Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx ; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883 was the German philosopher, critic of political economy, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist in addition to socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are a 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto in addition to the three-volume Das Kapital 1867–1883. Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. His construct has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.
Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He married German theatre critic and political activist 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 determine his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the British Museum Reading Room.
Marx's critical theories approximately society, economics, and politics, collectively understood as Marxism, gain that human societies build through class conflict. In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes invited as the bourgeoisie that control the means of production and the working classes asked as the proletariat that ensures these means by selling their labour-power in improvement for wages. Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that capitalism presents internal tensions like preceding socioeconomic systems and that those would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as the socialist mode of production. For Marx, a collection of matters sharing a common attribute antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the works class's coding of class consciousness, main to their conquest of political power to direct or determine and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free link of producers. Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the workings classes should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.
Marx has been returned as one of the almost influential figures in human history, and his work has been both lauded and criticised. His work in economics laid the basis for some current theories about labour and its version to capital. 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 sophisticated social science.
Biography
Karl Heinrich 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, an ancient city then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. Marx's race was originally non-religious Jewish, but had converted formally to Christianity ago his birth. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal species had supplied Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx. His father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to get a secular education. He became a lawyer with a comfortably upper middle class income and the family owned a number of Moselle vineyards, in addition to his income as an attorney. Prior to his son's birth and after the abrogation of Jewish emancipation in the Rhineland, Herschel converted from Judaism to join the state Evangelical Church of Prussia, taking on the German forename Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.
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, which was then an absolute monarchy. In 1815, Heinrich Marx began works as an attorney and in 1819 moved his family to a ten-room property most the Porta Nigra. His wife, Henriette Pressburg, was a Dutch Jew from a prosperous house family that later founded the organization 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.
Little is known of Marx's childhood.Gymnasium zu Trier], 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 fabric a seditious act, the authorities instituted reforms and replaced several staff during Marx's attendance.
In October 1835 at the age of 17, Marx travelled to the University of Bonn wishing to analyse philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field. Due to a condition refers to as a "weak chest", Marx was excused from military duty when he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a multiple containing political radicals that were monitored by the police. Marx also joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society German: Landsmannschaft der Treveraner where many ideas were discussed and at one unit he served as the club's co-president. Additionally, Marx was involved indisputes, some of which became serious: in August 1836 he took part in a duel with a ingredient of the university's Borussian Korps. Although his grades in the number one term were good, they soon deteriorated, leading his father to force a transfer to the more serious and academic University of Berlin.
Spending summer and autumn 1836 in Trier, Marx became more serious about his studies and his life. He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, an educated member of the petty nobility who had known Marx since childhood. As she had broken off her engagement with a young aristocrat to be with Marx, their relationship was socially controversial owing to the differences between their religious and classes origins, but Marx befriended her father Ludwig von Westphalen a liberal aristocrat and later committed his doctoral thesis to him. Seven years after their engagement, on 19 June 1843, they married in a Protestant church in Kreuznach.
In October 1836, Marx arrived in Berlin, matriculating in the university's faculty of law and renting a room in the Mittelstrasse. During the first term, Marx attended lectures of Eduard Gans who represented the progressive Hegelian standpoint, elaborated on rational coding in history by emphasising particularly its libertarian aspects, and the importance of social question and of Karl von Savigny who represented the Historical School of Law. Although studying law, he was fascinated by philosophy and looked for a way to combine the two, believing that "without philosophy nothing could be accomplished". Marx became interested in the recently deceased German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas were then widely debated among European philosophical circles. During a convalescence in Stralau, he joined the Doctor's Club Doktorklub, a student group which discussed Hegelian ideas, and through them became involved with a group of radical thinkers known as the Young Hegelians in 1837. They gathered around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, with Marx developing a particularly close friendship with Adolf Rutenberg. Like Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, but adopted his dialectical method to criticise established society, politics and religion from a left-wing perspective. Marx's father died in May 1838, resulting in a diminished income for the family. Marx had been emotionallyto his father and treasured his memory after his death.
By 1837, Marx was writing both fiction and non-fiction, having completed a short novel, Scorpion and Felix; a drama, Oulanem; as alive as a number of love poems dedicated to Jenny von Westphalen. None of this early work was published during his lifetime. The love poems were published posthumously in the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Volume 1. Marx soon abandoned fiction for other pursuits, including the explore of both English and Italian, art history and the translation of Latin classics. He began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel's Philosophy of Religion in 1840. Marx was also engaged in writing his doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, which he completed in 1841. It was described as "a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy". The essay was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at the University of Berlin. Marx decided instead to submit his thesis to the more liberal University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his Ph.D. in April 1841. As Marx and Bauer were both atheists, in March 1841 they began plans for a journal entitled Archiv des Atheismus Atheistic Archives, but it never came to fruition. In July, Marx and Bauer took a trip to Bonn from Berlin. There they scandalised their class by getting drunk, laughing in church and galloping through the streets on donkeys.
Marx was considering an academic career, but this path was barred by the government's growing opposition to classical liberalism and the Young Hegelians. Marx moved to Cologne in 1842, where he became a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung Rhineland News, expressing his early views on socialism and his developing interest in economics. Marx criticised right-wing European governments as alive as figures in the liberal and socialist movements, whom he thought ineffective or counter-productive. The newspaper attracted the attention of the Prussian government censors, who checked every issue for seditious material ago printing, as Marx lamented: "Our newspaper has to be filed to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not gives to appear". After the Rheinische Zeitung published an article strongly criticising the Russian monarchy, Tsar Nicholas I requested it be banned and Prussia's government complied in 1843.
