Karl Marx

Karl Marx (German: [ˈkaʁl ˈmaʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He developed the theory of historical materialism, analyzing class struggle under capitalism and predicting the system's overthrow by the proletariat in favour of communism. Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto (1848) with his lifelong friend Friedrich Engels, and undertook a critique of classical political economy in his magnum opus, Das Kapital (1867–1894). Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence and have influenced revolutions and uprisings in many countries. Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx earned a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1841. He became involved in radical journalism and was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the Young Hegelians, whose ideas he critiqued in works such as The German Ideology. In Paris, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and met Engels, who became a close collaborator. After moving to Brussels, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 wrote The Communist Manifesto, which lays out a programme for revolution. Expelled from Germany after the Revolutions of 1848, Marx moved to London, where he wrote his Grundrisse notebooks and the three volumes of Das Kapital. He became a leading figure in the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he battled the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin and celebrated the Paris Commune of 1871. In his late studies and his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx theorized on the transition to a communist society. He died in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Marx's critiques of history, society and political economy hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power for wages. Employing his historical materialist approach, Marx predicted that capitalism produced internal contradictions like previous socioeconomic systems, and that these tensions would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and the establishment of a classless, stateless, moneyless society constituted by a free association of producers. Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures of the modern era, and his work has been both lauded and criticised. Marxism has exerted major influence on socialist thought and political movements, with Marxist schools of thought such as Marxism–Leninism and its offshoots becoming the guiding ideologies of revolutions that took power in many countries during the 20th century, forming communist states. Marx's work in economics has had a strong influence on modern heterodox theories of labour and capital, and he is often cited as one of the principal architects of modern sociology.