Marx

The Marks Left by Marx: A Brief History

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 , in the city of Trier in Rheinish Prussia. His family was Jewish, but converted to Protestanism in 1824. After graduating from High School in Trier, Marx entered university, first at Bonn and later in Berlin, where he studied law, majoring in history and philosophy. He graduated in 1841, submitting a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Epicurus. At the time Marx was a Hegelian idealist in his views. In Berlin, he belonged to the circle of "Left Hegelians", who sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusions from Hegel's philosophy.

In the beginning of 1842, some radical bourgeois in Rhineland, Cologne, who were in touch with the Left Hegelians, founded a paper in opposition to the Prussian government, called the Rheinische Zeitung. Marx and Bruno Bauer were invited to be the chief contributors, and in October 1842 Marx became editor-in-chief and moved from Bonn to Cologne. The newspaper's revolutionary, democratic trend became more and more pronounced under Marx's editorship, and the government first imposed double and triple censorship on the paper, then, on January 1, 1843, suppressed it. Marx was forced to resign the editorship before that date, but his resignation did not save the paper, which suspended publication in March of 1843.

In 1843, Marx married, at Kreuznach, a childhood friend he had become engaged to while he was still a student. His wife came from a bourgeois family of the Prussian nobility, her elder brother being Prussia's Minister of the Interior during 1850 to 1858, an extremely reactionary period

During Autumn of 1843, Marx went to Paris in order to publish a radical journal abroad, together with Arnold Ruge. Only one issue of this journal, Deutsch-FranzÐ"¶sische JahrbÐ"јcher, appeared. Publication was discontinued due to the difficulty of secretly distributing it in Germany, and to a disagreement with Ruge. Marx's articles in this journal showed that he was already a revolutionary who advocated "merciless criticism of everything existing", and in particular the "criticism by weapon", and appealed to the masses and to the lower class, the proletariat.

Frederick Engels traveled to Paris in September 1844, and from that time on became Marx's closest friend. Shortly after meeting, Marx and Engels worked together to produce the first mature work of Marxism Ð'-- The German Ideology. In this work, largely produced in response to Feuerbach's materialism, Marx and Engels set down the foundations of Marxism with the materialistic conception of history, and broke from Left Hegelian idealism with a critique against Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;" Marx wrote in an outline for the beginning

of the book, " the point is to change it."

Marx and Engels took an active part in the then seething life of the revolutionary groups in Paris. Marx ripped apart Proudhon's Doctrine, which was of particular importance at the time, in Poverty of Philosophy. At the insistent request of the Prussian government, Marx was banished from Paris in 1845, considered by both governments a dangerous revolutionary. Marx then moved to Brussels.

In the spring of 1847 Marx and Engels joined a secret propaganda society called the Communist League. Marx and Engels took a prominent part in the League's Second Congress, at whose request they drew up the Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. With outstanding clarity, the work outlined a new world conception based on materialism. This document analyzed the realm of social life; the theory of the class struggle; the tasks of the Communists; and the revolutionary role of the lower