Karl Marx, in full Karl Heinrich Marx, (born May 5, 1818,

Trier, Rhine province, Prussia [Germany]—died March 14,

1883, London, England), revolutionary, sociologist, historian,
and economist. He published (with Friedrich Engels)
Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly
known as The Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated
pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. He also
was the author of the movement’s most important book, Das
Kapital. These writings and others by Marx and Engels form
the basis of the body of thought and belief known as
Marxism. (See also socialism; communism.)
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Early Years
Karl Heinrich Marx was the oldest surviving boy of nine
children. His father, Heinrich, a successful lawyer, was a
man of the Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who
took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. His
mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was from Holland. Both
parents were Jewish and were descended from a long line of
rabbis, but, a year or so before Karl was born, his father—
probably because his professional career required it—was
baptized in the Evangelical Established Church. Karl was
baptized when he was six years old. Although as a youth
Karl was influenced less by religion than by the critical,
sometimes radical social policies of the Enlightenment, his
Jewish background exposed him to prejudice and
discrimination that may have led him to question the role of
religion in society and contributed to his desire for social
change.
Marx was educated from 1830 to 1835 at the high school in
Trier. Suspected of harbouring liberal teachers and pupils,
the school was under police surveillance. Marx’s writings
during this period exhibited a spirit of Christian devotion and
a longing for self-sacrifice on behalf of humanity. In October
1835 he matriculated at the University of Bonn. The courses
he attended were exclusively in the humanities, in such
subjects as Greek and Roman mythology and the history of
art. He participated in customary student activities, fought a
duel, and spent a day in jail for being drunk and disorderly.
He presided at the Tavern Club, which was at odds with the
more aristocratic student associations, and joined a poets’
club that included some political activists. A politically
rebellious student culture was, indeed, part of life at Bonn.
Many students had been arrested; some were still being
expelled in Marx’s time, particularly as a result of an effort by
students to disrupt a session of the Federal Diet at Frankfurt.
Marx, however, left Bonn after a year and in October 1836
enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and
philosophy.
Marx’s crucial experience at Berlin was his introduction to
Hegel’s philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to the
Young Hegelians. At first he felt a repugnance toward
Hegel’s doctrines; when Marx fell sick it was partially, as he
wrote his father, “from intense vexation at having to make an
idol of a view I detested.” The Hegelian pressure in the
revolutionary student culture was powerful, however, and
Marx joined a society called the Doctor Club, whose
members were intensely involved in the new literary and
philosophical movement. Their chief figure was Bruno Bauer,
a young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea
that the Christian Gospels were a record not of history but of
human fantasies arising from emotional needs and that
Jesus had not been a historical person. Marx enrolled in a
course of lectures given by Bauer on the prophet Isaiah.
Bauer taught that a new social catastrophe “more
tremendous” than that of the advent of Christianity was in the
making. The Young Hegelians began moving rapidly toward
atheism and also talked vaguely of political action.
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The Prussian government, fearful of the subversion latent in
the Young Hegelians, soon undertook to drive them from the
universities. Bauer was dismissed from his post in 1839.
Marx’s “most intimate friend” of this period, Adolph
Rutenberg, an older journalist who had served a prison
sentence for his political radicalism, pressed for a deeper
social involvement. By 1841 the Young Hegelians had
become left republicans. Marx’s studies, meanwhile, were
lagging. Urged by his friends, he submitted a doctoral
dissertation to the university at Jena, which was known to be
lax in its academic requirements, and received his degree in
April 1841. His thesis analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the
difference between the natural philosophies of Democritus
and Epicurus. More distinctively, it sounded a note of
Promethean defiance:
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Philosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus’ admission: “In sooth

