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.
[quote]It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
- Karl Marx [/quote]
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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.
@LeopoldBloom no, it's a class conflict. You lied to protect capitalism. Nobody thinks we can negotiate or reason with people who kill for capitalism like Americans have for many decades!
@Roundandroundwego To take one example, the conflict in Northern Ireland until the Good Friday Accords was a class conflict? China's takeover of Tibet was a class conflict? World War Two was a class conflict?
The problem with Marxists is the same as with every religious fundamentalist - they can only see the world through their own religious mythology. In the case of Marxists, everything is economic.
@LeopoldBloom sorry, no. Each case is different and knowing the particular history matters to dialectical materialism. But whatever! Lies kill, lies rule and nobody can talk to the killer hegemon- its population is demented and murderous.
