Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the city of Trier in Prussia, now, Germany. He was one of seven children of Jewish Parents. His father was fairly liberal, taking part in demonstrations for a constitution for Prussia and reading such authors as Voltaire and Kant, known for their social commentary. His mother, Henrietta, was originally from Holland and never became a German at heart, not even learning to speak the language properly.
Shortly before Karl Marx was born, his father converted the family to the Evangelical Established Church, Karl being baptized at the age of six. Marx attended high school in his home town (1830-1835) where several teachers and pupils were under suspicion of harboring liberal ideals. Marx himself seemed to be a devoted Christian with a longing for self-sacrifice on behalf of humanity.
In October of 1835, he started attendance at the University of Bonn, enrolling in non-socialistic-related classes like Greek and Roman mythology and the history of art. During this time, he spent a day in jail for being drunk and disorderly-the only imprisonment he suffered in the course of his life. The student culture at Bonn included, as a major art, being politically rebellious and Marx was involved, presiding over the Tavern Club and joining a club for poets that included some politically active students.
However, he left Bonn after a year and enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and philosophy. Marxs experience in Berlin was crucial to his introduction to Hegels philosophy and to his adherence to the Young Hegelians. Hegels philosophy was crucial to the development of his own ideas and theories. Upon his first introduction to Hegels beliefs, Marx felt a repugnance and wrote his father that when he felt sick, it was artially from intense vexation at having to make an idol of a view [he] detested.
The Hegelian doctrines exerted considerable pressure in the revolutionary student culture that Marx was immersed in, however, and Marx eventually joined a society called the Doctor Club, involved mainly in the new literary and philosophical movement whos chief figure was Bruno Bauer, a lecturer in theology who thought that the Gospels were not a record of History but that they came from human fantasies arising from mans emotional needs and he also hypothesized that Jesus had not existed as a person. Bauer was later ismissed from his position by the Prussian government.
By 1841, Marxs studies were lacking and, at the suggestion of a friend, he submitted a doctoral dissertation to the university at Jena, known for having lax acceptance requirements. Unsurprisingly, he got in, and finally received his degree in 1841. His thesis analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the difference between the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus using his knowledge of mythology and the myth of Prometheus in his chains. In October of 1842, Marx became the editor of the paper Rheinische Zeitung, and, as the editor, wrote editorials on socio-economic issues uch as poverty, etc.
During this time, he found that his Hegelian philosophy was of little use and he separated himself from his young Hegelian friends who only shocked the bourgeois to make up their social activity. Marx helped the paper to succeed and it almost became the leading journal in Prussia. However, the Prussian government suspended it because of pressures from the government of Russia. So, Marx went to Paris to study French Communism. In June of 1843, he was married to Jenny Von Westphalen, an attractive girl, four years older than Marx, who came from a prestigious family f both military and administrative distinction.
Although many of the members of the Von Westphalen family were opposed to the marriage, Jennys father favored Marx. In Paris, Marx became acquainted with the Communistic views of French workmen. Although he thought that the ideas of the workmen were utterly crude and unintelligent, he admired their camaraderie. He later wrote an article entitled Toward the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right from which comes the famous quote that religion is the opium of the people. Once again, the Prussian government interfered with Marx and he was expelled from France.
He left for Brussels, Belgium, and , in 1845, renounced his Prussian nationality. During the next two years in Brussels, the lifelong collaboration with Engels deepened further. He and Marx, sharing the same views, pooled their intellectual resources and published The Holy Family, a criticism of the Hegelian idealism of Bruno Bauer. In their next work, they demonstrated their materialistic conception of history but the book found no publisher and remained unknown during its authors lifetimes. It is during his years in Brussels that Marx really developed his views and established his intellectual ezding.
From December of 1847 to January of 1848, Engels and Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, a document outlining 10 immediate measures towards Communism, ranging from a progressive income tax and the abolition of inheritances to free education for all children. When the Revolution erupted in Europe in 1848, Marx was invited to Paris just in time to escape expulsion by the Belgian government. He became unpopular to German exiles when, while in Paris, he opposed Georg Heweghs project to organize a German legion to invade and liberate the Fatherland.
