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Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the city of Trier in Rheinische Prussia. His family was Jewish, but converted to Protestantism in 1824. The family was petty bourgeois: his father was a lawyer. After graduating from a Gymnasium (High School) in Trier, Marx entered the university, first at Bonn and later in Berlin, where he read law, majoring in history and philosophy.
He concluded his university course in 1841, submitting a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Epicurus. At the time Marx was a Hegelian idealist in his views. In Berlin, he belonged to the circle of Left Hegelian's (with Bruno Bauer and others) who sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusions from Hegel's philosophy. Ludwig Feuerbach began to criticize theology, particularly after 1836, and he began his turn to materialism, which in 1841 gained ascendancy in his philosophy (The Essence of Christianity).
After graduating from university, Marx moved to Bonn, hoping to become a professor. However, the reactionary policy of the government made Marx abandon the idea of an academic career, after Ludwig Feuerbach had been deprived of his chair in 1832 (and who was not allowed to return to the university in 1836); and in 1841 the government had forbade the young Professor Bruno Bauer to lecture at Bonn. At the beginning on 1842, some radical bourgeois in the Rhineland (Cologne), who were in touch with the Left Hegelian's, founded a paper in opposition to the Prussian government, called the Rheinische Zeitung. Marx and Bruno Bauer were invited to be the chief contributors, and in October 1842 Marx became editor-in-chief and moved from Bonn to Cologne. The newspapers revolutionary-democratic trend became more and more pronounced under Marx's editorship, and the government first imposed double and triple censorship on the paper, and then on January 1 1843 suppressed it.
Marx was forced to resign the editorship before that date, but his resignation did not save the paper, which suspended publication in March 1843. Of the major articles Marx contributed to Rheinische Zeitung, Engels notes, an article on the condition of peasant winegrowers in the Moselle Valley. Marx's journalistic activities convinced him that he was insufficiently acquainted with political economy, and he zealously set out to study it. In 1843, Marx married, at Kreuznach, a childhood friend he had become engaged to while still a student.
His wife came from a bourgeois family of the Prussian nobility, her elder brother being Prussia's Minister of the Interior during an extremely reactionary period 1850 - 58. In the autumn of 1843, Marx went to Paris in order to publish a radical journal abroad, together with Arnold Ruge (1802 - 1880). Only one issue of this journal, Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher, appeared. Publication was discontinued owing to the difficulty of secretly distributing it in Germany, and to disagreement with Ruge. Marx's articles in this journal showed that he was already a revolutionary who advocated merciless criticism of everything existing, and in particular the criticism by weapon, and appealed to the masses and to the proletAlso in 1843, Feuerbach wrote his famous Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. One must have experienced for oneself the liberating effect of these books, Engels subsequently wrote.
We [i. e. , the Left Hegelian's] all became at once Feuerbachians. In September 1844, Frederick Engels came to Paris for a few days, and from that time on became Marx's closest friend. Shortly after meeting, Marx and Engels worked together to produce the first mature work of Marxism The German Ideology.
In this work, largely produced in response to Feuerbach's materialism, Marx and Engels set down the foundations of Marxism with the materialistic conception of history, and broke from Left Hegelian idealism with a critique against Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; Marx wrote in an outline for the begining of the book, the point is to change it. In the mid to late- 1840 s both Marx and Engels took a most active part in the then seething life of the revolutionary groups in Paris (of particular importance at the time was Proudhon's doctrine), which Marx broke into pieces in his Poverty of Philosophy (1847). At the insistent request of the Prussian government, Marx was banished from Paris in 1845, considered by both governments a dangerous revolutionary.
Marx then moved to Brussels. In the spring of 1847 Marx and Engels joined a secret propaganda society called the Communist League. Marx and Engels took a prominent part in the Leagues Second Congress (London, November 1847), at whose request they drew up the Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. With outstanding clarity, this work outlines a new world-conception based on materialism. This document analysis the realm of social life; the theory of the class struggle; the tasks of the Communists; and the revolutionary role of the proletariat the creators of a new, communist society. On the outbreak of the Revolution of February 1848, Marx was banished from Belgium.