all gods I hate,” is its own admission, its own motto against all
gods,…Prometheus is the noblest saint and martyr in the calendar of
philosophy.
In 1841 Marx, together with other Young Hegelians, was
much influenced by the publication of Das Wesen des
Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig
Feuerbach. Its author, to Marx’s mind, successfully criticized
Hegel, an idealist who believed that matter or existence was
inferior to and dependent upon mind or spirit, from the
opposite, or materialist, standpoint, showing how the
“Absolute Spirit” was a projection of “the real man standing
on the foundation of nature.” Henceforth Marx’s
philosophical efforts were toward a combination of Hegel’s
dialectic—the idea that all things are in a continual process
of change resulting from the conflicts between their
contradictory aspects—with Feuerbach’s materialism, which
placed material conditions above ideas.
In January 1842 Marx began contributing to a newspaper
newly founded in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung. It was
the liberal democratic organ of a group of young merchants,
bankers, and industrialists; Cologne was the centre of the
most industrially advanced section of Prussia. To this stage
of Marx’s life belongs an essay on the freedom of the press.
Since he then took for granted the existence of absolute
moral standards and universal principles of ethics, he
condemned censorship as a moral evil that entailed spying
into people’s minds and hearts and assigned to weak and
malevolent mortals powers that presupposed an omniscient
mind. He believed that censorship could have only evil
consequences.
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On October 15, 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische
Zeitung. As such, he was obliged to write editorials on a
variety of social and economic issues, ranging from the
housing of the Berlin poor and the theft by peasants of wood
from the forests to the new phenomenon of communism. He
found Hegelian idealism of little use in these matters. At the
same time he was becoming estranged from his Hegelian
friends for whom shocking the bourgeois was a sufficient
mode of social activity. Marx, friendly at this time to the
“liberal-minded practical men” who were “struggling step-by-
step for freedom within constitutional limits,” succeeded in
trebling his newspaper’s circulation and making it a leading
journal in Prussia. Nevertheless, Prussian authorities
suspended it for being too outspoken, and Marx agreed to
coedit with the liberal Hegelian Arnold Ruge a new review,
the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher (“German-French
Yearbooks”), which was to be published in Paris.
First, however, in June 1843 Marx, after an engagement of
seven years, married Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny was an
attractive, intelligent, and much-admired woman, four years
older than Karl; she came of a family of military and
administrative distinction. Her half-brother later became a
highly reactionary Prussian minister of the interior. Her
father, a follower of the French socialist Saint-Simon, was
fond of Karl, though others in her family opposed the
marriage. Marx’s father also feared that Jenny was destined
to become a sacrifice to the demon that possessed his son.
Four months after their marriage, the young couple moved to
Paris, which was then the centre of socialist thought and of
the more extreme sects that went under the name of
communism. There, Marx first became a revolutionary and a
communist and began to associate with communist societies
of French and German workingmen. Their ideas were, in his
view, “utterly crude and unintelligent,” but their character
moved him: “The brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with
them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon
us from their work-hardened bodies,” he wrote in his so-
called “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem
Jahre 1844” (written in 1844; Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 [1959]). (These manuscripts were not
published for some 100 years, but they are influential
because they show the humanist background to Marx’s later
historical and economic theories.)
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The “German-French Yearbooks” proved short-lived, but
through their publication Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, a
contributor who was to become his lifelong collaborator, and
in their pages appeared Marx’s article “Zur Kritik der
Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie” (“Toward the Critique of the
Hegelian Philosophy of Right”) with its oft-quoted assertion
that religion is the “opium of the people.” It was there, too,
that he first raised the call for an “uprising of the proletariat”
to realize the conceptions of philosophy. Once more,
however, the Prussian government intervened against Marx.
He was expelled from France and left for Brussels—followed
by Engels—in February 1845. That year in Belgium he
renounced his Prussian nationality.

Marx, Karl: religion

Learn about Karl Marx's opposition to religion.
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Karl Marx
QUICK FACTS

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BORN
May 5, 1818
Trier, Germany
DIED
March 14, 1883 (aged 64)
London, England
NOTABLE WORKS
“Das Kapital”
“The Communist Manifesto”
SUBJECTS OF STUDY
philosophy of history
capitalism
exchange value
use value
FOUNDER OF
First International
DID YOU KNOW?
• Much of Marx's work was not published during his lifetime.
• Marx spent much of his time reading The Economist in the British
Museum to study capitalist society.
• Marx's daughter Eleanor helped him with his work and was later
important to the British labor movement.

