- Born
- Died
- Birth nameKarl Heinrich Marx
- Height5′ 9″ (1.75 m)
- Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, then Kingdom of Prussia, German Confederation. His father, Hershel Mordechai, was the son of a rabbi. Karl converted to Lutheran Christianity because Jews were not allowed to practice law. He graduated from the Trier Gymnasium, then studied law at the University of Bonn, where he was briefly a president of the Trier Tavern Club. He transfered to the Fridrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in Berlin, from which he graduated in 1841 with a doctorate in philosophy. He abandoned a university career and became an editor of a liberal newspaper, "Rheinische Zeitung", in Cologne. A year later the paper was shut down by the Prussian government. Marx moved to France, where he wrote "Zur Judenfrage" ("On the Jewish Question", 1843), a critique of civil rights in his time.
In Paris Marx met Friedrich Engels. Engels was the son of a wealthy capitalist and supported Marx throughout his life. Together they developed the communist ideology. Police forced him to leave Paris and he moved with Engels to Brussels. There he developed the materialist conception of history and wrote "The German Ideology" and "The Poverty of Philosophy", which was a critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's socialist thought. On February 21, 1848, Marx and Engels published "The Communist Manifesto", which called for revolution instead of reforms. It described all human history as a class struggle. It was commissioned by the Communist League of German emigrants in London. Marx himself was active in London.
Police arrested Marx and expelled him from Belgium. He returned to Paris. There he managed to get the French government money to subsidize four hundred German immigrants' return tickets. In 1849 the French government collapsed and Marx returned to Cologne. There he was on two trials for his calls for armed rebellion of the poor. He was acquitted twice, but his newspaper was closed. He returned to Paris again, but was forced out. With the money from Engels he moved to London. There Marx lived for the rest of his life on financial contributions from Engels.
In London he became the central figure in a new organization called "The International Working Men's Association", which surfaced in 1864. Marx authored its first public statement in 1864, and many declarations and manifestos that followed. "Das Kapital"--his main work on economics--was drafted in three volumes. Only the first volume was completed and published in 1867. The second and third volumes remained unfinished and were published posthumously.
Marx and his wife Jenny von Westphalen had six children, three of whom died at young age. His daughter Eleanor was a socialist and assisted Marx in editing his works. She committed suicide in 1898. His other daughter, Laura, committed suicide in 1911. Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Steve Shelokhonov
- SpouseJenny von Westphalen(June 19, 1843 - December 2, 1881) (her death, 6 children)
- His long, thick and white beard.
- His scowling, always frowning facial expression
- In vol. 1 of "Das Kapital," Marx argued that the laws of capitalism will bring about its destruction. Capitalist competition will lead to a diminishing number of monopoly capitalists, while at the same time, the misery and oppression of the proletariat would increase. Marx claimed that the proletariat will gradually become "disciplined, united and organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production" and eventually overthrow the system that is the cause of their suffering.
- As he was dying, his housekeeper asked him to make a statement for posterity. Angrily, he threw a slipper at her and shouted, "Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!" They were to be his last words.
- Featured on the cover of The Beatles' album "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
- He was a supporter of the Union (Slavery abolitionists) in the American Civil War and even exchanged a few letters with Abraham Lincoln where They discussed the war.
- He was an early Feminist and supported extending more rights to women.
- The Established Church will more readily pardon an attack on thirty-eight of its thirty-nine articles than on one thirty-ninth of its income.
- The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom-Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation - Political Economy starts with the fact of private property, it does not explain it.
- Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being -- a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man -- the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, it knows itself to be this solution
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content