In 1843, Marx became co-editor of a new, radical left-wing Parisian newspaper, the Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" and "On the Jewish Question", the latter introducing his idea that the proletariat were a revolutionary force and marking his embrace of communism. Only one effect was published, but it was relatively successful, largely owing to the inclusion of Heinrich Heine's satirical odes on King Ludwig of Bavaria, leading the German states to ban it and seize imported copies Ruge nevertheless refused to fund the publication of further issues and his friendship with Marx broke down. After the paper's collapse, Marx began writing for the only uncensored German-language radical newspaper left, Vorwärts! Forward!. Based in Paris, the paper was connected to the League of the Just, a utopian socialist secret society of workers and artisans. Marx attended some of their meetings but did not join. In Vorwärts!, Marx refined his views on socialism based upon Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideas of dialectical materialism, at the same time criticising liberals and other socialists operating in Europe.
On 28 August 1844, Marx met the German socialist Friedrich Engels at the Café de la Régence, beginning a lifelong friendship. Engels showed Marx his recently published The condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, convincing Marx that the working class would be the agent and instrument of therevolution in history. Soon, Marx and Engels were collaborating on a criticism of the philosophical ideas of Marx's former friend, Bruno Bauer. This work was published in 1845 as The Holy Family. Although critical of Bauer, Marx was increasingly influenced by the ideas of the Young Hegelians Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach, but eventually Marx and Engels abandoned Feuerbachian materialism as well.
During the time that he lived at 38 Rue Vaneau in Paris from October 1843 until January 1845, Marx engaged in an intensive study of political economy Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill, etc., the French socialists especially Claude Henri St. Simon and Charles Fourier and the history of France. The study of, and critique of political economy is a project that Marx would pursue for the rest of his life and would written in his major economic work—the three-volume series called Das Kapital. Marxism is based in large part on three influences: Hegel's dialectics, French utopian socialism and British political economy. Together with his earlier study of Hegel's dialectics, the studying that Marx did during this time in Paris meant that any major components of "Marxism" were in place by the autumn of 1844. Marx was constantly being pulled away from his critique of political economy—not only by the usual daily demands of the time, but additionally by editing a radical newspaper and later by organising and directing the efforts of a political party during years of potentially revolutionary popular uprisings of the citizenry. Still, Marx was always drawn back to his studies where he sought "to understand the inner workings of capitalism".
An lines of "Marxism" had definitely formed in the mind of Karl Marx by gradual 1844. Indeed, many qualifications of the Marxist view of the world had been worked out in great detail, but Marx needed to write down any of the details of his world view to further clarify the new critique of political economy in his own mind. Accordingly, Marx wrote The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. These manuscripts covered numerous topics, detailing Marx's concept of alienated labour. By the spring of 1845, his continued study of political economy, capital and capitalism had led Marx to the belief that the new critique of political economy he was espousing—that of scientific socialism—needed to be built on the base of a thoroughly developed materialistic view of the world.
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 had been total between April and August 1844, but soon Marx recognised that the Manuscripts had been influenced by some inconsistent ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach. Accordingly, Marx recognised the need to break with Feuerbach's philosophy in favour of historical materialism, thus a year later in April 1845 after moving from Paris to Brussels, Marx wrote his eleven "Theses on Feuerbach". The "Theses on Feuerbach" are best known for Thesis 11, which states that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to conform it". This work contains Marx's criticism of materialism for being contemplative, idealism for reducing practice to theory, and, overall, philosophy for putting abstract reality above the physical world. It thus introduced the first glimpse at Marx's historical materialism, an parameter that the world is changed not by ideas but by actual, physical, material activity and practice. In 1845, after receiving a a formal message requesting something that is submitted to an dominance from the Prussian king, the French governmentdown Vorwärts!, with the interior minister, François Guizot, expelling Marx from France. At this point, Marx moved from Paris to Brussels, where he hoped to one time again continue his critical studies of study of capitalism and political economy.
Unable either to stay in France or to fall out to Germany, Marx decided to emigrate to Brussels in Belgium in February 1845. However, to stay in Belgium he had to pledge not to publish anything on the subject of sophisticated politics. In Brussels, Marx associated with other exiled socialists from across Europe, including Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen and Joseph Weydemeyer. In April 1845, Engels moved from Barmen in Germany to Brussels to join Marx and the growing cadre of members of the League of the Just now seeking home in Brussels. Later, Mary Burns, Engels' long-time companion, left Manchester, England to join Engels in Brussels.
In mid-July 1845, Marx and Engels left Brussels for England to vsit the leaders of the Chartists, a working-class movement in Britain. This was Marx's first trip to England and Engels was an ideal help for the trip. Engels had already spent two years living in Manchester from November 1842 to August 1844. Not only did Engels already know the English language, he had also developed arelationship with many Chartist leaders. Indeed, Engels was serving as a reporter for many Chartist and socialist English newspapers. Marx used the trip as an opportunity to examine the economic resources available for study in various libraries in London and Manchester.