He got expelled by the governments of Germany, France and Belgium with his refusal nature of writings as he became a journalist.
Marx and fellow German thinker Friedrich Engels in 1848 published “The Communist Manifesto." In which they introduced their concept of socialism as a natural result of the conflicts inherent in the capitalist system.
Marx later lived rest of his life in London. He published the first volume of “Capital” (Das Kapital) in 1867, he laid out his vision of capitalism and its inevitable tendencies toward self-destruction.
He also took part in a growing international workers’ movement based on his revolutionary theories.
Karl Marx’s Early Life and Education:
In 1818 Karl Marx was born in Trier, Prussia; in a family of nine children he was the oldest surviving boy. Both of his parents were descended from a long line of rabbis and were Jewish, but his father who was a lawyer, in 1816 converted to Lutheranism due to contemporary laws barring Jews from higher society.
In the same church at the age of 6 the young Karl was baptized, but later became an atheist.
After a year at the University of Bonn during which Marx fought a duel with another student and was imprisoned for drunkenness, he got enrolled at the University of Berlin by his worried parents where he studied law and philosophy.
The philosophy of the late Berlin professor G.W.F. Hegel was introduced to him there and then he joined a group known as the Young Hegelians, who challenged the existing institutions and ideas on all fronts, including religion, philosophy, ethics and politics.
Karl Marx Becomes a Revolutionary:
Marx began writing for the liberal democratic newspaper Rheinische Zeitung after receiving his degree, he later became the paper’s editor in 1842. The following year the Prussian government banned the paper as according to them it was too radical.
Marx moved to Paris in 1843 with his new wife, Jenny von Westphalen. German émigré Friedrich Engels meet with Marx there; he would become his lifelong collaborator and friend. In 1845, entitled as “The Holy Father" Engels and Marx published a criticism of Bauer’s Young Hegelian philosophy.
The Prussian government intervened to get Marx expelled from France by that time, and he and Engels had moved to Brussels, Belgium, where Marx renounced his Prussian citizenship.
In 1847, Marx and Engels were drafted to write “The Communist Manifesto" for the newly founded Communist League in London, England which got published in the following year.
The two philosophers depicted all of history as a series of class struggles (historical materialism) in it, and predicted that the workingmen would become the new ruling class of the world with the upcoming proletarian revolution which would sweep aside the capitalist system for good.
Karl Marx’s Life in London and “Das Kapital”:
Marx left Belgium just before being expelled by that country’s government in 1848 with revolutionary uprisings engulfing throughout Europe.
Before settling in London where he would live for the rest of his life, despite being denied British citizenship he briefly returned to Paris and Germany.
Including 10 years as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune he worked as a journalist there, but he was supported financially by Engels as he never quite managed to earn a living wage.
In time, Marx focused more on developing his economic theories and became increasingly isolated from fellow London Communists. He found the International Workingmen’s Association (known as the First International) and wrote its inaugural address in 1864.
Three years later, Marx published his masterwork of economic theory the first volume of “Capital” (Das Kapital). He expressed a desire to reveal “the economic law of motion of modern society” in it.
He laid out his theory of capitalism as a dynamic system which helped a subsequent triumph of communism as it contained the seeds of its own self-destruction.
Marx worked on manuscripts for additional volumes during the rest of his life but eventually they remained unfinished at the time of his death, on March 14, 1883.
Written by: Gourav Chowdhury
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