Brussels Period
The next two years in Brussels saw the deepening of Marx’s
collaboration with Engels. Engels had seen at firsthand in
Manchester, England, where a branch factory of his father’s
textile firm was located, all the depressing aspects of the
Industrial Revolution. He had also been a Young Hegelian
and had been converted to communism by Moses Hess,
who was called the “communist rabbi.” In England he
associated with the followers of Robert Owen. Now he and
Marx, finding that they shared the same views, combined
their intellectual resources and published Die heilige Familie
(1845; The Holy Family), a prolix criticism of the Hegelian
idealism of the theologian Bruno Bauer. Their next work, Die
deutsche Ideologie (written 1845–46, published 1932; The
German Ideology), contained the fullest exposition of their
important materialistic conception of history, which set out to
show how, historically, societies had been structured to
promote the interests of the economically dominant class.
But it found no publisher and remained unknown during its
authors’ lifetimes.
During his Brussels years, Marx developed his views and,
through confrontations with the chief leaders of the working-
class movement, established his intellectual standing. In
1846 he publicly excoriated the German leader Wilhelm
Weitling for his moralistic appeals. Marx insisted that the
stage of bourgeois society could not be skipped over; the
proletariat could not just leap into communism; the workers’
movement required a scientific basis, not moralistic phrases.
He also polemicized against the French socialist thinker
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in Misère de la philosophie (1847;
The Poverty of Philosophy), a mordant attack on Proudhon’s
book subtitled Philosophie de la misère (1846; The
Philosophy of Poverty). Proudhon wanted to unite the best
features of such contraries as competition and monopoly; he
hoped to save the good features in economic institutions
while eliminating the bad. Marx, however, declared that no
equilibrium was possible between the antagonisms in any
given economic system. Social structures were transient
historic forms determined by the productive forces: “The
handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the
steammill, society with the industrial capitalist.” Proudhon’s
mode of reasoning, Marx wrote, was typical of the petty
bourgeois, who failed to see the underlying laws of history.
An unusual sequence of events led Marx and Engels to write
their pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. In June 1847 a
secret society, the League of the Just, composed mainly of
emigrant German handicraftsmen, met in London and
decided to formulate a political program. They sent a
representative to Marx to ask him to join the league; Marx
overcame his doubts and, with Engels, joined the
organization, which thereupon changed its name to the
Communist League and enacted a democratic constitution.
Entrusted with the task of composing their program, Marx
and Engels worked from the middle of December 1847 to the
end of January 1848. The London Communists were already
impatiently threatening Marx with disciplinary action when he
sent them the manuscript; they promptly adopted it as their
manifesto. It enunciated the proposition that all history had
hitherto been a history of class struggles, summarized in
pithy form the materialist conception of history worked out in
The German Ideology, and asserted that the forthcoming
victory of the proletariat would put an end to class society
forever. It mercilessly criticized all forms of socialism
founded on philosophical “cobwebs” such as “alienation.” It
rejected the avenue of “social Utopias,” small experiments in
community, as deadening the class struggle and therefore
as being “reactionary sects.” It set forth 10 immediate
measures as first steps toward communism, ranging from a
progressive income tax and the abolition of inheritances to
free education for all children. It closed with the words, “The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have
a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
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Revolution suddenly erupted in Europe in the first months of

