Karl Marx

Karl Marx has been without doubt one of the most influential socialist thinkers till date. Although he was largely ignored by scholars, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance.

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Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany. He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family and lived in a three room flat in London. His father had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he would not lose his job as a lawyer. He had six children, of these only three survived.

After receiving his degree, Marx began writing for the liberal democratic newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, and he became the paper’s editor in 1842. The Prussian government banned the paper as too radical the following year. With his new wife, Jenny von Westphalen, Marx moved to Paris in 1843. There Marx met fellow German émigré Friedrich Engels, who would become his lifelong collaborator and friend. In 1845, Engels and Marx published a criticism of Bauer’s Young Hegelian philosophy entitled “The Holy Father.”

The jurists’ real mission in life was to overthrow capitalist society and state institutions and to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat