Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) |
Karl Heinrich Marx (5. May 1818 - 14. March 1883) was an influential German philosopher,
political economist, and a revolutionary. Marx was not only a social and political
theorist, but was also active as an organizer of the revolutionary International
Workingmen's Association.
Although Marx addressed a wide range of issues in his
career as a journalist and philosopher, he is most famous for his analysis of history
in terms of class conflict, summed up in the famous line from the introduction to
the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history
of class struggles". His writings formed the basis of later communist, socialist,
revolutionary leninist, and Marxist movements.
Early life
Karl Marx was born into a progressive Jewish family in Prussian Trier (now in Germany).
His father Herschel, descending from a long line of rabbis, was a lawyer; Herschel's
brother Samuel was -like many of his ancestors -chief rabbi of Trier. The family name
was originally "Marx Levi", which derives from the old Jewish surname Mardochai.
In 1817 Heinrich Marx converted to the Prussian state religion of Lutheranism, in order
to keep his position as a lawyer, which he had gained under the Napoleonic regime.
The Marx family was very liberal and the Marx household hosted many visiting
intellectuals and artists through Karl's early life.
Education
Marx received good marks in gymnasium (the approximate equivalent of high school).
His senior thesis was a treatise on "Religion: The Glue That Binds Society Together",
for which he won a prize.
Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1833 to study law, at his father's behest.
At Bonn he joined the Trier Tavern Club (and at one point served as its president).
His grades suffered as he spent most of his time singing songs in beer halls. The next
year, his father made him transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin (now known as the Humboldt University).
Marx and Young Hegelians
The young Karl Marx |
In Berlin, Marx's interests turned to philosophy, much to his father's dismay, and
he joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians".
Georg Hegel had just recently died in 1831, and during his lifetime was an extremely
influential figure at the University and in German academia in general.
The Young Hegelians with whom Marx was associated believed that there were still further
dialectical changes to come, and that the Prussian society of the time was far from
perfect as it still contained pockets of poverty, government censorship was in place,
and non-Lutherans suffered from religious discrimination.
Marx was warned not to submit his doctoral dissertation at the
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, as it would certainly be poorly received there due
to his reputation as a Young Hegelian radical. Marx instead submitted his dissertation,
which compared the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus, to the
University of Jena in 1840, where it was accepted.
Career
When his mentor Bauer was dismissed from the philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned
philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne
newspaper. After the newspaper was later shut in 1843, in part due to Marx's conflicts
with government censors, Marx returned to philosophy, turned to political activism, and
worked as a freelance journalist. Marx soon moved, however, something he would have to
do often as a result of his radical views.
Marx first moved to France, where he re-evaluated his relationship with Bauer and the
Young Hegelians, and wrote On the Jewish Question, mostly a critique of current notions
of civil rights and political emancipation. It was in Paris that he met and began
working with his life-long collaborator
Friedrich Engels, who called
Marx's attention
to the situation of the working class, and guided Marx's interest in economics. After
he was forced to leave Paris for his writings, he and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium.
There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a critique of the philosophy of Hegel and the
Young Hegelians, and then Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a critique of
French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most
famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on 21. February 1848, which was
commissioned by the Communist League (formerly, the League of the Just), an organization
of German émigrés whom Marx had met in London.
That year Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval; a working-class movement seized
power from King Louis Philippe in France and invited Marx to return to Paris. When
this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and restarted the
Rheinische Zeitung, only to be swiftly expelled again.
Marx's final move was to
London. In 1852 Marx wrote his famous pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, in which he analyzed Napoleon III's takeover of France. From 1852 to 1861,
while in London, Marx contributed to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune as its European
correspondent.
First International
Karl Marx in London |
In 1864 Marx organized the International Workingmen's Association, later called the
First International, as a base for continued political activism. The International
collapsed in 1872 in part
because of the fall of the Paris Commune, and in part because many members turned
to Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism.
In London throughout this period, Marx also dedicated
himself to the historical and theoretical research behind Das Kapital
(Capital: A Critique of Political Economy). Marx published the first volume in 1867.
The remaining two volumes of Capital were never completed by Marx, but were
reconstructed by Engels from extensive notes and drafts, and published posthumously.
Throughout the London period of Marx's life his family were generally impoverished and
depended on generous contributions from Engels to get by. Marx died in London in the
year 1883, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London.
Marital life
Wife Jenny Marx (1814 - 1881) |
Marx's wife, Jenny von Westphalen, came from an aristocratic background. Her uncle was
Lion Philips, father of the brothers Gerard and Anton who founded the famous Philips
company in 1891. The Marxes had many children, several of whom died young - their
daughter Eleanor (1855-1898), born in London, was also a committed socialist and
helped edit her father's works. Jenny Marx died in December 1881.
Marx's influence
The body of work of Marx and Engels covers a wide range of topics and presents a
complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of
Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a political and economic philosophy
dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over
how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events
and conditions.
Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to describe those who rely on
Marx's conceptual language (e.g. mode of production, class, commodity fetishism) to
understand capitalist and other societies, or to describe those who believe that a
worker's revolution is the only means to a communist society.
Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International"
as a base for continued political activism. This organization collapsed in 1914, in
part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary" socialism,
and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I.
World War I also led to the Russian Revolution
and the consequent ascendance of
Vladimir Lenin's leadership of the communist movement, embodied in the "Third
International". Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to
Marx, and developed a political program, called Leninism or Bolshevism, which
called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized Communist Party.
After Lenin's death, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, Joseph Stalin, seized control of the Party and state apparatus. He argued
that before a world-wide communist revolution would be possible, the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union had to dedicate itself to building communism in their
own country.
At this time, Leon Trotsky left the Soviet Union and in 1934 founded the competing
"Fourth International." Some followers of Trotsky argued that Stalin had created a
bureaucratic state rather than a socialist state.
After World War II Mao Zedong in China also
claimed to be an heir to Karl Marx, but argued that peasants
and not just workers could play a leading role in a communist revolution. This
was a profound departure from Marx's own view of revolution, which focused
exclusively on the urban proletariat, and which he believed would take place in
advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany and England.
Miscellaneous
In 1953 the German Democratic Republic
renamed the city of Chemnitz to Karl-Marx-Stadt.
However, in a plebiscite in 1990 the citizens of Karl-Marx-Stadt favoured the old name,
so that the city was renamed again.
The message carved on Marx's tombstone, in Highgate Cemetery, London, is:
"Workers of all lands, unite".
Banknote displaying Karl Marx
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