Childhood and early education: 1818–1836 , now Brückenstraße 10, in Trier. The family occupied two rooms on the ground floor and three on the first floor. Purchased by the
Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1928, it now houses a museum devoted to him. Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to
Heinrich Marx and
Henriette Pressburg, at Brückengasse 664 in
Trier, then part of the
Kingdom of Prussia. Marx's family was originally
non-religious Jewish but had
converted to Christianity before his birth. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch
rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx. His father was the first in the line to receive a secular education. He became a lawyer with a comfortably
upper middle class income and the family owned a number of
Moselle vineyards, in addition to his income as an attorney. After Prussia's annexation of the
Rhineland in 1815 and the subsequent abrogation of
Jewish emancipation, Heinrich converted from Judaism to the state
Evangelical Church of Prussia in order to retain his career as a lawyer. Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the
Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers
Immanuel Kant and
Voltaire. A
classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, which was then an
absolute monarchy. In 1815, Heinrich Marx began working as an attorney and in 1819 moved his family to a ten-room property near the
Porta Nigra. His wife, Henriette Pressburg, was a Dutch Jew from a prosperous business family that later founded the company
Philips Electronics. Her sister Sophie Pressburg married
Lion Philips and was the grandmother of both
Gerard and
Anton Philips and great-grandmother to
Frits Philips. Lion Philips was a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist, upon whom Karl and
Jenny Marx would later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled in London. Little is known of Marx's childhood. The third of nine children, he became the eldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819. Marx and his surviving siblings were
baptised into the
Lutheran Church on 28 August 1824, and their mother in November 1825. Marx was privately educated by his father until 1830 when he entered , whose headmaster,
Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of his father. By employing many
liberal humanists as teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local conservative government. In 1832, police raided the school and discovered that literature promoting political liberalism was being distributed among the students. Viewing the distribution of such material as a seditious act, the authorities implemented reforms and replaced several members of the staff during Marx's time at the school. In October 1835 at the age of 16, Marx travelled to the
University of Bonn wishing to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field. Due to a condition referred to as a "weak chest", Marx was excused from military duty when he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political radicals that were monitored by the police. Marx also joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one point served as the club's co-president. In August 1836 he took part in a duel with a member of the university's
Borussian Korps. Although his grades in the first term were good, they soon deteriorated, leading his father to force a transfer to the more serious and academic
University of Berlin.
Hegelianism and early journalism: 1836–1843 in the 1830s Spending summer and autumn 1836 in Trier, Marx became more serious about his studies and his life. He became engaged to
Jenny von Westphalen, an educated member of the
petty nobility who had known Marx since childhood. As she had broken off her engagement with a young
aristocrat to be with Marx, their relationship was socially controversial owing to the differences between their religious and class origins, but Marx befriended her father
Ludwig von Westphalen (a liberal aristocrat) and later dedicated his doctoral thesis to him. Seven years after their engagement, on 19 June 1843, they married in a Protestant church in
Kreuznach. In October 1836, Marx arrived in Berlin, matriculating in the university's faculty of law and renting a room in the Mittelstrasse. During the first term, Marx attended lectures of
Eduard Gans (who represented the progressive Hegelian standpoint, elaborated on rational development in history by emphasising particularly its libertarian aspects, and the importance of the social question) and of
Karl von Savigny (who represented the
Historical School of Law). Although studying law, he was fascinated by philosophy and looked for a way to combine the two, believing that "without philosophy nothing could be accomplished". Marx became interested in the recently deceased German philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas were then widely debated among European philosophical circles. During a convalescence in Stralau, he joined the
Doctors Club, a student group which discussed
Hegelian ideas, and through them became involved with a group of
radical thinkers known as the
Young Hegelians in 1837. They gathered around
Ludwig Feuerbach and
Bruno Bauer, with Marx developing a particularly close friendship with
Adolf Rutenberg. Like Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of Hegel's
metaphysical assumptions but adopted his
