Karl Marx

German philosopher, economist and political theorist (1818–1883), born in Trier into a family of rabbis converted to Lutheranism, trained in law and Hegelian philosophy at Bonn and Berlin, and the founder of historical materialism, the intellectual and political tradition that has most profoundly transformed the twentieth century. Successively exiled from Prussia, France and Belgium for his revolutionary activity, he finally settled in London in 1849, where he lived out the rest of his life in often extreme poverty — several of his children died for lack of resources — supported financially by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. With Engels he wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848), the most widely read and translated political text in modern history, proclaiming that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles'. His magnum opus, Capital — of which he completed only the first volume in his lifetime, with Engels posthumously editing the remainder from unfinished manuscripts — offers an exhaustive analysis of the capitalist mode of production: the labour theory of value, surplus value as the source of the working class's exploitation, and the tendential laws that, according to Marx, would inevitably lead to increasingly deep cyclical crises and, ultimately, to proletarian revolution and the abolition of private ownership of the means of production. His materialist conception of history — relations of production as the economic base that ultimately determines a society's political, legal and ideological forms — gave rise to an immense and diverse intellectual tradition, and revolutions made in his name transformed the destiny of much of the planet during the twentieth century.

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Karl Marx

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