After traveling back to Cologne, Marx alled for democracy and agreed with Engels that the Communist League should be disbanded. During this time, Marx got into trouble with the government; he was indicted on charges that he advocated that people not pay taxes. However, after defending himself in his trial, he was acquitted unanimously. On May 16, 1849, Marx was banished as an alien by the Prussian government. Marx then went to London. There, he rejoined the Communist League and became more bold in his revolutionary policy.
He advocated that the people try to make the revolution permanent and that they should void subservience to the bourgeois peoples. The faction that he belonged to ridiculed his ideas and he stopped attending meetings of the London Communists, working on the defense of 11 communists arrested in Cologne, instead. He wrote quite a few works during this time, including an essay entitled Der Achtzenhnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) and also a pamphlet written on the behalf of the 11 communists he was defending in Cologne.
From 1850 to 1864, Marx lived in poverty and spiritual pain, only taking a job once. He and his family were evicted from their partment and several of his children died, his son, Guido, who Marx called a sacrifice to bourgeois misery and a daughter named Franziska. They were so poor that his wife had to borrow money for her coffin. Frederich Engels was the one who gave Marx and his family money to survive on during these years. His only other source of money was his job as the European correspondent for The New York Tribune, writing editorials and columns analyzing everything in the political universe.
Marx published his first book on economic theory in 1859, called A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Marxs political isolation ended when he joined the International Working Mens Association. Although he was neither the founder nor the leader of this organization, he became its leading spirit and as the corresponding secretary for Germany, he attended all meetings. Marxs distinction as a political figure really came in 1870 with the Paris Commune. He became an international figure and his name became synonymous throughout Europe with the revolutionary spirit symbolized by the Paris Commune.
An opposition to Marx developed under the leadership of a Russian revolutionist, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin. Bakunin was a famed orator whose speeches one listener described as a raging storm with lightning, flashes and thunderclaps, and a roaring as of lions. Bakunin admired Marxs intellect but was personally opposed to him because Marx had an ethnic aversion to Russians. Bakunin believed that Marx was a German authoritarian and an arrogant Jew who wanted to transform the General council into a personal dictatorship over the workers.
Bakunin organized sections of the International for an attack on the dictatorship of Marx and the General Council. Marx didnt have the support of a right wing and feared that he would lose ontrol to Bakunin. However, he was successful at expelling the Bakuninists from the International and shortly, the International died out in New York. During the next decade of his life, his last few years, Marx was beset by what he called chronic mental depression and his life turned inward toward his family.
He never completed any subeztial work during this time although he kept his mind active, reading and learning Russian. In 1879, Marx dictated the preamble of the program for the French Socialist Workers Federation and shaped much of its content. During his last years, Marx spent time in health resorts and ies in London of a lung abscess on March 14, 1883, after the death of his wife and daughter. Marxs work seems to be more of a criticism of Hegelian and other philosophy, than as a statement of his own philosophy.
While Hegel felt that philosophy explained reality, Marx felt that philosophy should be made into reality, an hard thing to do. He thought that one must not just look at and inspect the world, but must try to transform the world, much like Jean Paul Sartres view that man must choose what is best for the world; and he will do so. Marx is unique from other philosophers in that he chooses to regard an as an individual, a human being. This is evident in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
There, he declares that man is a natural being who is endowed with natural [and] vital powers that exist in him as aptitudes [and] instincts. Humans simply struggle with nature for the satisfaction of mans needs. From this struggle comes mans awareness of himself as an individual and as something separate from nature. So, he seeks to oppose nature. He sees that history is just the story of man creating and re-creating himself and sees that man creates himself, and that a god has no part in it. Thus, the communist belief in no religion.
Marx also says that the more man works as a laborer, the less he has to consume for himself because his product and labor are estranged from him. Marx says that because the work of the laborer is taken away and does not belong to the laborer, the laborer loses his rightful existence and is made alien to himself. Private property becomes a product and cause of alienated labor and through that, causes disharmony. Alienated labor is seen as the consequence of market product, the division of labor, and the division of society into antagonistic classes.
