Karl Marx
| Karl Marx | |
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Marx in 1875
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| Born |
5 May 1818 Trier, Kingdom of Prussia, German Confederation (present-day Trier, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany) |
| Died | 14 March 1883 (aged 64) London |
| Residence | Germany, France, Belgium, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | Germany, stateless |
| Education | Gymnasium zu Trier |
| Alma mater | Universities of Bonn, Berlin and Jena (PhD, 1841) |
| Era | 19th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy, German philosophy |
| School | Marxism |
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Main interests
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Politics, economics, philosophy, sociology, labour, history, class struggle, natural sciences |
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Notable ideas
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Surplus value, contributions to the labour theory of value, class struggle, alienation and exploitation of the worker, materialist conception of history |
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Influenced
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| Signature | |
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Karl Marx (/mɑːrks/;German: [ˈkaɐ̯l ˈmaɐ̯ks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German-born scientist, philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Born in Trier to a middle-class family, he later studied political economy and Hegelian philosophy. As an adult, Marx became stateless and spent much of his life in London, England, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and published various works, the most well-known being the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. His work has since influenced subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history.
Marx's theories about society, economics and politics—collectively understood as Marxism—hold that human societies develop through class struggle; in capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour for wages. Through his theories of alienation, value, commodity fetishism, and surplus value, Marx argued that capitalism facilitated social relations and ideology through commodification, inequality, and the exploitation of labour. Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx propounded the theory of base and superstructure, asserting that the cultural and political conditions of society, as well as its notions of human nature, are largely determined by obscured economic foundations. These economic critiques were set out in influential works such as the three volumes, published between 1867 and 1894, that comprise Das Kapital.
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