1848, in France, Italy, and Austria. Marx had been invited to
Paris by a member of the provisional government just in time
to avoid expulsion by the Belgian government. As the
revolution gained in Austria and Germany, Marx returned to
the Rhineland. In Cologne he advocated a policy of coalition
between the working class and the democratic bourgeoisie,
opposing for this reason the nomination of independent
workers’ candidates for the Frankfurt Assembly and arguing
strenuously against the program for proletarian revolution
advocated by the leaders of the Workers’ Union. He
concurred in Engels’s judgment that The Communist
Manifesto should be shelved and the Communist League
disbanded. Marx pressed his policy through the pages of the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung, newly founded in June 1849,
urging a constitutional democracy and war with Russia.
When the more revolutionary leader of the Workers’ Union,
Andreas Gottschalk, was arrested, Marx supplanted him and
organized the first Rhineland Democratic Congress in
August 1848. When the king of Prussia dissolved the
Prussian Assembly in Berlin, Marx called for arms and men
to help the resistance. Bourgeois liberals withdrew their
support from Marx’s newspaper, and he himself was indicted
on several charges, including advocacy of the nonpayment
of taxes. In his trial he defended himself with the argument
that the crown was engaged in making an unlawful
counterrevolution. The jury acquitted him unanimously and
with thanks. Nevertheless, as the last hopeless fighting
flared in Dresden and Baden, Marx was ordered banished as
an alien on May 16, 1849. The final issue of his newspaper,
printed in red, caused a great sensation.
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Early Years In London
Expelled once more from Paris, Marx went to London in
August 1849. It was to be his home for the rest of his life.
Chagrined by the failure of his own tactics of collaboration
with the liberal bourgeoisie, he rejoined the Communist
League in London and for about a year advocated a bolder
revolutionary policy. An “Address of the Central Committee
to the Communist League,” written with Engels in March
1850, urged that in future revolutionary situations they
struggle to make the revolution “permanent” by avoiding
subservience to the bourgeois party and by setting up “their
own revolutionary workers’ governments” alongside any new
bourgeois one. Marx hoped that the economic crisis would
shortly lead to a revival of the revolutionary movement; when
this hope faded, he came into conflict once more with those
whom he called “the alchemists of the revolution,” such as
August von Willich, a communist who proposed to hasten
the advent of revolution by undertaking direct revolutionary
ventures. Such persons, Marx wrote in September 1850,
substitute “idealism for materialism” and regard
 Karl Marx.
Photos.com/Thinkstock
READ MORE ON THIS TOPIC
ethics: Marx
Marx was often portrayed by his followers as a scientist rather than a
moralist. He did not deal directly with the ethical issues that
occupied…
pure will as the motive power of revolution instead of actual
conditions. While we say to the workers: “You have got to go through
fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and national wars not merely in
order to change your conditions but in order to change yourselves
and become qualified for political power,” you on the contrary tell
them, “We must achieve power immediately.”
The militant faction in turn ridiculed Marx for being a
revolutionary who limited his activity to lectures on political
economy to the Communist Workers’ Educational Union.
The upshot was that Marx gradually stopped attending
meetings of the London Communists. In 1852 he devoted
himself intensely to working for the defense of 11
communists arrested and tried in Cologne on charges of
revolutionary conspiracy and wrote a pamphlet on their
behalf. The same year he also published, in a German-
American periodical, his essay “Der Achtzehnte Brumaire
des Louis Napoleon” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte), with its acute analysis of the formation of a
bureaucratic absolutist state with the support of the peasant
class. In other respects the next 12 years were, in Marx’s
words, years of “isolation” both for him and for Engels in his
Manchester factory.

From 1850 to 1864 Marx lived in material misery and

spiritual pain. His funds were gone, and except on one
occasion he could not bring himself to seek paid
employment. In March 1850 he and his wife and four small
children were evicted and their belongings seized. Several of
his children died—including a son Guido, “a sacrifice to
bourgeois misery,” and a daughter Franziska, for whom his
wife rushed about frantically trying to borrow money for a
coffin. For six years the family lived in two small rooms in
Soho, often subsisting on bread and potatoes. The children
learned to lie to the creditors: “Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.” Once
he had to escape them by fleeing to Manchester. His wife
suffered breakdowns.
During all these years Engels loyally contributed to Marx’s
financial support. The sums were not large at first, for Engels
was only a clerk in the firm of Ermen and Engels at
Manchester. Later, however, in 1864, when he became a
partner, his subventions were generous. Marx was proud of
Engels’s friendship and would tolerate no criticism of him.
Bequests from the relatives of Marx’s wife and from Marx’s
friend Wilhelm Wolff also helped to alleviate their economic
distress.

