Karl Marx (born May 5, 1818, in Trier, and died on March 14, 1883, in London) was a German philosopher, economist, social theorist, political journalist, the protagonist of the labor movement, and critic of capitalism and religion.
Together with Friedrich Engels, he became the most influential theorist of socialism and communism, the main features of which the two laid down in the programmatic Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848).
Marx’s main work is Das Kapital, the first volume of which was published in his lifetime in 1867; the following two volumes were published posthumously by Engels. His political activities in the emerging international workers ‘movement (International Workers’ Association) were also influential, in which he temporarily assumed an intellectual leadership role.
The theoretical foundations of Marxism named after Marx influence the discourses of history and sociology as well as economics and political science to the present day.
The Early Life of Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, in the province of Bas-Rhin, in the kingdom of Prussia (today in the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate). He is the second in a family of eight children.
His father, Heinrich Marx (1777-1838), born Herschel Marx Levi Mordechai, was a lawyer from a family of Ashkenazi Jewish rabbis – Marx’s grandfather, Meier Halevi Marx, became a rabbi in Trier in 1723 and his sons and grandchildren were the first to receive secular education – and merchants who owned vineyards in the Moselle valley.
To exercise his legal profession, he converted to Protestantism in 1816 or 1817 and changed his first name from Herschel to Heinrich. His mother, Henriette Pressburg (July 20, 1788-November 30, 1863), comes from a Dutch Jewish family.
Remained attached to the Jewish religion, she did not convert to Lutheranism until 1825, after the death of her father, who was a rabbi. She is the great-aunt of the brothers Gerard Philips and Anton Philips, founders of the Dutch company Philips.
Karl Marx was baptized into Lutheranism in 1824 and confirmed at the Trinity Church in Trier in 1834. Although his father respected Jewish tradition by giving his son the name of his grandfather, Karl Heinrich Marx, he is not raised religiously and there is no evidence that the Marx family practiced the Lutheran or Jewish religion.
Kari Marx Studies
He entered the Gymnasium Friedrich-Wilhelm in Trier in 1830. After obtaining his Abitur, he entered university, first in Bonn in October 1835 to study law and received a year-end certificate stating the excellence of his attendance and his attention, then in Berlin at Friedrich-Wilhelm University from march 1836 where he devotes himself more to history and philosophy.
He finished his studies in 1841 with the presentation of a doctoral thesis: Difference in the philosophy of nature in Democritus and Epicurus (Difference between the democratic and Epicurean natural philosophy). Marx is received in absentia doctor of the faculty of philosophy of the University of Jena on April 15, 1841.
Karl Marx Meet with Friedrich Engels
In September 1844 in Paris, Marx saw Friedrich Engels whom he had only encountered before; it is the beginning of a deep friendship. Studying philosophy by himself, Engels had become a supporter of Hegel while rejecting the support which he had given to the Prussian State. In 1842 he left Bremen to take up a position in a Manchester commercial firm owned by his father.
There he had encountered proletarian misery in all its magnitude and had systematically studied its conditions (The condition of the working classes in England, 1845). Shortly after their meeting, Marx and Engels worked together on their first joint work, The Holy Family, in which they attacked the critical philosophy of Bruno Bauer with which they had been close.
Next comes The German Ideology (essentially written by Marx), mainly centered around a very virulent criticism of Max Stirner entitled “Saint Max” and which occupies almost two-thirds of the work. This work defends a materialist conception of history which went beyond Feuerbach’s conception of materialism.
By a severe criticism of Stirner, Marx and Engels thus mark a break not only with Feuerbach but also with Proudhon. But the book does not find a publisher, and it will not be published until nearly a century later.
In the Theses on Feuerbach, a short text found in the same manuscript, Marx writes (Theses on Feuerbach): Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; what matters is to transform it.
Marriage and family of Karl Marx
Karl Marx married to Jenny von Westphalen, sister of the Prussian Interior Minister, a childhood friend with whom he became engaged as a student, but only managed to marry her after the death of her parents, who opposed the relationship, and after achieving a certain (eventual) economic stability as director of the “Franco-German Annals”.
They lived in severe economic hardship due to the irregularity of Marx’s income, political persecution (which censored and closed the magazines he published), and having to constantly move from country.
Marx had 6 children with Jenny von Westphalen, in 1849 they were already expecting the fourth, in 1855 three Guido, Franciska and Edgar had already died, due to seizures, bronchitis and tuberculosis, the little one, Eleanor Marx was part of the feminist movement and Laura Marx, she married the French socialist leader Paul Lafargue, and committed suicide with him in 1911.
Helene Demuth lived with them, helping them with housework, and having an excellent relationship with the Marx family. She was especially close to Karl, so much so, that she is supposed to have an illegitimate child with her who was recognized by Friedrich Engels as his own to avoid controversy within Karl and Jenny’s marriage.
Marx had a personal life dedicated exhaustively to the study of the different disciplines of thought and especially of philosophy and history which implied that he never had economic stability; however, he always had the faithful and unconditional support of his friend Engels.
Karl Marx theory of capitalism
Karl Marx is considered the thinker who best explained capitalism. Marx defines as the basis of capitalism the so-called original accumulation. For this, it had been necessary the expropriation of the land workers and the artisans and in turn the exploitation of the colonies.
Marx defines three stages of the capitalist regime:
Cooperation – He calls the first “Cooperation”. Within this stage, the work is called “social”, where the workers carry out the same activity in the process of production of the goods. The number of workers working in this process will depend on the capital available to the capitalist.