Marx, Karl (1818–83)

KARL MARX, THE SON of Hirschel and Henrietta Marx, was born in Trier, Germany. He came from a long line of rabbis, and his father, an admirer of Voltaire, abandoned his Jewish faith when Marx was a child and agreed to be baptized as a Protestant, so that he would keep his job as one of the most respected lawyers in Trier.

After schooling in Trier, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn at the age of 17. Soon thereafter he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen, a prominent member of Trier society and the man responsible for interesting Marx in Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year, his father, terrified by the fact that Marx was wounded in a duel and was running large debts, forced him to transfer to the academically superior Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Berlin.

In Berlin, Marx became interested in philosophy. He came under the influence of Bruno Bauer and joined the circle known as the Young Hegelians, known for their critique of the religion and the establishment. Marx was especially impressed by G.W.F. Hegel's dialectics, that is, that a thing or thought could not be separated from its opposite. Hegel's theory of the evolving process of history, and the notion that unity can be achieved only by equalizing the opposites, made a lasting impression on Marx.

After the death of his father and the dismissal of his mentor from the university, Marx moved to Cologne and, in October 1842, became editor of the influential Rheinische Zeitung. In January 1843 he published an article on the poverty of the Mosel wine farmers. This highly critical article provoked the government and the Prussian authorities, who quickly banned the newspaper. Fearing an imminent arrest, Marx married his fiancée and emigrated to France, where he became an editor of a political journal, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (Franco-German Annals). The principal contributors to the journal were his old mentor, Bauer; the Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin; and Friedrich Engels, son of a wealthy industrialist with whom Marx developed close cooperation a and devoted, lifelong friendship.

Paris experiences and especially the poverty of the working class made a deep and lasting impression on Marx. In an article published in February 1844, Marx argued that the workers would eventually emerge as the emancipators of the society. In the same year Marx wrote Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In this seminal work he developed the concept of alienation. At the end of 1844 Marx was expelled from Paris and he and Engels moved to Brussels where they cowrote The German Ideology, a critique of the philosophy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. The basic premise of the manuscript was the thesis that “the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.” According to this materialist conception [Page 687]of history, a human activity, rather than thought, plays the crucial role.

At the same time he also wrote a polemic, The Poverty of Philosophy, against idealistic socialism and joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigré workers, with its center in London, of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians. Marx and Engels took a prominent part in the league's Second Congress in London, in November 1847, at whose request they drew up the Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. Based on an earlier draft called Principles of Communism written by Engels, this document summarizes the theory of the class struggle and the role of the proletariat in building a new, classless society.

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