Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, journalist and revolutionary whose analysis of capitalism became one of the most influential bodies of thought in modern history. With his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels he wrote The Communist Manifesto, and in Capital he set out to show how capitalist economies work and why, in his view, they would give way to communism. He spent most of his adult life as a stateless exile in London, little known to the wider public, yet within a century of his death governments ruling a third of the world's population claimed to follow his ideas.

Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, in the Rhineland, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. Both his parents came from Jewish families with long lines of rabbis; his father Heinrich, a lawyer, converted to Lutheranism shortly before Karl's birth, apparently so that he could continue to practise law under Prussian restrictions on Jews. Marx studied law at the University of Bonn and then, from 1836, at Berlin, where he fell under the spell of the philosophy of Hegel and joined the Young Hegelians, a circle of radical thinkers who turned Hegel's ideas against religion and the Prussian state. In 1841 he received a doctorate from the University of Jena for a thesis on the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus.

Barred by his radical views from an academic career, Marx turned to journalism, becoming editor in 1842 of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, a liberal newspaper that the Prussian censors closed the following year. In 1843 he married Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a Prussian aristocrat, and moved to Paris. There he met socialist workers and thinkers, began a serious study of political economy, and in 1844 formed his partnership with Friedrich Engels, the son of a textile manufacturer. Expelled from France in 1845 at Prussian request, he moved to Brussels. He and Engels joined a small secret society, the Communist League, which commissioned them to write its programme. The Communist Manifesto appeared in London in February 1848, just as revolutions broke out across Europe.

Marx returned to Germany and edited a radical newspaper in Cologne, but when the revolutions were defeated he was expelled again. In 1849 he settled in London, where he lived for the rest of his life. The family was often desperately poor, living for years in cramped rooms in Soho, and several of their children died young. They survived on Marx's journalism, including about a decade as European correspondent of the New-York Daily Tribune, and above all on money from Engels. Marx spent long days in the reading room of the British Museum, studying economics, government reports and history.

Marx's approach to history, later called historical materialism, held that the way a society produces its material life shapes everything else. Each era has its own productive forces, its tools, skills and technology, and corresponding relations of production, above all the relationship between those who own the means of production and those who work them. Law, politics, religion and philosophy form a superstructure that largely reflects this economic base. As productive forces develop, they come into conflict with existing relations, and history advances through class struggle: masters against slaves, lords against serfs, and in the modern age the bourgeoisie, the owners of capital, against the proletariat, the workers who own nothing but their ability to labour.

In his early writings, especially the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx developed the idea of alienation. Under capitalism, he argued, workers are estranged from the products they make, from their own creative activity, from one another and from their human potential, because their labour belongs to someone else. In Capital, whose first volume appeared in 1867, he built on the labour theory of value of earlier economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Workers are paid wages that cover what they need to live, but they produce more value than this; the difference, which Marx called surplus value, is taken by the capitalist as profit. This, for Marx, is exploitation, even when every contract is freely made.

Marx argued that competition drives capitalists to accumulate and mechanise, producing enormous growth, as the Industrial Revolution showed, but also concentration of wealth, recurring crises of overproduction, and a growing, increasingly organised working class. He expected that workers would eventually overthrow capitalism, pass through a transitional phase he called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and build a classless communist society, in which goods would be distributed according to need. He wrote very little about how such a society would actually be organised.

In 1864 Marx helped found the International Workingmen's Association, known as the First International, and became its leading figure. His pamphlet The Civil War in France (1871) defended the Paris Commune, and his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) criticised the new German socialist party. He never finished Capital; the second and third volumes were edited from his manuscripts by Engels and published in 1885 and 1894. Many other works, including The German Ideology and the 1844 manuscripts, were published only in the twentieth century. Jenny Marx died in 1881, and Marx, by then in poor health, died in London on 14 March 1883. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

After his death, Marx's ideas spread through the socialist parties of Europe, many of which came to seek change through elections and reform rather than revolution. In 1917 Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks took power in the Russian Revolution and founded the Soviet Union as a one-party state ruled in Marx's name. Under Joseph Stalin it became a totalitarian dictatorship, and after the Second World War communist regimes claiming Marxist inspiration ruled eastern Europe, China under Mao Zedong, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. These states abolished most private property and imposed planned economies; they also suppressed political freedom and, in several cases, carried out mass repression, labour camps and policies that led to famines, causing many millions of deaths. Historians and philosophers continue to debate how far these regimes followed, distorted or contradicted Marx's own thought, which said little about how a post-revolutionary state should be run.

Beyond politics, Marx shaped economics, sociology, history and literary criticism. The idea that economic interests and class relations influence culture and politics has become common even among scholars who reject his predictions or his theory of value. His forecast that workers in the most advanced industrial countries would lead a revolution did not come true, and most communist states collapsed or abandoned central planning by the end of the twentieth century. Yet his account of capitalism's power to transform the world, and of its inequalities and crises, continues to be studied and argued over. His place among his contemporaries is traced on the nineteenth-century philosophy page, and his homeland in the history of Germany.