Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, which had belonged to Prussia since 1815. His father Heinrich, a lawyer from a family of rabbis, was baptised a Protestant around 1817, probably so that he could continue to practise under Prussian rules that excluded Jews from public office. Karl was baptised in 1824.

Marx studied law from 1835 in Bonn and from 1836 in Berlin, where he turned to philosophy and joined the Young Hegelians, a circle of radical followers of Hegel. In 1841 he obtained his doctorate in Jena with a dissertation on the natural philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. An academic career did not materialise because of the conservative politics at Prussian universities.

As editor-in-chief of the liberal 'Rheinische Zeitung' in Cologne, Marx wrote in 1842–1843 about censorship and the poverty of peasants. After the paper was banned he left for Paris with his wife Jenny von Westphalen. There began his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels, the son of a textile manufacturer, who had studied the conditions of workers in Manchester.

In Brussels Marx and Engels developed historical materialism: the view that economic relations of production form the basis of society, politics and ideas. Commissioned by the Communist League, they wrote the 'Manifesto of the Communist Party', published in February 1848, shortly before the revolutions of that year. After the revolutions failed, Marx settled in London in 1849 as a stateless refugee.

In London Marx worked as a journalist, including for the New-York Daily Tribune, and studied economics in the reading room of the British Museum. In 'Das Kapital' (volume I, 1867) he analysed capitalism as a system in which surplus value is extracted from labour, with recurring crises and a concentration of capital. He was a leading figure in the First International (1864–1876).

Marx lived in the age of the Industrial Revolution, which produced factories, railways and rapidly growing cities first in Britain and then on the European continent. Workers, including children, worked long days for low wages, and poverty and disease were widespread in the new industrial cities. At the same time production and the wealth of the bourgeoisie grew strongly.

Politically it was a time of liberal and national movements, censorship and restoration after the Napoleonic Wars. The revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 showed how fierce the struggle for rights, suffrage and social reform could be. Socialist ideas of thinkers such as Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon were already in circulation before Marx developed his own theory.

During his lifetime Marx was influential mainly in small circles of socialists and in the labour movement, particularly in Germany. After his death Engels and German social democracy spread his ideas more widely; Marxism became the main theory of the socialist parties of the Second International, which later split into reformist and revolutionary currents.

In the 20th century the Bolsheviks in Russia and later communist parties in China, Eastern Europe, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere invoked Marxism-Leninism. These one-party states introduced planned economies and were responsible for dictatorship, mass persecution and famines with millions of deaths. Beyond political movements, Marx's work also influenced sociology, historiography and economics.

Marx died on 14 March 1883 in London, fifteen months after his wife Jenny. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery; the present tomb with his bust was erected in 1956. Engels published volumes II (1885) and III (1894) of 'Das Kapital' from Marx's manuscripts.

Marx is among the most studied and most contested thinkers of the modern age. Supporters see in his work a lasting critique of inequality and economic power; critics point to predictions that did not come true and to the repressive regimes that invoked him. Whether and to what extent those regimes carried out his ideas remains a continuing debate among historians and philosophers.