Marx had one relatively steady source of earned income in

the United States. On the invitation of Charles A. Dana,
managing editor of The New York Tribune, he became in
1851 its European correspondent. The newspaper, edited by
Horace Greeley, had sympathies for Fourierism, a Utopian
socialist system developed by the French theorist Charles
Fourier. From 1851 to 1862 Marx contributed close to 500
articles and editorials (Engels providing about a fourth of
them). He ranged over the whole political universe,
analyzing social movements and agitations from India and
China to Britain and Spain.
In 1859 Marx published his first book on economic theory,
Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy). In its preface he again
summarized his materialistic conception of history, his theory
that the course of history is dependent on economic
developments. At this time, however, Marx regarded his
studies in economic and social history at the British Museum
as his main task. He was busy producing the drafts of his
magnum opus, which was to be published later as Das
Kapital. Some of these drafts, including the Outlines and the
Theories of Surplus Value, are important in their own right
and were published after Marx’s death.

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Role In The First International

Marx’s political isolation ended in 1864 with the founding of
the International Working Men’s Association. Although he
was neither its founder nor its head, he soon became its
leading spirit. Its first public meeting, called by English trade
union leaders and French workers’ representatives, took
place at St. Martin’s Hall in London on September 28, 1864.
Marx, who had been invited through a French intermediary
to attend as a representative of the German workers, sat
silently on the platform. A committee was set up to produce
a program and a constitution for the new organization. After
various drafts had been submitted that were felt to be
unsatisfactory, Marx, serving on a subcommittee, drew upon
his immense journalistic experience. His “Address and the
Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s
Association,” unlike his other writings, stressed the positive
achievements of the cooperative movement and of
parliamentary legislation; the gradual conquest of political
power would enable the British proletariat to extend these
achievements on a national scale.
As a member of the organization’s General Council, and
corresponding secretary for Germany, Marx was henceforth
assiduous in attendance at its meetings, which were
sometimes held several times a week. For several years he
showed a rare diplomatic tact in composing differences
among various parties, factions, and tendencies. The
International grew in prestige and membership, its numbers
reaching perhaps 800,000 in 1869. It was successful in
several interventions on behalf of European trade unions
engaged in struggles with employers.
In 1870, however, Marx was still unknown as a European
political personality; it was the Paris Commune that made
him into an international figure, “the best calumniated and
most menaced man of London,” as he wrote. When the
Franco-German War broke out in 1870, Marx and Engels
disagreed with followers in Germany who refused to vote in
the Reichstag in favour of the war. The General Council
declared that “on the German side the war was a war of
defence.” After the defeat of the French armies, however,
they felt that the German terms amounted to
aggrandizement at the expense of the French people. When
an insurrection broke out in Paris and the Paris Commune
was proclaimed, Marx gave it his unswerving support. On
May 30, 1871, after the Commune had been crushed, he
hailed it in a famous address entitled Civil War in France:

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History has no comparable example of such greatness.…Its martyrs

are enshrined forever in the great heart of the working class.
In Engels’s judgment, the Paris Commune was history’s first
example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx’s name,
as the leader of The First International and author of the
notorious Civil War, became synonymous throughout Europe
with the revolutionary spirit symbolized by the Paris
Commune.

