Karl Marx's thought radically changed the political history of humanity. Inspired by his ideas, half of the world's population embarked on the socialist revolution, with the intention of collectivizing wealth and distributing social justice.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Trier, in the Rhineland, then province of Prussia, on May 5, 1818. First of the boys among nine children of a German-Jewish family, he was baptized in a church Protestant, of which his father, a successful lawyer, had become a member, presumably to ensure social respectability. After studying in his hometown, in 1835 Marx entered the University of Bonn, where he participated in the student political struggle.
At the University of Berlin, to which he transferred in 1836, he began to study Hegel's philosophy and joined the group of young Hegelians. He became a member of a society formed around theology professor Bruno Bauer, who considered the Gospels to be fantastic narratives brought about by psychological needs.
With a political position that was increasingly identified with the republican left, Marx in 1841 presented his thesis of doctorate, in which he analyzed, from the Hegelian perspective, the differences between the philosophical systems of Democritus and of Epicurus. That same year he conceived the idea of a system that would combine the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach with the idealism of Hegel. He went on to collaborate with the Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, which he took over in 1842. The following year, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen and, shortly thereafter, his publication was closed.
The couple moved to Paris, where Marx came into contact with the socialists. In 1845, expelled from France by the government, he settled in Brussels and began his lasting friendship and collaboration with Friedrich Engels. Die heilige Familie (1845; The Holy Family) and Die deutsche Ideologie (1845-1846, published in 1926; German ideology) were the first works they wrote with four hands. At this time, Marx worked on several philosophical treatises against the ideas of Bruno Bauer and the utopian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and in 1848 he wrote, with Engels, the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Communist Manifesto), summary of historical materialism, in which the famous appeal to revolution appeared for the first time with the words "Proletarians of all countries, unite!"
After participating in the revolutionary movement of 1848 in Germany, Marx definitely returned to London, where for the rest of his life he relied on Engels' generous financial help to maintain the family.
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In 1852 he wrote Der 18 Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (The 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), in which he analyzed Napoleon III's coup d'etat from the point of view of historical materialism. Seven years later, he published Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), his first treatise on theory. and in 1867 the first volume of Das Kapital (Capital), a monumental analysis of the capitalist socioeconomic system, his most important work. important.
Marx returned to political activity in 1864, when he participated in the founding of the International Workers' Association. As leader and main inspirer of this First International, his presence was reaffirmed in 1871, on the occasion of the second Paris Commune, revolutionary movement in which the association actively participated and in which more than twenty thousand perished rebels.
The divergences of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, from 1872, brought about the downfall of the International. Marx still participated in 1875 in the founding of the German Social Democratic Party and then withdrew from political activity to complete Das Kapital. Despite having gathered a lot of documentation to continue the book, the second and third volumes were only edited by Engels, in 1885 and 1894. Other texts were published by Karl Kautsky, as a fourth volume, between 1904 and 1910. Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883, in London.
Source: Biographies - Academic Unit of Civil Engineering / UFCG