Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–83) was the German political philosopher and economist who founded modern communism. He was one of the most significant political theorists of modern times.
Born in Trier, Prussia (now Germany,) Marx studied law at the University of Bonn and history and philosophy at the University of Berlin. He was a gifted student who made friends with many of the leading German-speaking philosophers of the time. By his late 20s, he was expressing himself as a communist and frequently engaged in heated debates with fellow scholars. Marx traveled around France, Belgium, and Germany during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and eventually settled in London starting 1849.
Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels became his closest intellectual collaborator and the source of much of the money with which Marx lived. They teamed up to write the epoch-making Communist Manifesto (1848) and elaborated their political principles in the three-volume Das Kapital. They published the first volume in 1867; Engels completed and published the remainder after Marx’s death (1885, 1894.)
The intellectual father of twentieth-century socialism, Marx’s ideas of indifference for the individual, denial of human nature, and rejection of the basic economics principles inspired some of the world’s murderous regimes—those of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro. In Marx’s name, millions of people were divested of their freedom, subjected to imprisonment and torture, sent to labor camps, or executed by firing squads.
Marx’s influence persists—his diagnosis of many of capitalism’s most significant flaws is still prescient. Many affluent countries have progressive income taxes, universal public education, and other principles that Marx espoused in Communist Manifesto. He continues to motivate liberals who emphasize the deprivation of capitalism as a class struggle in which the ruling-class minority takes advantage of the working-class majority while sharing little of the proceeds of wealth.
Marx is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Only 11 people came to his funeral. His monument now gets daily visitors, including followers of Marxist theory, who have made the tomb a place of pilgrimage. The pedestal is inscribed with quotes from Marx’s works—the front features the final words of Communist Manifesto, “Workers of all lands unite.”
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The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Unemployment, Work
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Writers, Creativity, Art, Authors & Writing
The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.
—Karl Marx
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Values, Value
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Necessity
As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politics, Politicians
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Absence
Fascism in power is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism.
—Karl Marx
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Philosophy, Science
It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving — as if it were an individual person — its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
Religion is the opiate of the masses.
—Karl Marx
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