The advent of the Commune, however, exacerbated the

antagonisms within the International Working Men’s
Association and thus brought about its downfall. English
trade unionists such as George Odger, former president of
the General Council, opposed Marx’s support of the Paris
Commune. The Reform Bill of 1867, which had enfranchised
the British working class, had opened vast opportunities for
political action by the trade unions. English labour leaders
found they could make many practical advances by
cooperating with the Liberal Party and, regarding Marx’s
rhetoric as an encumbrance, resented his charge that they
had “sold themselves” to the Liberals.
A left opposition also developed under the leadership of the
famed Russian revolutionary Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin.
A veteran of tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, Bakunin could
move men by his oratory, which one listener compared to “a
raging storm with lightning, flashes and thunderclaps, and a
roaring as of lions.” Bakunin admired Marx’s intellect but
could hardly forget that Marx had published a report in 1848
charging him with being a Russian agent. He felt that Marx
was a German authoritarian and an arrogant Jew who
wanted to transform the General Council into a personal
dictatorship over the workers. He strongly opposed several
of Marx’s theories, especially Marx’s support of the
centralized structure of the International, Marx’s view that the
proletariat class should act as a political party against
prevailing parties but within the existing parliamentary
system, and Marx’s belief that the proletariat, after it had
overthrown the bourgeois state, should establish its own
regime. To Bakunin, the mission of the revolutionary was
destruction; he looked to the Russian peasantry, with its
propensities for violence and its uncurbed revolutionary
instincts, rather than to the effete, civilized workers of the
industrial countries. The students, he hoped, would be the
officers of the revolution. He acquired followers, mostly
young men, in Italy, Switzerland, and France, and he
organized a secret society, the International Alliance of
Social Democracy, which in 1869 challenged the hegemony
of the General Council at the congress in Basel, Switzerland.
Marx, however, had already succeeded in preventing its
admission as an organized body into the International.
To the Bakuninists, the Paris Commune was a model of
revolutionary direct action and a refutation of what they
considered to be Marx’s “authoritarian communism.” Bakunin
began organizing sections of the International for an attack
on the alleged dictatorship of Marx and the General Council.
Marx in reply publicized Bakunin’s embroilment with an
unscrupulous Russian student leader, Sergey
Gennadiyevich Nechayev, who had practiced blackmail and
murder.
Without a supporting right wing and with the anarchist left
against him, Marx feared losing control of the International to
Bakunin. He also wanted to return to his studies and to finish
Das Kapital. At the congress of the International at The
Hague in 1872, the only one he ever attended, Marx
managed to defeat the Bakuninists. Then, to the
consternation of the delegates, Engels moved that the seat
of the General Council be transferred from London to New
York City. The Bakuninists were expelled, but the
International languished and was finally disbanded in
Philadelphia in 1876.
 <a
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Last Years
During the next and last decade of his life, Marx’s creative
energies declined. He was beset by what he called “chronic
mental depression,” and his life turned inward toward his
family. He was unable to complete any substantial work,
though he still read widely and undertook to learn Russian.
He became crotchety in his political opinions. When his own
followers and those of the German revolutionary Ferdinand
Lassalle, a rival who believed that socialist goals should be
achieved through cooperation with the state, coalesced in
1875 to found the German Social Democratic Party, Marx
wrote a caustic criticism of their program (the so-called
Gotha Program), claiming that it made too many
compromises with the status quo. The German leaders put
his objections aside and tried to mollify him personally.
Increasingly, he looked to a European war for the overthrow
of Russian tsarism, the mainstay of reaction, hoping that this
would revive the political energies of the working classes. He
was moved by what he considered to be the selfless
courage of the Russian terrorists who assassinated the tsar,
Alexander II, in 1881; he felt this to be “a historically
inevitable means of action.”
Despite Marx’s withdrawal from active politics, he still
retained what Engels called his “peculiar influence” on the
leaders of working-class and socialist movements. In 1879,
when the French Socialist Workers’ Federation was founded,
its leader Jules Guesde went to London to consult with Marx,
who dictated the preamble of its program and shaped much
of its content. In 1881 Henry Mayers Hyndman in his
England for All drew heavily on his conversations with Marx
but angered him by being afraid to acknowledge him by
name.
During his last years Marx spent much time at health resorts
and even traveled to Algiers. He was broken by the death of
his wife on December 2, 1881, and of his eldest daughter,
Jenny Longuet, on January 11, 1883. He died in London,
evidently of a lung abscess, in the following year.

