Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in Trier in 1818 and studied first in Bonn, then in Berlin, where philosophy displaced the legal career his family had imagined for him. He moved quickly from criticism to politics. As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, he learned that questions of law, property, and government could not be understood apart from the material life beneath them.

Exile became the ordinary condition of his adult life. In Paris he met Friedrich Engels in 1844; in Brussels the two men worked through the ideas that would become historical materialism. They entered the Communist League, and in early 1848 wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party just as revolution was breaking across Europe.

After the defeat of the 1848 movement, Marx settled in London. He lived there for the rest of his life, often in severe financial strain, while carrying out the long study that became A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and then Capital. He treated capitalism not as a collection of abuses, but as a system with its own laws of motion, rooted in class relations and the extraction of surplus value.

Marx was never only a scholar. He helped found the International Working Men's Association in 1864, wrote its inaugural documents, followed strikes and political struggles closely, and defended the Paris Commune in 1871 as a new form of working-class rule. His work moved constantly between theory and the real movement of workers trying to change their conditions.

He died in London in 1883 after years of illness and bereavement. Engels said at his graveside that Marx had discovered both the law of development of human history and the special law governing capitalist production. The claim was not modest, but neither was the work.