Marx, Karl Heinrich (1818–1883)

German philosopher, economist, and social theorist whose account of class change through conflict, ‘the materialist conception of history’ is known as historical, or dialectical, materialism (see Marxism). His Das Kapital/Capital (1867–95) is the fundamental text of Marxist economics, and his systematic theses on class struggle, history, and the importance of economic factors in politics have exercised an enormous influence on later thinkers and political activists.

In 1844 Marx began his lifelong collaboration with the German social and political philosopher Friedrich Engels, with whom he developed the Marxist philosophy, first formulated in their joint works Die heilige Familie/The Holy Family (1844) and Die deutsche Ideologie/German Ideology (1846) (which contains the theory demonstrating the material basis of all human activity:‘Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’). They joined the Communist League, a German refugee organization, and 1847–48 prepared its programme, The Communist Manifesto, widely considered to be the most influential political pamphlet ever written, and Marx's monumental work Das Kapital/Capital (1867; first volume). Marx never lived to finish this work and it remained unread and almost unreviewed for over two decades. Engels spent over ten years after Marx's death preparing the second and third volumes for publication (1885, 1894). Other more widely read works by Marx were Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich/Class Struggles in France (1849), Die Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte/The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), and Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie/Critique of Political Economy (1859).

Marx was born in Trier in the Rhineland, Prussia (now Germany). He studied at the German universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, where he received his doctorate in philosophy at the age of 23. While a student he began to associate with the Young Hegelians, a group of intellectuals who were turning the conservative philosophy of German philosopher Georg Hegel into a weapon of fierce social criticism. Marx's philosophical work owed much to Hegel's work although he later rejected his idealism. Marx then moved into journalism and edited the Rheinische Zeitung/Rhineland Newspaper from 1842 until its suppression in 1843 when he was forced to flee Germany. He settled first in Paris, France, where he met Engels, then in Brussels, Belgium. Marx's first venture into economics, The Poverty of Philosophy was published in 1847, and was a critique of the then influential socialist ideas of the French anarchist Pierre Proudhon. In 1848 Marx moved to Cologne, Germany, where he edited the Neue Rheinische Zeitung/New Rhineland Newspaper. This paper was again suppressed and Marx fled to London, England, in 1849.

In 1864 the International Working Men's Association was formed, whose policy Marx, as a member of the general council, largely controlled. Although he showed extraordinary tact in holding together its diverse elements, it collapsed in 1872 owing to his disputes with the anarchists, including the Russian Bakunin. Marx and Engels rarely wrote together after 1848 but they continued to confer and to correspond on an almost daily basis until Marx's death. Marx never again held a job after moving to London and was dependent on financial handouts and a fixed annual settlement from Engels until he inherited a small legacy from his mother in the late 1870s.