About Me
Lets see where do I start. I guess I will start with my birth. I was born Karl Heinrich Marx May 5, 1818 in Trier, Germany. I born into a progressive and wealthy Jewish family. My father, Herschel, descends from a long line of rabbis, although harboring many deistic tendencies, he converted to the Christian religion joining the relatively liberal Lutheran denomination, in order to become a lawyer. Our household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during my early life. In 1835 I enrolled in the University of Bonn to study law, where I joined the Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its president; but my grades suffered as a result. The following year, my father forced me to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. In Berlin my interests turned to philosophy. It was during this period where I absorbed the atheistic philosophy and joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians". One of my teachers of Hegelian Society was Baron Von Westphalen, father of Jenny Von Westphalen whom I would latter marry. In 1841, I would get Ph.D. degree at Jena. In 1842 I became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, but my demand for radical reforms led to its suppression in 1843. I went to Paris, where I began my lifelong association with the best dude in the world, Friedrich Engels and got me interested with the oppression of the working class. At this time I became a socialist. I devoured the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, the comte de Saint-Simon, and many others. Antagonized by the individualistic radicalism of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, I attacked him in "The Poverty of Philosophy "(1847), an early attempt to systematize my own thought. In this period I also wrote, with Engels," The German Ideology", which provided an exposition of my dialectical materialism. Breaking with the tradition of justifying social reform by appeal to natural rights, I invoked “inevitable†laws of history to predict the eventual triumph of the working class. These works laid the foundation for my and Engels' most famous work, "The Communist Manifesto", published on February 21, 1848, which was commissioned by the Communist League. In 1864 I organized the International Workingmen's Association, later called the First International, as a base for my continued political activism. I was generally impoverished during the later period of his life, depending on financial contributions from my best bud and fellow author, Friedrich Engels, to help with his family's living expenses and debts. Following the death of my wife Jenny in 1881, I died in London in 1883, and am buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. The message carved on my tombstone reads– a monument built in 1954 by the British Communist Party – is: "Workers of all lands, unite".