Character And Significance

At Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery, Engels declared
that Marx had made two great discoveries, the law of
development of human history and the law of motion of
bourgeois society. But “Marx was before all else a
revolutionist.” He was “the best-hated and most-calumniated
man of his time,” yet he also died “beloved, revered and
mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers.”
The contradictory emotions Marx engendered are reflected
in the sometimes conflicting aspects of his character. Marx
was a combination of the Promethean rebel and the rigorous
intellectual. He gave most persons an impression of
intellectual arrogance. A Russian writer, Pavel Annenkov,
who observed Marx in debate in 1846 recalled that “he
spoke only in the imperative, brooking no contradiction,” and
seemed to be “the personification of a democratic dictator
such as might appear before one in moments of fantasy.”
But Marx obviously felt uneasy before mass audiences and
avoided the atmosphere of factional controversies at
congresses. He went to no demonstrations, his wife
remarked, and rarely spoke at public meetings. He kept
away from the congresses of the International where the
rival socialist groups debated important resolutions. He was
a “small groups” man, most at home in the atmosphere of
the General Council or on the staff of a newspaper, where
his character could impress itself forcefully on a small body
of coworkers. At the same time he avoided meeting
distinguished scholars with whom he might have discussed
questions of economics and sociology on a footing of
intellectual equality. Despite his broad intellectual sweep, he
was prey to obsessive ideas such as that the British foreign
minister, Lord Palmerston, was an agent of the Russian
government. He was determined not to let bourgeois society
make “a money-making machine” out of him, yet he
submitted to living on the largess of Engels and the bequests
of relatives. He remained the eternal student in his personal
habits and way of life, even to the point of joining two friends
in a students’ prank during which they systematically broke
four or five streetlamps in a London street and then fled from
the police. He was a great reader of novels, especially those
of Sir Walter Scott and Balzac; and the family made a cult of
Shakespeare. He was an affectionate father, saying that he
admired Jesus for his love of children, but sacrificed the lives
and health of his own. Of his seven children, three daughters
grew to maturity. His favourite daughter, Eleanor, worried
him with her nervous, brooding, emotional character and her
desire to be an actress. Another shadow was cast on Marx’s
domestic life by the birth to their loyal servant, Helene
Demuth, of an illegitimate son, Frederick; Engels as he was
dying disclosed to Eleanor that Marx had been the father.
Above all, Marx was a fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in
the battle for his conception of a better society. He regarded
struggle as the law of life and existence.
The influence of Marx’s ideas has been enormous. Marx’s
masterpiece, Das Kapital, the “Bible of the working class,” as
it was officially described in a resolution of the International
Working Men’s Association, was published in 1867 in Berlin
and received a second edition in 1873. Only the first volume
was completed and published in Marx’s lifetime. The second
and third volumes, unfinished by Marx, were edited by
Engels and published in 1885 and 1894. The economic
categories he employed were those of the classical British
economics of David Ricardo, but Marx used them in
accordance with his dialectical method to argue that
bourgeois society, like every social organism, must follow its
inevitable path of development. Through the working of such
immanent tendencies as the declining rate of profit,
capitalism would die and be replaced by another, higher,
society. The most memorable pages in Das Kapital are the
descriptive passages, culled from Parliamentary Blue Books,
on the misery of the English working class. Marx believed
that this misery would increase, while at the same time the
monopoly of capital would become a fetter upon production
until finally “the knell of capitalist private property sounds.
The expropriators are expropriated.”
 <a
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Marx never claimed to have discovered the existence of

classes and class struggles in modern society. “Bourgeois”
historians, he acknowledged, had described them long
before he had. He did claim, however, to have proved that
each phase in the development of production was
associated with a corresponding class structure and that the
struggle of classes led necessarily to the dictatorship of the
proletariat, ushering in the advent of a classless society.
Marx took up the very different versions of socialism current
in the early 19th century and welded them together into a
doctrine that continued to be the dominant version of
socialism for half a century after his death. His emphasis on
the influence of economic structure on historical
development has proved to be of lasting significance.
Although Marx stressed economic issues in his writings, his
major impact has been in the fields of sociology and history.
Marx’s most important contribution to sociological theory was
his general mode of analysis, the “dialectical” model, which
regards every social system as having within it immanent
forces that give rise to “contradictions” (disequilibria) that can
be resolved only by a new social system. Neo-Marxists, who
no longer accept the economic reasoning in Das Kapital, are
still guided by this model in their approach to capitalist
society. In this sense, Marx’s mode of analysis, like those of
Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, or Vilfredo Pareto, has
become one of the theoretical structures that are the
heritage of the social scientist.