dialectical method to criticise established society, politics and religion from a left-wing perspective. Marx's father died in May 1838, resulting in a diminished income for the family. Marx had been emotionally close to his father and treasured his memory after his death. commemorating the PhD he was awarded there in 1841 By 1837, Marx had completed a short novel,
Scorpion and Felix; a drama,
Oulanem; and a number of love poems dedicated to his wife. None of this early work was published during his lifetime. The love poems were published posthumously in the
Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Volume 1. Marx soon abandoned fiction for other pursuits, including the study of English and Italian,
art history and the translation of Latin classics. He began co-operating with
Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel's
Philosophy of Religion in 1840. Marx was also engaged in writing his doctoral thesis,
The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, which he completed in 1841. He based the theme of his thesis on the philosophy of
Democritus and
Epicurus. It was described as "a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy". The essay was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at the University of Berlin. Marx decided instead to submit his thesis to the more liberal
University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his
Ph.D. in April 1841. As Marx and Bauer were both
atheists, in March 1841 they began plans for a journal entitled (
Atheistic Archives), but it never came to fruition. In July, Marx and Bauer took a trip to
Bonn from Berlin. There they scandalised their class by getting drunk, laughing in church and galloping through the streets on donkeys. Marx was considering an academic career, but this path was barred by the government's growing opposition to classical liberalism and the Young Hegelians. Marx moved to
Cologne in 1842, where he became a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper (
Rhineland News), expressing his early views on socialism and his developing interest in economics. Marx criticised right-wing European governments as well as figures in the liberal and socialist movements, whom he thought ineffective or counter-productive. The newspaper attracted the attention of the Prussian
government censors, who checked every issue for seditious material before printing, which Marx lamented: "Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear". After the published an article strongly criticising the Russian monarchy, Tsar
Nicholas I requested it be banned, and Prussia's government complied in 1843.
Paris: 1843–1845 In 1843, Marx became co-editor of a new, radical left-wing Parisian newspaper, the (
German-French Annals), then being set up by the German activist
Arnold Ruge to bring together German and French radicals. Therefore Marx and his wife moved to Paris in October 1843. Initially living with Ruge and his wife communally at 23
Rue Vaneau, they found the living conditions difficult, so moved out following the birth of their daughter Jenny in 1844. Although intended to attract writers from both France and the German states, the was dominated by the latter and the only non-German writer was the exiled Russian
anarchist collectivist Mikhail Bakunin. Marx contributed two essays to the paper, "
Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" and "
On the Jewish Question", the latter introducing his belief that the
proletariat were a revolutionary force and marking his embrace of communism; "On the Jewish Question" has also been described as evidence of Marx's antisemitic views by writers such as
Paul Johnson,
Bernard Lewis,
Hyam Maccoby, and
Robert S. Wistrich, but this view is disputed by
Wendy Brown,
Robert Fine,
David McLellan, and
Francis Wheen, among others. Only one issue was published, but it was relatively successful, largely owing to the inclusion of
Heinrich Heine's satirical odes on King
Ludwig of Bavaria, leading the German states to ban it and seize imported copies (Ruge nevertheless refused to fund the publication of further issues and his friendship with Marx broke down). After
Jahrbücher's collapse, Marx began writing for (
Forwards!), the only remaining uncensored German-language radical newspaper. Based in Paris, the paper was connected to the
League of the Just, a
utopian socialist secret society of workers and artisans. Marx attended some of their meetings but did not join. In , Marx refined his views on socialism based upon Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideas of
dialectical materialism, at the same time criticising liberals and other socialists operating in Europe. , whom Marx met in 1844; the two became lifelong friends and collaborators. On 28 August 1844, Marx met the German socialist
Friedrich Engels at the
Café de la Régence, beginning a lifelong friendship. Engels showed Marx his recently published
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, convincing Marx that the working class would be the agent and instrument of the final revolution in history. Although critical of Bauer, Marx was increasingly influenced by the ideas of the Young Hegelians
Max Stirner and
Ludwig Feuerbach, but eventually Marx and Engels abandoned Feuerbachian materialism as well. Marx engaged in an intensive study of
political economy (
Adam Smith,
David Ricardo,
James Mill,
etc.)
