Karl Marx (1818–83,) fully Karl Heinrich Marx, was the German political philosopher and economist who founded modern communism. He was one of the most significant political theorists of modern times.
Born in Trier, Prussia (now Germany,) Marx studied law at the University of Bonn and history and philosophy at the University of Berlin. He was a gifted student who made friends with many of the leading German-speaking philosophers of the time. By his late 20s, he was expressing himself as a communist and frequently engaged in heated debates with fellow scholars. Marx traveled around France, Belgium, and Germany during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and eventually settled in London starting 1849.
Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels became his closest intellectual collaborator and the source of much of the money with which Marx lived. They teamed up to write the epoch-making Communist Manifesto (1848) and elaborated their political principles in the three-volume Das Kapital. They published the first volume in 1867; Engels completed and published the remainder after Marx’s death (1885, 1894.)
The intellectual father of twentieth-century socialism, Marx’s ideas of indifference for the individual, denial of human nature, and rejection of the basic economics principles inspired some of the world’s murderous regimes—those of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro. In Marx’s name, millions of people were divested of their freedom, subjected to imprisonment and torture, sent to labor camps, or executed by firing squads.
Marx’s influence persists—his diagnosis of many of capitalism’s most significant flaws is still prescient. Many affluent countries have progressive income taxes, universal public education, and other principles that Marx espoused in Communist Manifesto. He continues to motivate liberals who emphasize the deprivation of capitalism as a class struggle in which the ruling-class minority takes advantage of the working-class majority while sharing little of the proceeds of wealth.
Marx is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Only 11 people came to his funeral. His monument now gets daily visitors, including followers of Marxist theory, who have made the tomb a place of pilgrimage. The pedestal is inscribed with quotes from Marx’s works—the front features the final words of Communist Manifesto, “Workers of all lands unite.”
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Karl Marx
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism, Communism
Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list—the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Taxes, Taxation
The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.
—Karl Marx
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism, Communism
Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
—Karl Marx
The product of mental labor—science—always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Science
From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Judaism, Jews, Religion
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Absence
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Value, Values
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Work
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Science, Medicine
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
—Karl Marx
Topics: World
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Necessity
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Individuality
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politicians, Politics
The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politics
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Writers, Creativity, Art, Authors & Writing
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Capitalism
The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living.
—Karl Marx
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Wealth, Riches
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Experience, Happiness
From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism
Constant revolutionizing of production distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
—Karl Marx
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Pain
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
—Karl Marx
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Nature
It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
Follow your own path, no matter what people say.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Self-Discovery
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