Born in Trier, Germany on 5th May 1818, Karl Heinrich Marx was the third of nine children of a prosperous Jewish lawyer. He was the only son to survive till maturity. When Karl was about 6years of age, all members of his family were baptized to the Protestant faith.
At the age of Seventeen, he entered the University of Bonn intending to study law, but transferred to the University of Berlin a year later and studied philosophy, history and literature. Just before his transfer, he got engaged to a beautiful and aristocratic girl, Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen, a prominent member of Trier Society. They married seven years later. Baron von Westphalen was responsible for interesting Marx in Romantic Literature and Saint-Simonian Politics.
It was in Berlin that he “got to know Hegel from beginning to end”, so he had written to his father. Hegel had been the head of the department of Philosophy at the University of Berlin. He had died only 5 years before Marx became a student there. The Hegelian system of thought had become very popular among European intellectuals who had become disillusioned with the French revolution in its failure to establish, liberty, equality and fraternity for all. The fundamental basis of Marx’s works begins with the philosophy of Hegel.
In 1841, Marx received a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Jena. His emergence as a radical Hegelian and a non-conformist denied him a. university appointment. So, Marx became a freelance journalist and soon after became the editor of Rheinische Zeitung in which he wrote editorials denouncing the harsh treatment of the poor by the authorities. After 5 months, the newspaper was suppressed and Marx and his wife moved to Paris. It was here; in 1844 that Marx began his lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels.
In Paris, he became acquainted with the prevailing French socialist thinking. He also edited the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher; a revolutionary paper intended to find common ground between French socialism and radical German Hegelians. Here, he set down his views on communism in a series of writing known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which remained unpublished till the 1930s. Towards the end of 1844, Marx was expelled from France and moved to Brussels with Engels.
In Brussels, he developed a manuscript published posthumously as The German Ideology, the basic thesis of which was that “the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.” He joined the Communist League, an organization of German emigrant workers head quartered in London, of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians. In 1847, at a conference of the League in London, they were commissioned to write a manifesto to set down its principles and program.
The Communist Manifesto as it was called was first published in the German language in 1848 and later reprinted in all languages. Scarcely was it published when the wave of 1848 revolutions broke out across Europe. At the time, he moved back to Paris and then went on to Germany, where he founded the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a radical paper along democratic lines as the Communist league had been almost disbanded.
He was expelled from Germany on charges of treason and finally settled in London along with his family and Engels. Engels was the son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer and he had cotton-spinning interests in Manchester. For almost forty years, Engels used his income and his inheritance to work with and support Marx and his family.
In London, he rejoined the Communist League and wrote two lengthy pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Life in London in the early 1850s was a grind. The Marx family lived in the Soho quarter of London in a three room flat. They lived through poverty, sickness and personal tragedy. Marx and Jenny had five children, of whom only three survived. Once, when one of their children died in infancy, Mrs. Marx had to borrow the money for the coffin from a stranger in the neighborhood.
It was in the midst of these tribulations that Marx produced his major three-volume work, Das Kapital (Capital). His work at this time also included an 800-page manuscript, the Grundrisse or Outlines (completed in 1857, published in 1941) on landed property, wage labour, capital, foreign trade and world market. He also wrote three large volumes. ‘Theories of Surplus volume’, which discusses theoreticians of political economy, particularly, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Though all three volumes of Das Kapital were completed in 1960s, Marx worked on them for the rest of his life and except for one volume; Engels published the other two posthumously.
Marx is regarded as a great thinker in economics and a practical revolutionary who used his knowledge of economics and history for the liberation of the workers. Both in Das Kapital and Manifesto, Marx tried to analyze the changing trends of his time that was undoubtedly transforming the world from a capitalist system to a socialist one. To Marx, the advantage of the victory of the working class was obvious. A one-class society consisting only of workers would emerge and all people would accrue the benefits.
“Let the ruling classes tremble at the Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, Unite!” These words by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto set in motion the international communist movement. Ironically they themselves were products of ‘bourgeois capitalism’ with a substantial middle class upbringing.
In 1864, With Engels, Marx founded the International Working Men’s Association or the First International as it was called. But his disputes with the anarchist Mikhail Babukinin eventually led to its breakup. Marx wrote “The Civil War in France”, one of his most famous pamphlets, based on the Paris commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris overthrew the government and held the city for two months.
Ill health plagued the last decade of his life and he became incapable of the sustained effort that had characterized his previous work. The deaths of his wife and eldest daughter clouded the last years of his life. On March 14 1883, Marx passed away peacefully in his armchair. He lies buried at Highgate Cemetery in North London.
At his funeral, his life long friend and partner said, “…Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers — from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America — and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.”
