Karl Marx

Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet ''The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels), and his three-volume (1867–1894), a critique of classical political economy which employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his life's work. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence.

Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, and received a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as ''The German Ideology'' (written 1846) and the ''Grundrisse'' (written 1857–1858). While in Paris, Marx wrote his ''Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844'' and met Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 they wrote ''The Communist Manifesto'', which expresses Marx's ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote ''The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte'' (1852) and . From 1864, Marx was involved in the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he fought the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin. In his ''Critique of the Gotha Programme'' (1875), Marx wrote on revolution, the state and the transition to communism. He died stateless in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Marx's critiques of history, society and political economy hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power for wages. Employing his historical materialist approach, Marx predicted that capitalism produced internal tensions like previous socioeconomic systems and that these tensions would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as the socialist mode of production. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers. Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.

Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures of the modern era, and his work has been both lauded and criticised. Marxism has exerted major influence on socialist thought and political movements, with Marxist schools of thought such as Marxism–Leninism and its offshoots becoming the guiding ideologies of revolutions that took power in many countries during the 20th century, forming communist states. Marx's work in economics has had a strong influence on modern heterodox theories of labour and capital, and he is often cited as one of the principal architects of modern sociology. Provided by Wikipedia