Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born on 5 May (new style) 1818 in the town of Trier (Rhenish Prussia). His father was a lawyer, a Jew, who in 1824 adopted Protestantism. The family was well-to-do and cultured, but not revolutionary. After leaving the gymnasium in Trier, Marx entered the university, first at Bonn and then at Berlin; he studied law, but above all history and philosophy. He finished the course in 1841, submitting a university dissertation on the philosophy of Epicurus. In his views Marx was at that time still a Hegelian idealist. In Berlin he belonged to the circle of the “Left Hegelians” (Bruno Bauer and others), who sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusions from Hegel’s philosophy.

After finishing university Marx moved to Bonn, expecting to become a professor. But the reactionary policy of the government, which in 1832 deprived Ludwig Feuerbach of his chair and in 1836 again refused to let him back into the university, and in 1841 took away the young professor Bruno Bauer’s right to lecture at Bonn, compelled Marx to abandon an academic career. At that time the development of Left Hegelian views in Germany was advancing very rapidly. Ludwig Feuerbach, particularly from 1836, began to criticise theology and to turn towards materialism, which by 1841 had gained the upper hand in his thinking (The Essence of Christianity); in 1843 appeared his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. “One must have experienced the liberating effect” of these books, Engels wrote later of these works of Feuerbach. “We” (that is, the Left Hegelians, Marx among them) “all became at once Feuerbachians.” At that time the Rhenish radical bourgeois, who had certain points of contact with the Left Hegelians, founded an opposition paper in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung (it began to appear on 1 January 1842). Marx and Bruno Bauer were invited to be its chief contributors, and in October 1842 Marx became editor-in-chief and moved from Bonn to Cologne. Under Marx’s editorship the revolutionary-democratic trend of the paper became more and more pronounced, and the government first subjected the paper to a double and triple censorship and then decided to close it altogether on 1 January 1843. Marx had to resign the editorship by that date, but his departure did not save the paper, which was suppressed in March 1843. Among Marx’s more important articles in the Rheinische Zeitung Engels notes, besides those mentioned below (see Literature), an article on the condition of the peasant wine-growers of the Moselle valley. His newspaper work showed Marx that he was not sufficiently acquainted with political economy, and he zealously set about studying it.

In 1843 Marx married, at Kreuznach, Jenny von Westphalen, a childhood friend to whom he had become engaged while still a student. His wife came of a reactionary family of the Prussian nobility. Her elder brother was Prussian Minister of the Interior during one of the most reactionary periods, 1850–58. In the autumn of 1843 Marx went to Paris in order to publish a radical journal abroad together with Arnold Ruge (1802–80; a Left Hegelian; in prison 1825–30, an émigré after 1848, a Bismarckian after 1866–70). Only the first issue of this journal, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, appeared. It ceased because of the difficulty of secret distribution in Germany and because of disagreements with Ruge. In his articles in this journal Marx already appears as a revolutionary who proclaims the “ruthless criticism of everything existing”, and in particular the “criticism of weapons”, and who appeals to the masses and to the proletariat.

In September 1844 Frederick Engels came to Paris for a few days, and from that time he became Marx’s closest friend. The two of them took a most active part in the then seething life of the revolutionary groups in Paris (of special importance was the doctrine of Proudhon, with whom Marx thoroughly settled accounts in his The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847) and, in sharp struggle against the various doctrines of petty-bourgeois socialism, worked out the theory and tactics of revolutionary proletarian socialism, or communism (Marxism). See Marx’s works of this period, 1844–48, below: Literature. In 1845, at the insistence of the Prussian government, Marx was expelled from Paris as a dangerous revolutionary. He moved to Brussels. In the spring of 1847 Marx and Engels joined a secret propaganda society, the Communist League; they took a leading part in the Second Congress of the League (London, November 1847), and on its instructions drew up the celebrated Manifesto of the Communist Party, which appeared in February 1848. With the clarity and brilliance of genius this work outlines the new world-outlook: consistent materialism, which embraces the realm of social life as well; dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development; the theory of the class struggle and of the world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat, the creator of a new, communist society.

When the February Revolution of 1848 broke out, Marx was expelled from Belgium. He went back to Paris, and from there, after the March revolution, to Germany, namely to Cologne. There the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared from 1 June 1848 to 19 May 1849, with Marx as editor-in-chief. The new theory was brilliantly confirmed by the course of the revolutionary events of 1848–49, just as it has since been confirmed by all the proletarian and democratic movements of all the countries of the world. The victorious counter-revolution first had Marx tried (he was acquitted on 9 February 1849) and then expelled him from Germany (16 May 1849). Marx went first to Paris, was expelled from there too after the demonstration of 13 June 1849, and went to London, where he lived until his death.

The conditions of émigré life, laid bare with special vividness in the correspondence between Marx and Engels (published in 1913), were extremely hard. Want literally choked Marx and his family; had it not been for Engels’s constant and self-sacrificing financial support, Marx would not only have been unable to finish Capital but would inevitably have perished under the weight of poverty. Besides, the prevailing doctrines and trends of petty-bourgeois, and in general non-proletarian, socialism forced Marx to wage a constant and merciless struggle, and sometimes to repel the most savage and monstrous personal attacks (Herr Vogt). Keeping aloof from the émigré circles, Marx developed his materialist theory in a number of historical works (see Literature), devoting himself mainly to the study of political economy. Marx revolutionised this science (see below, The Teaching of Marx) in his works A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital (vol. I, 1867).

The period of revived democratic movements at the end of the fifties and in the sixties recalled Marx to practical activity. In 1864 (28 September) the famous First International, the “International Working Men’s Association”, was founded in London. Marx was the soul of this organisation and the author of its first “Address” and of a host of resolutions, declarations and manifestos. In uniting the labour movement of various countries, and striving to direct into the channel of joint activity the various forms of non-proletarian, pre-Marxist socialism (Mazzini, Proudhon, Bakunin, liberal English trade unionism, Lassallean vacillations to the right in Germany, and so on), and in combating the theories of all these sects and petty schools, Marx hammered out a uniform tactic for the proletarian struggle of the working class in the various countries. After the fall of the Paris Commune (1871), which Marx assessed so profoundly, so aptly, so brilliantly, in so effective and revolutionary a way (The Civil War in France, 1871), and after the split in the International caused by the Bakuninists, it became impossible for the International to exist in Europe. After the Hague Congress of the International (1872) Marx had the General Council of the International transferred to New York. The First International had played its historical part, and it made way for a period of an immeasurably greater growth of the labour movement in all the countries of the world, a period in which the movement grew in breadth and mass socialist workers’ parties were formed on the basis of individual national states.

Strenuous work in the International and still more strenuous theoretical studies completely undermined Marx’s health. He continued his reworking of political economy and the completion of Capital, gathering a mass of new material and studying a number of languages (Russian, for example), but ill-health prevented him from finishing Capital.

His wife died on 2 December 1881. On 14 March 1883 Marx passed away peacefully in his armchair. He lies buried, together with his wife, in Highgate Cemetery, London. Several of Marx’s children died in infancy in London when the family was in great poverty. Three daughters married English and French socialists: Eleanor Aveling, Laura Lafargue and Jenny Longuet. The latter’s son is a member of the French Socialist Party.