Karl Marx

Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a 19th century German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary who, alongside his friend and long-time collaborator Engels, discovered the laws of development of human societies based on the dialectical materialist method.

Marx is one of the most important thinkers of the communist movement, having written several books on capitalism and its intrinsic exploitation, he highlighted the contradictions in the capitalist mode of production, and helped develop socialist economic models. His essays such as "Capital" and "Manifesto of the Communist Party" are works that had international influence after their publication.

Life and work

Marx was born in the small town of Trier, in the south of Rhenish Prussia, in what is today Germany, on the borders with France. At the time, Trier had only 12 thousand residents, and from 1798 to 1814, the city belonged to France, which changed after Napoleon's defeat and Prussian annexation of the region.

He was the third of the nine children of Hirschel and Henriette Marx, and belonged to the prosperous petty bourgeois of Trier.

MARX, Karl Heinrich (1818-1883). One of the greatest geniuses of the 19th century, immortal founder of scientific communism, of the theory and practice of class struggle, and modern revolutionary of the international proletariat. To him the communist ideal owes its theory and its scientific program. Marx’s system rests on the principles of dialectical materialism. Through his masterly analyses of concrete problems, be it a question of discovering the internal laws of capitalism or of explaining periods and events determined by the history of humanity, Marx demonstrated the superiority of materialist dialectics as a theoretical method for research into the historical relations of the past, for knowledge of the true motor forces of social evolution in the present, as well as for the determination of tendencies towards development in the future. His brilliant criticism of bourgeois society was both destructive and constructive: destructive in that it proclaimed the death of the bourgeoisie, and constructive in that it announced the victory of the proletariat. His dialectics is at the same time a research method and a guideline for human action. His materialist dialectics extends not only to the knowledge of the laws of human history, but also to the knowledge of natural history. Whence his adherence to the revolution in natural science provoked by Charles Darwin’s doctrine of evolution. The method of thought and action which comprises Marxism is the proletariat’s most precious weapon in its struggle for emancipation and for the advent of a total humanism.

Let us cite Marx’s most important works in chronological order:

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1844);
The Holy Family (1844);
The German Ideology (with Friedrich Engels) (1845-1846);
The Poverty of Philosophy (1847);
The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) (1847);
Wage-Labor and Capital (1847);
Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 (1850);
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851-1852);
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859);
Herr Vogt (1860);
Value, Price and Profit (1865);
Capital, Volume One (1867);

Posthumously Published:

Capital, Volume Two (1893);
Capital, Volume Three (1894);
Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875);
Theories of Surplus Value (1863)

These last three are often considered to comprise Volume Four of Capital

Some additional works by Marx to be read and studied are Pre-Capitalist Formations, On Colonialism, The Civil War in the United States, Letters to Americans, and a single volume Selected Works. Also see the collection of articles on Marx by Lenin, The Teachings of Karl Marx.

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