Biography of Karl Marx | Free PDF Download -

EARLY LIFE

Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx (1777–1838) and Henriette Pressburg (1788–1863). He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussia”s Province of the Lower Rhine.
Little is known of Marx’s childhood. The third of nine children, he became the eldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819.
Young Marx was privately educated by his father until 1830, when he entered Trier High School.

EDUCATION

In October 1835 at the age of 17, Marx travelled to the University of Bonn wishing to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field.
When he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets’ Club, a group containing political radicals that were monitored by the police.
Additionally, Marx was involved in certain disputes some of which became serious.

EDUCATION

Spending summer and autumn 1836 in Trier, Marx became more serious about his studies and his life. He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, an educated baroness of the Prussian ruling class who had known Marx since childhood.
Seven years after their engagement, on 19 June 1843, they married in a Protestant church in Kreuznach.
In October 1836, Marx arrived in Berlin, matriculating in the university’s faculty of law and renting a room in the Mittelstrasse.

EDUCATION

Although studying law, he was fascinated by philosophy and looked for a way to combine the two, believing that “without philosophy nothing could be accomplished”.
Marx’s father died in May 1838, resulting in a diminished income for the family. Marx had been emotionally close to his father and treasured his memory after his death
By 1837, Marx was writing both fiction and non-fiction, having completed a short novel.
Marx soon abandoned fiction for other pursuits, including the study of both English and Italian, art history and the translation of Latin classics.

THE RISING

As Marx atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), but it never came to fruition.
Marx moved to Cologne in 1842, where he became a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung(Rhineland News), expressing his early views on socialism and his developing interest in economics.

THE RISING

In 1843, Marx became co-editor of a new, radical leftist Parisian newspaper, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher(German-French Annals) and thus Marx and his wife moved to Paris in October 1843.
Although intended to attract writers from both France and the German states, the Jahrbücher was dominated by the latter and the only non-German writer was the exiled Russian anarchist collectivist Mikhail Bakunin.
On 28 August 1844, Marx met the German socialist Friedrich Engels beginning a lifelong friendship.Soon, Marx and Engels were collaborating on a criticism of the philosophical ideas of Marx’s former friend, Bruno Bauer.

THE RISING

During the time that he lived at 38 Rue Vanneau in Paris (from October 1843 until January 1845),Marx engaged in an intensive study of political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill, etc.),
The study of political economy is a study that Marx would pursue for the rest of his life and would result in his major economic work—the three-volume series called Capital.
An outline of “Marxism” had definitely formed in the mind of Karl Marx by late 1844.

THE RISING

In 1845, after receiving a request from the Prussian king, the French government shut down Vorwärts!, with the interior minister, François Guizot, expelling Marx from France.At this point, Marx moved from Paris to Brussels, where Marx hoped to once again continue his study of capitalism and political economy.
Unable either to stay in France or to move to Germany, Marx decided to emigrate to Brussels in Belgium in February 1845. However, to stay in Belgium he had to pledge not to publish anything on the subject of contemporary politics.

THE RISING

In Brussels, Marx associated with other exiled socialists from across Europe. In April 1845, Engels moved from Barmen in Germany to Brussels to join Marx and the growing cadre of members of the League of the Just now seeking home in Brussels.
After completing German Ideology, Marx turned to a work that was intended to clarify his own position regarding “the theory and tactics” of a truly “revolutionary proletarian movement” operating from the standpoint of a truly “scientific materialist” philosophy.

THE RISING

This work was intended to draw a distinction between the utopian socialists and Marx’s own scientific socialist philosophy.
This was the intent of the new book that Marx was planning, but to get the manuscript past the government censors he called the book The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) .
These books laid the foundation for Marx and Engels’s most famous work, a political pamphlet that has since come to be commonly known as The Communist Manifesto.

THE RISING

The Communist Manifesto laid out the beliefs of the new Communist League. No longer a secret society, the Communist League wanted to make aims and intentions clear to the general public rather than hiding its beliefs as the League of the Just had been doing.
It goes on to examine the antagonisms that Marx claimed were arising in the clashes of interest between the bourgeoisie (the wealthy capitalist class) and the proletariat (the industrial working class).
Later that year, Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions and often violent upheavals that became known as the Revolutions of 1848.

KARL MARX PART 2

COMMUNIST LEAGUE

Marx moved to London in early June 1849 and would remain based in the city for the rest of his life.
The headquarters of the Communist League also moved to London.Marx maintained that this would spell doom for the Communist League itself, arguing that changes in society are not achieved overnight through the efforts and will power of a handful of men.
They are instead brought about through a scientific analysis of economic conditions of society and by moving toward revolution through different stages of social development.

JOURNALISM

In the early period in London, Marx committed himself almost exclusively to revolutionary activities, such that his family endured extreme poverty.
His main source of income was Engels, whose own source was his wealthy industrialist father.In London, without finances to run a newspaper themselves, he and Engels turned to international journalism.
Marx’s principal earnings came from his work as European correspondent, from 1852 to 1862, for the New-York Daily Tribune,and from also producing articles for more “bourgeois” newspapers.

JOURNALISM

Marx continued to write articles for the New York Daily Tribune as long as he was sure that the Tribune’s editorial policy was still progressive
In 1864, Marx became involved in the International Workingmen’s Association (also known as the First International).
The successful sales of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy stimulated Marx in the early 1860s to finish work on the three large volumes that would compose his major life’s work – Das Kapital and the Theories of Surplus Value.

DAS KAPITAL

Theories of Surplus Value is often referred to as the fourth volume of Das Kapital and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought.
In 1867, the first volume of Das Kapital was published, a work which analysed the capitalist process of production.
Here Marx elaborated his labour theory of value. In this first volume of Capital, Marx outlined his conception of surplus value and exploitation.
Demand for a Russian language edition of Capital soon led to the printing of 3,000 copies of the book in the Russian language, which was published on 27 March 1872.

DEATH

Following the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last 15 months of his life.
It eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on 14 March 1883 (age 64), dying a stateless person.
Family and friends in London buried his body in Highgate Cemetery (East), London, on 17 March 1883 in an area reserved for agnostics and atheists (George Eliot’s grave is nearby). There were between nine and eleven mourners at his funeral

DIALECTIC MATERIALISM

Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of science and nature developed in Europe and based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
In contrast to the Hegelian dialectic, which emphasized the idealist observation that human experience is dependent on the mind’s perceptions, Marxist dialectics emphasizes the importance of real world conditions, in terms of class, labor, and socioeconomic interactions..