Karl Marx was a 19th century German philosopher, revolutionary, political activist and economist. Regarded as the father of communism, he is best-known for his influential works The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.
His work, along with that of Friedrich Engels, profoundly influenced political events in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 20th century, endeared of both European and American intellectuals up until the 1960s.
Marx's Life
Karl Marx was born in Treves, Germany, on May 5, 1818, the son of a lawyer. He followed in his father's footsteps and also studied law. In 1843, he married his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen, a daughter of a Prussian Baron. Theirs was a happy marriage.
The Communist Manifesto
Aged 30, he published The Communist Manifesto, which begins with: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." He was banished from Germany and fled to Paris, but soon after, fled to England, where the prime minister was an advocate of free speech.
Marx Philosophy
For Marx, the fundamental condition of humanity is the need to convert the raw material of the natural world into the goods necessary for survival. Production, or economics, is the primary conditioning factor of life. According to dialectical materialism, there is a three-sided conflict between economic classes. The landowners created by feudalism were opposed by the rise of the middle classes, forcing a 'synthesis' of a new economic class, the industrial employers of capitalism. However, the new 'thesis' of capitalism generates the antithetical force of the proletariat or working classes. From this conflict, the synthesis that Marx envisages is socialism, the inevitable dialectical outcome.
Marx and Socialism
According to Marx, socialism is a natural outcome of the economic conditions operating on the human being. He asserts that it is transformations in economics that give rise to new ways of thinking, to the development of ideas. For him, mind does not exist as a passive subject in an external world, as the prevailing empiricist tradition emanating from Locke would have it.
Last Years of Marx
Marx spent his life in poverty. Often his days were spent in London's British Museum's Reading Room. It was Friedrich Engels in Germany who supported his family, mailing money to Marx. They corresponded for 20 years. Karl Marx died in London on March 14, 1883, aged 65, buried at Highgate Cemetery in London.
Works by Karl Marx
- Paris Manuscripts, 1844
- The German Ideology, 1846
- The Communist Manifesto, 1848
- A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859
- Das Kapital, three volumes – 1867, 1884, 1893
Sources:
Biographical Dictionary, edited by Una Mcgovern, Chambers (2002)
Philosophy, the Great Thinkers, by Philip Stokes, Capella (2007)
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