Marx was educated from 1830 to 1835 at the high school in Trier. In October 1835 he matriculated at the University of Bonn. In October 1836, he enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and philosophy. Marx's crucial experience at Berlin was his introduction to Hegel's philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to the Young Hegelians. The Prussian government, fearful of the subversion latent in the Young Hegelians, soon undertook to drive them from the universities. By 1841 they had become leftist republicans. Marx's studies, meanwhile, were lagging far behind.  He submitted a doctoral dissertation to the university at Jena,  which was known to be lax in its academic requirements, and received his degree in April 1841. 

Marx's philosophical efforts were toward a combination of Hegel's dialectic--the idea that all things are in a continual process of change resulting from the conflicts between their contradictory aspects--with Feuerbach's materialism, which placed  material conditions above ideas.

On Oct. 15, 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. In 1843, he moved to Paris, the centre of socialist thought. There, Marx first became a revolutionary and a communist and began to associate with leftist societies of French and German workingmen. Under the pressure from the Prussian government, Marx was expelled from France and went to Brussels where he renounced his Prussian nationality. He later moved to London where he died in 1883. He is buried in London at Highgate cemetery.

II. His thought. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. According to them, communism would occur as the inevitable outcome of a historical process. Human history has been a long, protracted struggle between an exploiting class, the capitalists in the present age, and an exploited class, the workers, or the Proletariat. This historical struggle enters its critical stage in the period of capitalism and its highest achievement, which is industrialization. The effect of industrialization is to heighten and intensify the internal contradictions in capitalism. 

In order to understand Marx's conceptualization of the class struggle, one has to situate his thought in his dialectic materialism. For him:

"the key to change is society was to be found in the way men produce their life in common. This productive activity was fundamental, and the ideas and concepts--political, philosophical, religious--with which men interpreted and organized this activity were secondary. To take a particular example, the rights of man as proclaimed in the French Revolution and the first constitution of the United States were not eternal truths about the nature of man that happened to be discovered at that particular time; they could only be fully understood if viewed in the context of demands by new commercial groups for the end of the feudal restrictions and for free competition in economic affairs. (McLellan, 123).

This has to be seen against the background of hegelian philosophy:

  Marx tried to put people's thought into reverse gear. First, philosophy has been merely airy contemplation; it is time that it engaged the real world. Secondly, Hegel and his followers in German philosophy have persuaded us that the world is governed by thought, that the process of history is gradual dialectical unfolding of the laws of Reason, and that material existence is the expression of an immaterial spiritual essence. People have been led to believe that their ideas, their cultural life, their legal systems, and their religions were the creations of human and divine reason, which should be regarded as the unquestioned guides to human life. Marx reverses this formulation and argues that all mental (ideological) systems are the products of real social and economic existence. The material interests of the dominant social class determine how people see human existence, individual and collective. Legal systems, for example, are not pure manifestations of human or divine reason, but ultimately reflect the interests of the dominant class in particular historical periods. 

"... the relations of exploitation and domination which govern the social and economic order of a particular phase of human history will in some sense 'determine' the whole cultural life of the society." (Roman Selden and Peter Widdowson, Contemporary Literary Theory (Lexington: The U of Kentucky Press, 1993), p. 70-71.

III. Major Work.  The Poverty of Philosophy (1847),  Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848; The Communist Manifesto);  The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, 1924); Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon (1852);  A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1904); and Das Kapital (1867).

IV. For group 7: cSarah Hormell, Wes Lakenan, Brett Creasy.

1. Who is Karl Marx?
2. What was the social climate that motivated his writings and ideology?
3. What type of order does his ideology focus on?