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Karl Heinrich Marx was born in May, 1818, in the city of Trier in the Rhine province of Prussia, today a part of Germany. His father, Heinrich Marx, a Jewish lawyer and his mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, baptized Karl in the Evangelical Established Church when he was six years old.
In 1835 Marx matriculated at the University of Bonn. In Bonn he spent one day in prison the only imprisionment he suffered in his life. However, he left Bonn after one year and enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and philosophy. During the time as a student in Berlin, Marx was strongly influenced by Georg W. F. Hegel. Marx recieved his doctor\'s degree in 1841 from the University of Jena.
Marx considered Journalism as a career and in 1842 he became an editor of the \'Rheinische Zeitung\'. As such he was obligated to write editorials on a variety of social and economic issues and about the new phenomenon of Communism. In the year 1843 Karl married Jenny von Westphalen, a close friend of his boyhood and the daughter of a high government official. A short time afer his marrige the newspaper, at which he worked, was suppressed and he emigrated with his wife to Paris where he became acquainted with French socialists. After being expelled from the French government, Marx left for Brussls in 1845.
In Brussls Marx established the lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels, finding that they shared the same political views. They wanted to combine their intellectual resources and, as a result, they published several books together.
Marx was fascinated by Ludwig Feuerbachs idea that man had \"alienated himself from himself\" by creating God in his image. So he applied the idea of \"alienation\" to his thougts of private property, which he said causes men to work only for themseves and not for the whole society.
In 1847 Marx visited London, where he and Engels prepared a program for a secret organization of Workers. It appeared in 1848 as the \'Communist Manifesto\' and declared that the struggle between the working class and the business class, under Capitalism, had to end in a self destruction of society and a change to Communism.
When a revolution suddenly erupted in Europe in the first month of 1848, Marx returned to the Rhineland. Now he pressed his policy throught the pages of the newly founded \'Neue Rheinische Zeitung\'.
Expelled once more, Marx went to London in 1849. From 1851 to 1862 Marx and his family lifed in poverty, with only the little help from Engels and the relatives of his wife. Marx refused to work for money like a proletarian. During all these years he had one relatively steady source of earned income. He wrote about 400 articles and editorials for the \'New York Tribune\' as the European correspondent.
In 1864 Marx\'s ideas had begun to influence a group of workers and German emigres in London, who founded the International Working Men\'s Association, later known as the First International. This new organization set up a committee to produce a program and a constitution. Marx, invited as the representative of the German workers, used his immense journalistic experience to present his political views to the committee. After various other drafts had been submitted, his ideas were taken.
Marx\'s name was still unknown in 1870, but he became famous in political circles of Europe, when the French Prussian War broke out. He and Engels disagreed with followers in Germany who refused to vote in favour of the war. The General Council declared that \"on the German side the war is a war of defense\". But after the defeat of the French armies, they felt that the German terms amounted to aggrandizement at the expense of the French people. When an insurrection broke out in Paris and the Paris Commune was proclaimed, Marx gave it his unswerving support. Engels judged the Paris Commune as the first example of the \"dictatorship of the proletariat\". Marx\'s name, as the leader of the First International, became synonymous throughout Europe with the revolutionary spirit symbolized by the Paris Commune.
In 1867, Marx published, together with Engels, \'Das Kapital\', dealing with the economic system of Capitalism. The body of thoughts and belief known as Marxism is based one this book, also known as the \'Bible of the working class\'.
During his lifetime Karl Marx wrote two major works together with Friedrich Engels. In both of them he described and discussed his views of politic and economic systems. The first one is \'The Communist Manifesto\', a pamphlet, writen in 1848. It embodied the authors\' materialistic conception of the stuggle between the classes in history. Also it surveyed history from the age of feudalism down to 19th century. Capitalism was destined to be overthrown and replaced by a workers\' society. Communism would accomplish the \"abolition of private property\" and \"raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class\". The Manifesto ends with the dramatic words \"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite.\"
The other famous work is \'Das Kapital\', written by Marx and Engels in 1867. Much of \'Das Kapital\' deals with Marx concept of the \"surplus value\" of labor and its consequences for Capitalism. In Marx mind the large army of unemployed was blamed on the system of Capitalism. He explains in his book that the introduction of machines is profitable for the individual entrepreneur, to whom they give an advantage over his competitors. But as outlay for machinery grows in relation to outlay of wages, profit declines in relation to the total capital outlay. The capitalist will recieve less and less per hundred dollars of capital and can only try to postpone his bankruptcy by pressure upon the workers. Finally the \"capitalist class becomes unfit to rule, because it is incompetent to assure an existence to it\'s slave within his slavery\". Consequently, the system collapses and the working class inherits the power.
Marx spent most of his lifetime studying economic and social history in the British Museum in London to develop his theories. In the last years of his life, marked by illness and depression, his creativity declined, caused by the death of his wife and his eldest daughter. Finally, he died in March 1883 and was buried in the Highgate Cemetery in London.
Afer his death Engels published the second and third edition of \'Das Kapital\'. Today his studies on economics and sociology themes are still very influential in academic circles and often discussed by those who do not share his political oppinions.
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