, the French socialists (especially
Claude Henri St. Simon and
Charles Fourier) and the history of France. The study and critique of political economy was a project that Marx would pursue for the rest of his life and would result in his major economic workthe three-volume series called
Das Kapital.
Marxism is based in large part on three influences: Hegel's dialectics, French utopian socialism and British political economy. Together with his earlier study of Hegel's dialectics, the studying that Marx did during this time in Paris meant that all major components of "Marxism" were in place by the autumn of 1844. Marx was constantly being pulled away from his critique of political economynot only by the usual daily demands of the time, but additionally by editing a radical newspaper and later by organising and directing the efforts of a political party during years of potentially revolutionary popular uprisings of the citizenry. Still, Marx was always drawn back to his studies where he sought "to understand the inner workings of capitalism". An outline of "Marxism" had definitely formed in the mind of Karl Marx by late 1844. Indeed, many features of the Marxist view of the world had been worked out in great detail, but Marx needed to write down all of the details of his world view to further clarify the new critique of political economy in his own mind. Accordingly, Marx wrote
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. These manuscripts covered numerous topics, detailing Marx's concept of
alienated labour. The "Theses on Feuerbach" are best known for Thesis 11, which states that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it". This work contains Marx's criticism of
materialism (for being contemplative),
idealism (for reducing practice to theory), and, overall, philosophy (for putting abstract reality above the physical world). Later,
Mary Burns, Engels' long-time companion, left Manchester, England, to join Engels in Brussels. In mid-July 1845, Marx and Engels left Brussels for England to visit the leaders of the
Chartists, a working-class movement in Britain. This was Marx's first trip to England and Engels was an ideal guide for the trip. Engels had already spent two years living in Manchester from November 1842 to August 1844. Not only did Engels already know the English language, but he had also developed a close relationship with many Chartist leaders. Indeed, Engels was serving as a reporter for many Chartist and socialist English newspapers. Marx used the trip as an opportunity to examine the economic resources available for study in various libraries in London and Manchester. In collaboration with Engels, Marx also set about writing a book which is often seen as his best treatment of the concept of
historical materialism,
The German Ideology. In this work, Marx broke with
Ludwig Feuerbach,
Bruno Bauer,
Max Stirner and the rest of the Young Hegelians, while he also broke with
Karl Grün and other "true socialists" whose philosophies were still based in part on "
idealism". In
German Ideology, Marx and Engels finally completed their philosophy, which was based solely on materialism as the sole motor force in history.
German Ideology is written in a humorously satirical form, but even this satirical form did not save the work from censorship. Like so many other early writings of his,
German Ideology would not be published in Marx's lifetime and was published only in 1932. This work was intended to draw a distinction between the utopian socialists and Marx's own scientific socialist philosophy. Whereas the utopians believed that people must be persuaded one person at a time to join the socialist movement, the way a person must be persuaded to adopt any different belief, Marx knew that people would tend, on most occasions, to act in accordance with their own economic interests, thus appealing to an entire class (the working class in this case) with a broad appeal to the class's best material interest would be the best way to mobilise the broad mass of that class to make a revolution and change society. This was the intent of the new book that Marx was planning, but to get the manuscript past the government censors he called the book
The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and offered it as a response to the "petty-bourgeois philosophy" of the French anarchist socialist
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as expressed in his book
The Philosophy of Poverty (1840). These books laid the foundation for Marx and Engels's most famous work, a political pamphlet that has since come to be commonly known as
The Communist Manifesto. While residing in Brussels in 1846, Marx continued his association with the secret radical organisation
League of the Just. As noted above, Marx thought the League to be just the sort of radical organisation that was needed to spur the working class of Europe toward the mass movement that would bring about a working-class revolution. However, to organise the working class into a mass movement the League had to cease its "secret" or "underground" orientation and operate in the open as a political party. Members of the League eventually became persuaded in this regard. Accordingly, in June 1847 the League was reorganised by its membership into a new open "above ground" political society that appealed directly to the working classes. This new open political society was called the Communist League. Both Marx and Engels participated in drawing up the programme and organisational principles of the new
Communist League. '', published in German in 1848 In late 1847, Marx and Engels began writing what was to become their most famous work – a programme of action for the
Communist League. Written jointly by Marx and Engels from December 1847 to January 1848,
The Communist Manifesto was first published on 21 February 1848.
