Karl Marx

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes. When he returned, he found his lifelong friend peacefully gone to sleep, but forever. The man who died that day in London was stateless, aged 64, and left a personal estate valued for probate at just 250 pounds. He would be buried three days later in a corner of Highgate Cemetery set aside for agnostics and atheists, with by some accounts as few as nine mourners present. How does a man who died in such modest circumstances become described as one of the most influential figures of the modern era? Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He developed the theory of historical materialism and predicted that capitalism would be overthrown by the proletariat. This is the story of how a rabbi's grandson from Trier built a critique of the modern world, why he spent decades in exile and poverty to write it, and how the ideas he never finished came to guide revolutions across the twentieth century.

• 2. A Prussian Inheritance

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  Born on the 5th of May 1818 at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, Marx came from a line that had supplied the city's rabbis since 1723. His grandfather Meier Halevi Marx held that role, and his maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi. His father, Heinrich, broke the pattern as the first in the line to receive a secular education, becoming a lawyer with a comfortable upper-middle-class income and several Moselle vineyards.

  After Prussia annexed the Rhineland in 1815 and revoked Jewish emancipation, Heinrich converted from Judaism to the state Evangelical Church of Prussia simply to keep his career. A man of the Enlightenment, he was interested in Immanuel Kant and Voltaire, and as a classical liberal he agitated for a constitution in what was then an absolute monarchy.

  Henriette Pressburg, Marx's mother, came from a prosperous Dutch business family that later founded Philips Electronics. Her sister Sophie married Lion Philips, a wealthy tobacco manufacturer who became great-grandfather to Frits Philips. That family tie was not merely genealogical. Lion Philips would later supply Karl and Jenny Marx with loans during their London exile.

  The third of nine children, Marx became the eldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819. He and his surviving siblings were baptised into the Lutheran Church on the 28th of August 1824. At the school he entered in 1830, police raided in 1832 and found literature promoting political liberalism circulating among the students, prompting the authorities to replace several staff members during his time there.

• 3. Hegel And The Donkeys

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  In October 1835, at the age of 16, Marx travelled to the University of Bonn wanting to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law. A condition described as a weak chest excused him from military duty at 18. At Bonn he joined the Poets' Club, a group of political radicals watched by police, and the Trier Tavern Club drinking society, where he served at one point as co-president. In August 1836 he fought a duel with a member of the university's Borussian Korps.

  Grades that started good soon deteriorated, and his father forced a transfer to the more academic University of Berlin. There Marx became fascinated by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, declaring that without philosophy nothing could be accomplished. Through the Doctors Club he joined the Young Hegelians around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, forming a particularly close friendship with Adolf Rutenberg.

  Marx completed his doctoral thesis in 1841 on the difference between the philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. One description called it a daring and original piece of work meant to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy. Too controversial for the conservative professors at Berlin, he submitted it instead to the more liberal University of Jena, which awarded his Ph.D. in April 1841.

  That summer Marx and Bauer scandalised polite society in Bonn by getting drunk, laughing in church, and galloping through the streets on donkeys. The government's growing hostility to the Young Hegelians barred an academic career, so Marx turned to journalism at the radical Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. He complained that the paper had to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and after it criticised the Russian monarchy, Tsar Nicholas I requested a ban that Prussia granted in 1843.

• 4. Paris And The Friendship

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  On the 19th of June 1843, after a seven-year engagement, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen in a Protestant church in Kreuznach. She was an educated member of the petty nobility who had broken off an engagement with a young aristocrat to be with him. The match was socially controversial given their differing religious and class origins. Marx had befriended her father, the liberal aristocrat Ludwig von Westphalen, and dedicated his doctoral thesis to him.

  In October 1843 the couple moved to Paris so Marx could co-edit the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Only one issue appeared. Marx contributed two essays there, including On the Jewish Question, which marked his embrace of communism and his belief that the proletariat were a revolutionary force.

  On the 28th of August 1844, at the Café de la Régence, Marx met Friedrich Engels and began a lifelong friendship. Engels showed him his recently published The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, convincing Marx that the working class would be the instrument of the final revolution in history. Their first joint work, a criticism of Bruno Bauer, appeared in 1845 as The Holy Family.

  Living at 38 Rue Vaneau, Marx threw himself into political economy, reading Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the French socialists. He wrote The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, detailing his concept of alienated labour. By late 1844 all the major components of Marxism, drawn from Hegel's dialectics, French utopian socialism, and British political economy, were in place. In 1845, after a request from the Prussian king, the French interior minister François Guizot expelled Marx from France.

• 5. The Manifesto

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  In February 1845 Marx emigrated to Brussels, where he had to pledge not to publish on contemporary politics. There he wrote his eleven Theses on Feuerbach, best known for the line that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it. The work introduced his historical materialism, the argument that the world is changed by material activity and practice rather than by ideas.

