Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818. He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family and his father had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he would not lose his job as one of the respected lawyers in Trier. At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn. At Bonn he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen , a member of Trier society, and man pretty much responsible for making Marx interested in Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year Marx's father sent him to the little more serious University of Berlin where he remained four years, at which time he abandoned his romanticism for the Hegelianism which ruled in Berlin at the time.

Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group seemed to give radical critique of Christianity and the liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy. Marx moved into journalism and, in October 1842, became editor, in Cologne, of the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper. Marx's articles, mostly the ones on economic questions, forced the Prussian government to close the paper. Marx then emigrated to France.

Arriving in Paris at the end of 1843, Marx quickly made contact with organized groups of German workers and with various groups of French socialists. During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a communist and wrote down his views in a series of writings which are called the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist idea of communism, influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. It was also in Paris that Marx developed his friendship with Friedrich Engels.

Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844 and with Engels, moved to Brussels where he lived for the next three years. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and built on what came to be known as the materialist idea of history.

Early in 1848 Marx moved back to Paris when a revolution first broke out and onto Germany where he founded, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The paper supported a radical democratic line against the Prussian autocracy. Marx's paper was suppressed and 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.

Settling in London, Marx was optimistic about the new revolutionary outbreak in Europe. He rejoined the Communist League and wrote two fairly long pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He was soon convinced that "a new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis" and then devoted himself to the study of political economy in order to determine

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