Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany Ð'- March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx believed that the downfall of capitalism was inevitable, and that it would be replaced by communism:

Karl Marx

The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. [1]

Karl Marx

However, Marx also wrote in The German Ideology (1845) that:

Karl Marx

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Karl Marx

In this text, he opposed himself to the conception of communism as a future state of society, to consider it rather as the negativity at work in the present moment: communism is the negativity that rejects the current order of things, that is, capitalism.

While Marx was a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence was given added impetus by the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. The relation of Marx's own thought to the popular, "Marxist" interpretations of it during this period is a point of controversy. While Marx's ideas have declined somewhat in popularity, particularly with the decline of Marxism in Russia, they are still very influential today, both in academic circles, and in political practice, and Marxism continues to be the official ideology of numerous states and political movements.

Contents

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* 1 Biography

o 1.1 Childhood

o 1.2 Education

o 1.3 Marx and the Young Hegelians

o 1.4 London

o 1.5 Family life

o 1.6 Death and Legacy

* 2 Marx's thought

o 2.1 Philosophy

o 2.2 Political economy

* 3 Influences on Marx's thought

* 4 Marx's influence

* 5 Criticisms

* 6 References

* 7 Notes

* 8 See also

* 9 External links

o 9.1 Bibliography and online texts

o 9.2 Biographies

o 9.3 Articles and entries

[edit] Biography

[edit] Childhood

Karl Marx was born into a Jewish family in Trier, in the Rhineland region of Germany. His father Heinrich, who had descended from a long line of rabbis, converted to Christianity, despite his many deistic tendencies and his admiration of such Enlightenment figures as Voltaire and Rousseau. Marx's father was actually born Herschel Mordechai, but when the Prussian authorities would not allow him to continue practicing law as a Jew, he joined the official denomination of the Prussian state, Lutheranism, which accorded him advantages, as one of a small minority of Lutherans in a predominantly Roman Catholic region. The Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals.

[edit] Education

Up until the age of thirteen, Marx was educated at home. After graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of 17 to study law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a result. Marx was interested in studying philosophy and literature, but his father would not allow it because he did not believe that his son would be able to comfortably support himself in the future as a scholar. The following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-UniversitÐ"¤t in Berlin. During this period, Marx wrote many poems and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity," but also absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians who were prominent in Berlin at the time. Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but he had to submit his dissertation to the University of Jena as he was warned that his reputation among the faculty as a Young Hegelian radical would lead to a poor reception in Berlin.

The younger Karl Marx.

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The younger Karl Marx.

[edit] Marx and the Young Hegelians

The Left or Young Hegelians consisted of circles of philosophers and journalists around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer opposing their teacher Hegel. Nevertheless they made use of Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, as a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and