The Communist Manifesto laid out the beliefs of the new Communist League. No longer a secret society, the Communist League wanted to make aims and intentions clear to the general public rather than hiding its beliefs as the League of the Just had been doing. The opening lines of the pamphlet set forth the principal basis of Marxism: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It goes on to examine the antagonisms that Marx claimed were arising in the clashes of interest between the
bourgeoisie (the wealthy capitalist class) and the
proletariat (the industrial working class). Proceeding on from this, the
Manifesto presents the argument for why the Communist League, as opposed to other socialist and liberal political parties and groups at the time, was truly acting in the interests of the proletariat to overthrow capitalist society and to replace it with socialism. Later that year, Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions, and often violent upheavals that became known as the
Revolutions of 1848. In France,
a revolution led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the
French Second Republic. Marx was supportive of such activity and having recently received a substantial inheritance from his father (withheld by his uncle Lionel Philips since his father's death in 1838) of either 6,000 he allegedly used a third of it to arm Belgian workers who were planning revolutionary action. Although the veracity of these allegations is disputed, the Belgian Ministry of Justice accused Marx of it, subsequently arresting him and he was forced to flee back to France, where with a new republican government in power he believed that he would be safe.
Cologne: 1848–1849 Temporarily settling down in Paris, Marx transferred the Communist League executive headquarters to the city and also set up a
German Workers' Club with various German socialists living there. Hoping to see the revolution spread to Germany, in 1848 Marx moved back to Cologne where he began issuing a handbill entitled the
Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, in which he argued for only four of the ten points of the
Communist Manifesto, believing that in Germany at that time the bourgeoisie must overthrow the
feudal monarchy and aristocracy before the proletariat could overthrow the bourgeoisie. On 1 June, Marx started the publication of a daily newspaper, the , which he helped to finance through his recent inheritance from his father. Designed to put forward news from across Europe with his own Marxist interpretation of events, the newspaper featured Marx as a primary writer and the dominant editorial influence. Despite contributions by fellow members of the Communist League, according to
Friedrich Engels it remained "a simple dictatorship by Marx". Meanwhile, the democratic parliament in
Prussia collapsed and the king,
Frederick William IV, introduced a new cabinet of his reactionary supporters, who implemented counterrevolutionary measures to expunge left-wing and other revolutionary elements from the country. Consequently, the was soon suppressed, and Marx was ordered to leave the country on 16 May 1849. The Society held their meetings in
Great Windmill Street,
Soho, central London's entertainment district.
New-York Daily Tribune and journalism In the early period in London, Marx committed himself almost exclusively to his studies, such that his family endured extreme poverty. His main source of income was Engels, whose own source was his wealthy industrialist father. In Prussia as editor of his own newspaper, and contributor to others ideologically aligned, Marx could reach his audience, the working classes. In London, without finances to run a newspaper themselves, he and Engels turned to international journalism. At one stage they were being published by six newspapers from England, the United States,
Prussia, Austria, and South Africa. Marx's principal earnings came from his work as European correspondent, from 1852 to 1862, for the
New-York Daily Tribune, and from also producing articles for more "bourgeois" newspapers. Marx had his articles translated from German by , until his proficiency in English had become adequate. The journal had wide working-class appeal from its foundation; at two cents, it was inexpensive; and, with about 50,000 copies per issue, its circulation was the widest in the United States. On 21 March 1857, Dana informed Marx that due to the economic recession only one article a week would be paid for, published or not; the others would be paid for only if published. Marx had sent his articles on Tuesdays and Fridays, but, that October, the
Tribune discharged all its correspondents in Europe except Marx and B. Taylor, and reduced Marx to a weekly article. Between September and November 1860, only five were published. After a six-month interval, Marx resumed contributions from September 1861 until March 1862, when Dana wrote to inform him that there was no longer space in the
Tribune for reports from London, due to American domestic affairs. In 1868, Dana set up a rival newspaper, the
New York Sun, at which he was editor-in-chief. In April 1857, Dana invited Marx to contribute articles, mainly on military history, to the
New American Cyclopedia, an idea of George Ripley, Dana's friend and literary editor of the
Tribune. In all, 67 Marx-Engels articles were published, of which 51 were written by Engels, although Marx did some research for them in the
British Museum. By the late 1850s, American popular interest in European affairs waned and Marx's articles turned to topics such as the "slavery crisis" and the outbreak of the
American Civil War in 1861 in the "War Between the States". Between December 1851 and March 1852, Marx worked on his theoretical work about the
French Revolution of 1848, titled
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. In this he explored concepts in
historical materialism,
class struggle,
dictatorship of the proletariat, and victory of the proletariat over the
bourgeois state.
