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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 May 5, 1818 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, and the city belonged to France, which changed after Napoleon's defeat and Prussian annexation of the region.[1] He was the third of the nine children of Hirschel and Henriette Marx, and belonged to the prosperous petty bourgeois of Trier. The family was well-to-do, cultured, but not revolutionary.
After graduating from a Gymnasium in Trier, Marx entered the university, first at Bonn and later in Berlin, where he read law, majoring in history and philosophy and concluded his university course in 1841, submitting a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Epicurus. At the time Marx was a Hegelian idealist in his views and belonged to the circle of “Left Hegelians”, along with Bruno Bauer and others.[2]