A hugely influential revolutionary thinker and philosopher, Marx did not live to see his ideas carried out in his own lifetime, but his writings formed the theoretical base for modern international communism as well as a far-reaching intellectual and cultural movement, known as Marxism.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier in western German, the son of a successful Jewish lawyer. Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, but was also introduced to the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach. In 1841, he received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. In 1843, after a short spell as editor of a liberal newspaper in Cologne, Marx and his wife Jenny moved to Paris, a hotbed of radical thought. There he became a revolutionary communist and befriended his life long collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Expelled from France, Marx spent two years in Brussels, where his partnership with Engels intensified. They co-authored the pamphlet 'The Communist Manifesto' which was published in 1848 and asserted that all human history had been based on class struggles, but that these would ultimately disappear with the victory of the proletariat.
In 1849, Marx moved to London, where he was to spend the remainder of his life. For a number of years, his family lived in poverty but the wealthier Engels was able to support them to an increasing extent. Gradually, Marx emerged from his political and spiritual isolation and produced his most important body of work, 'Das Kapital'. The first volume of this 'bible of the working class' was published in his lifetime, while the remaining volumes were edited by Engels after his friend's death.
In his final years, Karl Marx was in creative and physical decline. He spent time at health spas and was deeply distressed by the death of his wife, in 1881, and one of his daughters. He died on 14 March 1883 and was buried at Highgate Cemetery in London.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects, to his laziness, incompetence, improvidence or simple stupidity." Henry Hazlitt
@DogMan You are living a dream that has been planted in your head since birth that owning lots of material wealth means something and that it is part of this distorted idea of freedom in the US
@DogMan Hey, victimhood is so in fashion these days. Unsuccessful? Must be somebody else's fault, not your own. Successful? You must've preyed on someone! "He has stuff because he stole it from me!" Bulls***
Ah, that old time Bolshevik religion. "Dictatorship of the Proletariat". Some thought it would be the Worker's Paradise. Instead, Marxist socialism/communism turned out to be more like the reign of Ivan the Terrible. There is no Santa Claus kids.
@Roundandroundwego They are incredible hypocrites talking about Soviet crimes and feeling morally superior when their capitalist warmachine caused death, chaos and destruction worldwide.
@Gloomy The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was jointly invaded by four Warsaw Pact countries: the Soviet Union, the Polish People's Republic, the People's Republic of Bulgaria and the Hungarian People's Republic. The invasion stopped Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring liberalisation reforms and strengthened the authoritarian wing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. About 250,000 Warsaw Pact troops, supported by thousands of tanks and hundreds of aircraft, participated in the overnight operation, which was code-named Operation Danube
Marx was definitely influential, although his influence on peoples' actual lives was mostly negative. His theory of surplus value is still valid as it explains how capital profits from labor. His predictions in the Communist Manifesto were at best half correct. He would have been shocked to learn that the first Communist revolution was in an agrarian country like Russia, and not in an industrialized one like England which most of his theories were based on.
Marx believed in the Hegelian Dialectic, which was his first mistake. Any overarching theory of history must always oversimplify or misrepresent certain trends while overly amplifying others in order to shoehorn reality into the theory. This was the case with earlier theories like Vico's and current ones like the Great Turning. The same is true with reducing history to a class struggle, with other conflicts - national, religious, racial - subsidiary to it.
The real conflict in human society has always been between individual freedom and the need of the group to suppress that freedom. Successful societies are those that strike a balance between the two.
@Gloomy And what has it got you? You should start a business, and pay all your employees 1 million dollars a year, each. Karl would like that, as long as you didn't pay yourself more than you employees. What are you waiting for? I will work for you.
@DogMan "start a business" belongs to the most american right wing arguments ever and the notion that starting a business is so great and a sign of freedom is so flawed.
The whole point of marxist thought is that there would be no boss that pays wages but rather every worker democratically decides on important decisions and earns the value of their labor.