First International and Das Kapital Marx continued to write articles for the
New York Daily Tribune as long as he was sure that the
Tribunes editorial policy was still progressive. However, the departure of Charles Dana from the paper in late 1861 and the resultant change in the editorial board brought about a new editorial policy. No longer was the
Tribune to be a strong
abolitionist paper dedicated to a complete
Union victory. The new editorial board supported an immediate peace between the Union and the
Confederacy in the Civil War in the United States with slavery left intact in the Confederacy. Marx strongly disagreed with this new political position and in 1863 was forced to withdraw as a writer for the
Tribune. In 1864, Marx became involved in the
International Workingmen's Association (known as the First International), to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. In that organisation, Marx was involved in the struggle against the anarchist wing centred on
Mikhail Bakunin. Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. Given the repeated failures and frustrations of workers' revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to understand and provide a critique suitable for the
capitalist mode of production, and hence spent a great deal of time in the reading room of the
British Museum studying. By 1857, Marx had accumulated over 800 pages of notes and short essays on capital,
landed property, wage labour, the state, and foreign trade, and the world market, though this work did not appear in print until 1939, under the title
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (). In 1859, Marx published
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious critique of political economy. This work was intended merely as a preview of his three-volume
Das Kapital (English title:
Capital: Critique of Political Economy), which he intended to publish at a later date. In
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx began to critically examine axioms and categories of economic thinking. The work was enthusiastically received, and the edition sold out quickly. '' The successful sales of
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy stimulated Marx in the early 1860s to finish work on the three large volumes that would compose his major life's work – and the
Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed and critiqued the theoreticians of political economy, particularly
Adam Smith and
David Ricardo.
Theories of Surplus Value is often referred to as the fourth volume of and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the
history of economic thought. Volume III of was published a year later in October 1894 under the name
Capital III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole.
Theories of Surplus Value derived from the sprawling
Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, a second draft for , the latter spanning volumes 30–34 of the
Collected Works of Marx and Engels. Specifically,
Theories of Surplus Value runs from the latter part of the
Collected Works' thirtieth volume through the end of their thirty-second volume; meanwhile, the larger
Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863 run from the start of the
Collected Works' thirtieth volume through the first half of their thirty-fourth volume. The latter half of the Collected Works' thirty-fourth volume consists of the surviving fragments of the
Economic Manuscripts of 1863–1864, which represented a third draft for , and a large portion of which is included as an appendix to the Penguin edition of , volume I. A German-language abridged edition of
Theories of Surplus Value was published in 1905 and in 1910. This abridged edition was translated into English and published in 1951 in London, but the complete unabridged edition of
Theories of Surplus Value was published as the "fourth volume" of in 1963 and 1971 in Moscow. During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined, and he became incapable of the sustained effort that had characterised his previous work. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. His
Critique of the Gotha Programme opposed the tendency of his followers
Wilhelm Liebknecht and
August Bebel to compromise with the
state socialist ideas of
Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party. This work is also notable for another famous Marx quote: "
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". While admitting that Russia's rural "commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia", Marx also warned that in order for the mir to operate as a means for moving straight to the socialist stage without a preceding capitalist stage it "would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it [the rural commune] from all sides". Before he died, Marx asked Engels to write up these ideas, which were published in 1884 under the title
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, partially based on Marx's notes to
Lewis H. Morgan's book
Ancient Society. == Personal life ==