Marx, Karl 1818-83
German social, political and economic theorist

Karl Marx was born in Trier and brought up in a Jewish family which converted to Protestantism in order to escape anti-Semitism. He studied at the universities of Bonn (1835-36) and Berlin (1836-41), where he associated with the radical followers of Hegel, 'the young Hegelians', who were concerned particularly with the critique of religion.

In 1842 he worked for the liberal Cologne paper Rheinische Zeitung, until it was suppressed by the government the following year. Marx then emigrated to Paris, where he became a communist and first stated his belief that the proletariat must itself be the agent of revolutionary change in society. In Paris he wrote his first long critique of capitalism, usually called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (not published until 1932), which developed the important Marxist notion of the alienation of man under capitalism, and also in Paris he began his lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels.

Under political pressure he moved on to Brussels in 1845, and in collaboration with Engels wrote the posthumously published German Ideology, a full statement of his materialist conception of history, and the famous Communist Manifesto (1848), a masterpiece of political propaganda which ends with the celebrated rallying-cry: 'The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all lands, unite!' With Engels he also reorganized the Communist League, which met in London in 1847.

After the 1848 Paris revolution, he returned to Cologne as editor of the radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung, but when that folded in 1849 he temporarily abandoned his political activism and took refuge with his family in London. They lived in some poverty, but in the reading room of the British Museum he began the researches which culminated in the publication of his major works of economic and political analysis, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen �konomie (1857-58, published in Moscow 1939-41), Zur Kritik der politischen �konomie (1859) and, most notably, his magnum opus Das Kapital (Vol 1 1867, Vols 2 & 3 posthumously 1884, 1894), one of the most influential works of the 19th century. In this last work, which remained unfinished at his death, he developed his mature doctrines of the theory of surplus value, class conflict and the exploitation of the working class, and predicted the victory of socialism over capitalism and the ultimate withering away of the state as the classless society of communism was achieved. Marx was supported in his research over these years by his collaborator, Engels, and he eked out his income by journalistic work from 1825 to 1862 as European correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.

He later revived his political involvement and was a leading figure in the First International (Working-Men's Association) from 1864 until its effective demise in 1872, when the anarchist followers of Mikhail Bakunin broke away. The last decade of his life was marked by increasing ill health. He died in 1883 and was buried in Highgate cemetery, London. Despite the apparent failure of Marxian principles as practised in communist Europe, his theories still exert an enormous influence on social science, and his secular adherents continue to outnumber the followers of many other religious or political creeds.

Bibliography: D McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973); I Berlin, Karl Marx (1939).