The Life of Carl Marx

Karl Marx was born into a progressive and wealthy Jewish family in Trier, Germany. His father Heinrich, who had descended from a long line of rabbis, converted to Christianity, despite his many deistic tendencies. 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 relatively liberal Lutheran denomination. The Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during Karl's early life.

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Education

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 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 Karl 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 his stead, Marx wrote many poems and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity." It was during this period that he absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the left-Hegelians. Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.

The younger Karl Marx.

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Marx and the Young Hegelians

In Berlin, Marx's interests turned to philosophy, and he joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians". For many of them, the so-called left-Hegelians, Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, provided a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. Another Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, applied Hegelian criticism and argued that stopping anywhere short of nihilistic egoism was mysticism. His views were not accepted by most of his colleagues; nevertheless, Stirner's book was the main reason Marx abandoned the Feuerbachian view and developed the basic concept of historical materialism. One of Marx's teachers was Baron Von Westphalen, father of Jenny Von Westphalen, whom Karl Marx later married.

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Activities in Europe

When his mentor, Bruno Bauer, was dismissed from Friedrich-Wilhelms' philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned a university career and moved into journalism. In October of 1842, he became editor of the influential liberal newspaper Rheinische Zeitung located in Cologne, Germany. The newspaper was shut down in 1843 by the Prussian government, in part due to Marx's conflicts with government censors. As a freelance journalist Marx continued his writing, but with his philosophical views and turn towards political activism he was soon forced to move.

Marx's life-long friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels.

Marx left for France, where he re-evaluated his relationship with Bauer and the Young Hegelians, and wrote On the Jewish Question, mostly a critique of current notions of civil rights and political emancipation that also includes several critical references to Judaism and Jewish culture from an atheistic standpoint. It was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long close friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, a committed communist, who kindled Marx's interest in the situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics. It was during his time in Paris that Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of Communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. After he was forced to leave Paris for his writings, Marx and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium.

While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the materialist conception of history. He developed this in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), of which the basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one -- industrial capitalism -- and its replacement by communism.

Next, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a response to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty and a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, which was commissioned by the Communist League (formerly, the League of the Just), an organization of German йmigrйs whom Marx had converted in London.

That year Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval. Marx was arrested and expelled from Belgium; in the meantime a working-class movement had seized power from King Louis Philippe in France, and invited Marx to return to Paris. Whilst in Paris, Marx, along with others, helped four hundred unemployed Germans the same travel allowance as the French legionaries, so that they too could return to Germany.

When this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and restarted the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. During its existence he was on trial twice, on February 7, 1849 because of a press misdemeanour, and on the 8th charged with incitement to armed rebellion. Both times he was acquitted.

After the paper had been suppressed Marx returned to Paris, but was forced out again. He sought refuge in London in May 1849 to begin the "long, sleepless night of exile" that was to last for the rest of his life.

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London

Settling in London, Marx was optimistic about the imminence of a new revolutionary outbreak in Europe. He rejoined the Communist League and wrote two lengthy pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath, The Class Struggles