He returned to Paris, whence, after the March Revolution, he went to Cologne, Germany, where Neue Rheinische Zeitung was published from June 1 1848 to May 19 1849, with Marx as editor-in-chief. The victorious counter-revolution first instigated court proceedings against Marx (he was acquitted on February 9, 1849), and then banished him from Germany (May 16, 1849). First Marx went to Paris, where he was again banished after the demonstration of June 13, 1849, and then went to London, where he lived until his death. Marx's life as a political exile was an extremely difficult one, as the correspondence between Marx and Engels clearly reveals. Poverty weighed heavily on Marx and his family; had it not been for Engels constant and selfless financial aid, Marx would not only have been unable to complete Capital but would have inevitably have been crushed by hunger and malnutrition. The revival of the democratic movements in the late fifties and in the sixties trusted Marx back into political work.
In 1864 (September 28) the International Working Mens Association the First International was founded in London. Marx was the heart and soul of this organization, and author of its first address and of a host of resolutions, declaration and manifestos. In uniting the labor movement of various forms of non-proletarian socialism (Mazzini, Proudhon, Bakunin, liberal trade-unionism in Britain, Lassalle an deviations to the right, etc. ), and in combating the theories of all these sects and schools, Marx here hammered out uniform tactics for the proletarian struggle of the working in the various Following the downfall of the Paris Commune (1871) of which Marx gave a clear-cut materialistic analysis of these events in The Civil War In France, 1871 and the Bakunin cleavage in the International (See: Marx's conflict with Bakunin), the organization could no longer exist in Europe. After the Hague Congress of the International (1872), the General Council of the International had played its historical part, and now made way for a period of a far greater development of the labor movement in all countries in the world, a period in which the movement grew in scope, and mass socialist working-class parties in individual national states were form Marx's health became undermined by his strenuous work in the International and his still more strenuous writings and organising. He continued work on the refashioning of political economy and on the completion of Capital, for which he collected a mass of new material and studied a number of languages (Russian, for instance; Marx was fully fluent in German, French, and English). However, ill-health prevented him from completing the last two volumes of Capital (which Engels subsequently put together from Marx's notes).
Marx's wife died on December 2, 1881, and on March 14, 1883, Marx passed away peacefully in his armchair. He lies buried next to his wife at Highgate Cemetery in London... Karl Marx is a sociologist, and thought to be the third and most important of the nineteenth-century social thinkers (1818 - 1883). Marx was born in Germany, but after being expelled from various countries for his revolutionary activities, he eventually settled in England.
An erratic genius, he wrote brilliantly on subjects as broad and diverse as philosophy, economics, political science, and history. He did not think of himself as a sociologist, but his work is so rich in sociological insight that he is now regarded as one of the most profound and original sociological thinkers. His influence has been immense. Millions of people accept his theories with almost religious fervor, and modern socialist and communist movements owe their inspiration directly to him.
It is important to realize that Marxism is not the same as communism. Marx would probably be dismayed at many of the practices of communist movements, and he cannot be held responsible for policies pursued in his name a century after his death. Even in his own lifetime, he was so appalled at the various interpretations of his ideas by competing factions that he declared, I am not a Marxist. To Marx the task of social scientist was not merely to describe the world: it was to change it. Where as Spencer saw social harmony and the inevitability of progress, Marx saw social conflict and the inevitability of revolution.
The key to history, he believed, is class conflict the bitter struggle between those who own the means of producing wealth and those who do not. This contest, Marx claimed, would end only with the overthrow of the ruling exploiters and the establishment of a free, humane, classless society. Marx placed special emphasis on the economic base of society. He argued that the character of virtually all other social arrangements is shaped by the way goods are produced and by the relationships that exists between those who work to produce them and those who live off the production of others. Modern sociologist, including many who reject other aspects of Marx's theories, generally recognize the fundamental influence of the economy on other areas of society.
The Communist Manifesto, the spectre is haunting Europe the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Two things result from this fact: I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, . To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms.
It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other bourgeoisie and proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns.
From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. Whether socialism can be brought about within the framework of the existing modern capitalist state or by a revolutionary overthrow of that state is a question unresolved by history. So far there have been no examples of either road to socialism in modern industrial society. The question of what kind of socialism we should struggle for deserves more extensive treatment than can be given here. American socialism cannot be modeled on the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or other countries with different historical, economic and cultural developments.
There is nothing sacred about existing systems. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interest of the people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just and more democratic. Marx said and so did Jefferson. It is a revolutionary doctrine and very much an American one. Karl Marx makes the facts of social life comprehensible.
It places seemingly meaningless events in a general framework that enables us to determine cause an effect, to explain and to predict. Sociological theories vary greatly in their scope and sophistication. Some are sweeping explanations of major issues such as social change but most theories attempt to explain only a small aspect of reality
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