marx studied law at the University of Bonn and philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he became attracted to the writings of Kant and Hegel. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841.

Although a brilliant philosophy student, Marx was denied a teaching position because of his Jewish heritage and atheistic religious beliefs. He became a journalist for a liberal newspaper in Cologne and attended socialist meetings. His articles criticized the Prussian monarchy, proposed the abolishment of private property, and encouraged a working class revolution. Marx and his wife, the daughter of Prussian nobility, moved to Paris after the Prussian government threatened to arrest him for treason. There Marx helped create a political journal in exile.

Marx and Engels

In 1844, Marx declared himself a communist and formed a lifetime friendship with Friedrich Engels, another Prussian writer living in Paris. Engels, an heir to a business fortune, published The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, a seething critique of the negative impacts of the Industrial Revolution on individuals and society. That same year, Marx and Engels published The Holy Family, a critique of the Young Hegelians. Marx began writing Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, about the communist solution to capitalist alienation, and The German Ideology, about his materialist conception of history, although neither would be published until after his death.

Marx was expelled from France in 1845 for his revolutionary writings. Jobless, he relocated his family to Belgium, where they lived in poverty. Marx joined the revolutionary Communist League whose goals included violently overthrowing capitalism. In February 1848, he and Engels published The Communist Manifesto as the political organization's statement of faith. In their call to arms, Marx and Engels argued that capitalism inevitably would be replaced by socialism and then communism.

Marx was arrested and expelled from Belgium in 1848 for supplying revolutionaries with money to purchase weapons. He and Engels reentered Germany as it experimented with democratic reform. They were arrested for inciting a revolt, acquitted, but then deported. Marx went back to Paris to participate in revolutionary activities but was expelled from France again. In 1849, Marx settled in London, England. He lived in slum conditions with his wife and children. Only three of his seven children survived to adulthood.

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