  With Engels, who moved to Brussels in April 1845, Marx wrote The German Ideology, often seen as his best treatment of historical materialism. Its humorous satire did not spare it from censorship, and it remained unpublished until 1932. To slip past censors, Marx titled his next book The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847, framing it as a reply to the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

  In June 1847 the secret League of the Just reorganised itself into the open Communist League. Written jointly from December 1847 to January 1848, The Communist Manifesto was first published on the 21st of February 1848. Its opening declared that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

  Later that year, Europe erupted in the Revolutions of 1848. Marx had received an inheritance from his father of either 6,000 or 5,000 francs, withheld by his uncle Lionel Philips since 1838. The Belgian Ministry of Justice accused him of using a third of it to arm Belgian workers, arrested him, and forced him to flee back to France.

• 6. Cologne And The Long Exile

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  On the 1st of June 1848, back in Cologne, Marx launched a daily newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, financed through his father's inheritance. Engels called it a simple dictatorship by Marx. The editor faced repeated trials for insulting the chief public prosecutor and inciting rebellion through tax boycotting, though he was acquitted each time. After Frederick William IV installed a reactionary cabinet, the paper was suppressed and Marx was ordered to leave on the 16th of May 1849.

  Marx reached London in early June 1849 and would remain there for the rest of his life. The Communist League's headquarters followed him. In the winter of 1849 to 1850 a faction led by August Willich and Karl Schapper pushed for an immediate uprising, believing the whole European working class would rise spontaneously to join it. Marx called such an unplanned revolt adventuristic and suicidal, insisting that society changes through scientific analysis of economic conditions, not the will power of a handful of men. He prevailed, and the Willich and Schapper group left.

  With no money to run a paper, Marx turned to international journalism. At one stage he and Engels were published by six newspapers across England, the United States, Prussia, Austria, and South Africa. His principal earnings came from 1852 to 1862 as European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune, founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley. His contact there was Charles Dana, a fourierist and abolitionist who was editor-in-chief. The Tribune sold at two cents with a circulation around 50,000 copies, the widest in the United States.

  Marx's family endured extreme poverty in this period, supported mainly by Engels, whose income came from his wealthy industrialist father. The arrangement frayed when Dana departed in late 1861 and the Tribune's new board favoured peace with the Confederacy. Marx strongly disagreed and withdrew as a writer in 1863.

• 7. The Magnum Opus

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  By 1857 Marx had accumulated over 800 pages of notes on capital, wage labour, the state, and the world market. These did not appear in print until 1939, under the title Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Two years later, in 1859, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy sold out quickly, encouraging him to finish his life's major work.

  In 1867 the first volume of Das Kapital was published, analysing the dynamics of capital accumulation, competition, the banking system, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx proposed that the driving force of capital lies in the exploitation of labour, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value. By autumn 1871 the entire first German edition had sold out, and a Russian-language edition of 3,000 copies appeared on the 27th of March 1872.

  Volumes II and III remained manuscripts that Marx worked on for the rest of his life. Engels published Volume II in July 1893 as The Process of Circulation of Capital, and Volume III in October 1894 as The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Theories of Surplus Value, often called the fourth volume, was published in full in Moscow in 1963 and 1971.

  From 1864 Marx joined the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association, the First International, where he fought the anarchist wing centred on Mikhail Bakunin. The most important event of the International's life was the Paris Commune of 1871, when the citizens of Paris held their city for two months. After its bloody suppression, Marx wrote The Civil War in France in its defence. His Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875 gave another famous line: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

• 8. The Worker And The Tomb

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  Marx and Jenny von Westphalen had seven children together, but the poor conditions of their London life meant only three survived to adulthood. Friends called him Moor for his dark complexion and black curly hair, while he encouraged his children to call him Old Nick and Charley. He often used pseudonyms when renting a home, signing himself Monsieur Ramboz in Paris and A. Williams in London, apparently to make it harder for authorities to track him down.

  Marx drank heavily after joining the Trier Tavern Club in the 1830s and continued until his death. His biographer Werner Blumenberg attributed his poor health to liver and gall problems from 1849, worsened by an unsuitable lifestyle of seasoned dishes, smoked fish, caviare, wine, and an enormous amount of cheap cigars. From 1863 Marx complained of boils so severe he could neither sit nor work upright. In 2007, the dermatologist Sam Shuster of Newcastle University offered a retrodiagnosis of hidradenitis suppurativa, and even asked whether the disease's psychosocial effects helped Marx develop his theory of alienation.

  Marx was an outspoken opponent of child labour, charging that British industries could but live by sucking blood, and children's blood too. He saw religion as both an expression of suffering and a protest against it, calling it the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the opium of the people. In a letter to Vera Zasulich dated the 8th of March 1881, he contemplated whether Russia might bypass the capitalist stage and build communism on the common ownership of land in the village mir.

  Following his wife Jenny's death in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery on the 17th of March 1883 in an area reserved for agnostics and atheists. Marx and his family were reburied nearby in November 1954, and a new tomb was unveiled on the 14th of March 1956 bearing the words Workers of All Lands Unite. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm offered the verdict that one cannot say Marx died a failure. Within twenty-five years of his death, continental socialist parties acknowledging his influence had made significant gains in democratic elections.