Das Kapital

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the German city of Trier, in what was then the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Heinrich, was a Jewish convert to Protestantism who worked as a lawyer. Henriette Pressburg, his mother, was also a Jewish convert to Protestantism who came from a well-off family of merchants in the Netherlands.

Pressured by his father into studying law, Karl Marx studied at the University of Bonn and then transferred to the University of Berlin. While there studying law and philosophy, he fell in with a group of students who were deeply influenced by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. They were called the “Young Hegelians.” Like Hegel, they embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment and a rationalistic version of Protestantism. However, over time, they became more radical, opposing monarchy in favor of democracy and becoming atheists.

Marx received his PhD in philosophy at the University of Jena, writing his dissertation on the theories of the ancient philosophers Democritus and Epicurus. Due to Marx’s already-radical views, he failed to find work as a university faculty member. Instead, he began to work as an editor and journalist for mostly left-wing newspapers. Most notably, he worked for a time as a foreign correspondent for the United States-based newspaper the New York Daily Tribune. Marx quit the position in protest when the newspaper’s editorial board endorsed an immediate end to the US Civil War even if it meant preserving slavery in the American South.

Facing persecution and a lack of work because of his politics, Marx lived in various places around Germany, France, Belgium, and Algeria. During this time, he married Jenny von Westphalen, a theater critic and the daughter of a civil servant. She and Marx had seven children, only three of whom lived to adulthood: Jenny Caroline, Jenny Laura, and Jenny Julia Eleanor. In Paris, he also met his longtime collaborator and friend, Friedrich Engels, with whom he would write The Communist Manifesto.

By 1849, Marx and his family had settled in London permanently. By then, Britain was home to the world’s first industrialized economy and the largest colonial empire. Although the Revolutions of 1848 that broke out across much of Europe failed to establish more democratic, liberal, and nationalist governments, they shaped Marx’s view of history as a series of struggles between socioeconomic classes that will eventually end with the working class seizing the means of production. Similarly, Marx’s view of history was also informed by the US Civil War and the rise of Emperor Napoleon III in France.

Marx died from bronchitis and other ailments on March 14, 1883. A prolific writer, Marx’s notable works other than Capital include The Communist Manifesto (1848) (co-written with Engels), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), and The Civil War in France (1871).