Karl Marx

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Karl Marx
Karl Marx 001.jpg
Karl Marx in 1875
Born(1818-05-05)5 May 1818
Died14 March 1883 (aged 64)
Resting placeTomb of Karl Marx, Highgate Cemetery, London, England, United Kingdom
ResidenceGermany, France, Belgium, United Kingdom
Nationality
Spouse(s)Jenny von Westphalen 19 June 1843 to 2 December 1881 end=died
Children7, including Jenny, Laura, and Eleanor
Parents
Relatives
Template:Infobox philosopher

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Karl Marx[1] (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary.

Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital. His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.

Marx's theories about society, economics and politics – collectively understood as Marxism – hold that human societies develop through class struggle. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power in return for wages.[2] Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature, would eventuate the working class' development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers.[3] Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.[4]

Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and his work has been both lauded and criticised.[5] His work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought.[6][7][8] Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx's work, with many modifying or adapting his ideas. Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.[9][10]

Biography[edit]

Childhood and early education: 1818–1836[edit]

Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx (1777–1838) and Henriette Pressburg (1788–1863). He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine.[11] Marx was ethnically Jewish. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx.[12] His father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education. He became a lawyer and lived a relatively wealthy and middle-class existence, with his family owning a number of Moselle vineyards. Prior to his son's birth, and after the abrogation of Jewish emancipation in the Rhineland,[13] Herschel converted from Judaism to join the state Evangelical Church of Prussia, taking on the German forename Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.[14]

Marx's birthplace, now Brückenstraße 10, in Trier. The family occupied two rooms on the ground floor and three on the first floor.[15] Purchased by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1928, it now houses a museum devoted to him[16]

Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. A classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, at that time being an absolute monarchy.[17] In 1815, Heinrich Marx began working as an attorney and in 1819 moved his family to a ten-room property near the Porta Nigra.[18] His wife, Henriette Pressburg, was a Dutch Jewish woman from a prosperous business family that later founded the company Philips Electronics. Her sister Sophie Pressburg (1797–1854) married Lion Philips (1794–1866) and was the grandmother of both Gerard and Anton Philips and great-grandmother to Frits Philips. Lion Philips was a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist, upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled in London.[19]

Little is known of Marx's childhood.[20] The third of nine children, he became the eldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819.[21] Young Marx and his surviving siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie and Caroline, were baptised into the Lutheran Church in August 1824 and their mother in November 1825.[22] Young Marx was privately educated by his father until 1830, when he entered Trier High School, whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of his father. By employing many liberal humanists as teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local conservative government. Subsequently, police raided the school in 1832 and discovered that literature espousing political liberalism was being distributed among the students. Considering the distribution of such material a seditious act, the authorities instituted reforms and replaced several staff during Marx's attendance.[23]

In October 1835 at the age of 17, Marx travelled to the University of Bonn wishing to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field.[24] Due to a condition referred to as a "weak chest",[25] Marx was excused from military duty when he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political radicals that were monitored by the police.[26] Marx also joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft der Treveraner), at one point serving as club co-president.[27] Additionally, Marx was involved in certain disputes, some of which became serious: in August 1836 he took part in a duel with a member of the university's Borussian Korps.[28] Although his grades in the first term were good, they soon deteriorated, leading his father to force a transfer to the more serious and academic University of Berlin.[29]

  1. The name "Karl Heinrich Marx", used in various lexicons, is based on an error. His birth certificate says "Carl Heinrich Marx", while elsewhere "Karl Marx" is used. "K.H. Marx" is used only in his poetry collections and the transcript of his dissertation; since Marx wanted to honour his father, who had died in 1838, he called himself "Karl Heinrich" in three documents.The article by Friedrich Engels "Marx, Karl Heinrich" in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (Jena, 1892, column 1130 to 1133 see MECW Volume 22, pp. 337–45) does not justify assigning Marx a middle name. See Heinz Monz: Karl Marx. Grundlagen zu Leben und Werk. NCO-Verlag, Trier 1973, p. 214 and 354, respectively.
  2. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named manifesto
  3. Karl Marx: Critique of the Gotha Program
  4. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Calhoun2002-23-24
  5. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Manchester
  6. Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
  7. John Hicks, "Capital Controversies: Ancient and Modern." The American Economic Review 64.2 (May 1974) p. 307: "The greatest economists, Smith or Marx or Keynes, have changed the course of history ..."
  8. Joseph Schumpeter Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes. Volume 26 of Unwin University books. Edition 4, Taylor & Francis Group, 1952 ISBN 0-415-11078-5, 978-0-415-11078-5
  9. Little, Daniel. "Marxism and Method".
  10. Kim, Sung Ho (2017). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Max Weber". Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 10 December 2017. Max Weber is known as a principal architect of modern social science along with Karl Marx and Emil Durkheim. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  11. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, p. 7; Wheen 2001, pp. 8, 12; McLellan 2006, p. 1.
  12. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, pp. 4–5; Wheen 2001, pp. 7–9, 12; McLellan 2006, pp. 2–3.
  13. Carroll, James (2002). Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews – A History. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 419. ISBN 978-0-547-34888-9.
  14. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, pp. 4–6; McLellan 2006, pp. 2–4.
  15. McLellan 2006, p. 178, Plate 1.
  16. Wheen 2001. pp. 12–13.
  17. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, pp. 5, 8–12; Wheen 2001, p. 11; McLellan 2006, pp. 5–6.
  18. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, p. 7; Wheen 2001, p. 10; McLellan 2006, p. 7.
  19. Wheen 2001, chpt. 6
  20. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, p. 12; Wheen 2001, p. 13.
  21. McLellan 2006, p. 7.
  22. Karl Marx: Dictionary of National Biography. Volume 37. Oxford University Press. 2004. pp. 57–58. ISBN 978-0-19-861387-9.
  23. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, pp. 12–15; Wheen 2001, p. 13; McLellan 2006, pp. 7–11.
  24. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, pp. 15–16; Wheen 2001, p. 14; McLellan 2006, p. 13.
  25. Wheen 2001, p. 15.
  26. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, p. 20; McLellan 2006, p. 14.
  27. Wheen 2001, p. 16; McLellan 2006, p. 14.
  28. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, pp. 21–22; McLellan 2006, p. 14.
  29. Nicolaievsky & Maenchen-Helfen 1976, p. 22; Wheen 2001, pp. 16–17; McLellan 2006, p. 14.