About Me
Hi, Im Karl Marx, I was born May 5, 1818 in Trier, Germany. I was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmen's Association. I addressed a wide range of issues, and I'm most famous for my analysis of history in terms of class struggles, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto (one of my most famous books): "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle."
Childhood:
I was born into a progressive and wealthy Jewish family in Trier, Germany. My father Heinrich, who had descended from a long line of rabbis, converted to Christian, despite his many deistic tendencies. My father was actually born Herschel Mordechai, but when the Prussian authorities would not allow him to continue practicing law as a Jew, he joined the relatively liberal Lutheran denomination. My family household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during my early life.
Education:
After graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, I enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of 17 to study law, where I joined the Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its president; my grades suffered as a result. I was interested in studying philosophy and literature, but my father would not allow it because he did not believe that I would be able to comfortably support myself in the future as a scholar. The following year, my father forced me to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitt in Berlin. During my stead, I wrote much poetry and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from my liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity." It was during this period that I absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the left-Hegelians. I earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.
Me & the Young Hegelians:
In Berlin, My interests turned to philosophy, and I joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians". For many of us, the so-called left-Hegelians, Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, provided a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of my circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. Another Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, applied Hegelian criticism and argued that stopping anywhere short of nihilistic egoism was mysticism. His views were not accepted by most of my colleagues; nevertheless, Stirner's book was the main reason I abandoned the Feuerbachian view and developed the basic concept of historical materialism. One of My teachers was Baron Von Westphalen, father of Jenny Von Westphalen, whom I later married.
Family Life:
My engagement to Jenny von Westphalen, an aristocrat, was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed by both the Marxes and Westphalens. Jenny and I stayed in touch throughout the former half of my life, when I was moving around Europe. We had many children, several of whom died young. Our daughter Eleanor (1855-1898), who was born in London, was a committed socialist who helped edit her my works. During the first half of the 1850s my family lived in poverty in a three room flat in the Soho quarter of London. Jenny and I already had four children and two more were to follow. Of these only three survived. My major source of income at this time was Engels who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.
Later life:
I was generally impoverished during the later period of my life, depending on financial contributions from Engels. Following the death of my wife Jenny in 1881, My health worsened and I died in 1883. I was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. The message carved on my grave tombstone is: "Workers of all lands, unite", the final line of my book "The Communist Manifesto". The tombstone was a monument built in 1954 by the Communist Party of Great Britain - My original tomb was humbly adorned; only eleven people were present at my funeral. Several of my closest friends spoke at my funeral, including Friedrich Engels, who delivered the following eulogy: "On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep-but forever. Marx was the best-hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers -- from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to say that though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work!"
