KARL MARX (1818-83)
Marx's career blended the retirement of the philosopher and scholar with the active life of the organizer and propagandist. In one role, he was a student of the dynamics of society; in the other, he was an interventionist who sought to hasten social change.
These diverse facets of the man and his activities were closely associated. It was through a process of detached intellectual inquiry that he first identified the causes he sought to promote and he carried over much of the manner of the scholar to his role in public affairs. For a political organizer his style was remarkably austere.Born to an upper middle-class Rhineland family that had forsaken Judaism in favour of the established church, his early years were largely conventional. He entered the university to study law, but changed his plans after the lively debates on Hegelian philosophy in Berlin in the 1830s captured his imagination. He identified himself with the Young Hegelians who sought to transform Hegelian orthodoxy into a radical social doctrine. With this cause in mind, Marx in his mid-twenties aspired to a university post as a philosopher. This dream soon died when the Prussian Minister of Education proscribed the Hegelian Left.
Obliged by the death of his father to find a means of supporting himself, he turned to journalism, writing for a newly-founded anti-government journal published in Cologne. He flourished in this enterprise, which afforded him an opportunity to agitate for political reform and to sharpen his skills in writing trenchant prose. Within a year, he had risen to the post of editor. This episode was short-lived. In 1843, the government censor banned the publication and Marx set off for Paris to assist in the editing of another journal.
During the next two years, the framework of ideas with which he worked began to take clear shape.
While in Paris, he devoured the major literature of economic theory. Life there also brought him into contact with most of the leading members of the Continental Left and itwas then that his partnership with Friedrich Engels began. This phase ended in 1845 when the French government, prompted by official Prussian protests against the contents of the publication with which he had been associated, expelled him.
In 1849 - after a period of hectic political activity that included collaboration with Engels in the drafting of the Communist Manifesto - he went into exile in London where he was to spend the remainder of his days. During these years, he passed the bulk of the daylight hours in the reading rooms of the British Museum. The materials he gathered were woven into his major contribution to economic theory - the three volumes of Das Kapital.
Few serious students of social problems can have worked under hardships comparable to those Marx endured. The small sums he could eke out from free-lance journalism (plus the charity of the devoted Engels) were insufficient to keep creditors from the door. Even when living in the most miserable housing conditions - conditions that a Prussian spy assigned to check on his activities reported on with horror - Marx was unable to afford adequate nutritional and medical attention for his family. When he wrote of poverty, it was not an exercise of the imagination.
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