Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818–83) German philosopher, economist and political thinker, usually portrayed as the father of twentieth-century communism. After a brief career as a university teacher, Marx took up journalism and became increasingly involved with the socialist movement. He moved to Paris in 1843, later spent three years in Brussels and finally, in 1849, settled in London. He worked for the rest of his life as an active revolutionary and writer, supported by his friend and life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels.

Marx’s work provides the basis for the Marxist political tradition. It was derived from a synthesis of Hegelian philosophy, British political economy and French socialism. His early writings, known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts ([1844] 1967), outlined a humanist conception of communism based upon the prospect of unalienated labour in conditions of free and cooperative production. The ideas of historical materialism started to take shape in The German Ideology ([1846] 1970) and are given their most succinct expression in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). Marx’s best known and most accessible work is The Communist Manifesto (with Engels) ([1848] 1976), which summarizes his critique of capitalism and highlights its transitional nature by drawing attention to systematic inequality and instability. Marx’s classic work is the three-volume Capital (1867, 1885 and 1894), which painstakingly analyses the capitalist process of production and is based, some argue, upon economic determinism.