Notes on Karl Marx

Early Life

• Born to a wealthy middle-class family
• Of Jewish origin, his father converted to Lutheranism to escape persecution
• Marx studied as a lawyer and philosopher at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin
• While employed at a newspaper, he began to work on a non-idealist theory of history (later this becomes historical materialism)

Adult Life

• Moved to Paris in early 1840 and met Friedrich Engels
• In 1849, following the defeat of revolutions across Europe, he was forced into exile because his political ideas were not well received by authorities.
• His theory is strongly influenced by the Paris Commune of 1871, Proudhon, Fourier, as well as by Hegel, Ricardo, and Adam Smith
• Ended his days in brutal poverty in London, UK
• He was not able to successfully establish a strong workers party, but his ideas influenced labor and workers movements and continue to do so

Dialectic Materialism

1. State of Nature: freedom and poverty (thesis)
2. Liberal Civil Society: wealth and lack of freedom (antithesis)
3. Communist Society: freedom and wealth (synthesis)

Legacy 

• Political
• Economic
• Philosophical
• Artistic
• Marx’s thinking is at the base of all modern and postmodern theory

The Communist Manifesto

Marx writes the text when the Communist League commissions him to.

• He bases his text on a manuscript by Engels
• Second most published manuscript in the Western World
• A call to arms
• The claim that socialism is inevitable is more political than  “scientific”