Karl Marx

Trier

His birthplace in the Brückenstraße is a museum today.

💡 Did you know? Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, then Prussian: son of a Jewish lawyer who had converted to Protestantism.

The Communist Manifesto

On the eve of the 1848 revolutions (closing with): 'Workers of all countries, unite!'

💡 Did you know? „A spectre is haunting Europe“: so begins the „Manifesto“, published in 1848 amid a wave of revolutions.

Capital

Volume 1 appeared in 1867; volumes 2 and 3 were published by Engels from Marx's papers.

💡 Did you know? „Capital“ is a meticulous analysis of capitalism: Marx completed only the first volume in his lifetime; Engels published the rest.

history of class struggles

Freeman and slave, lord and serf, bourgeois and proletarian: the famous opening section.

💡 Did you know? „The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles“: the famous opening line of the Manifesto.

surplus value

Labour creates more value than the wage repays: the difference stays with the capitalist.

💡 Did you know? With „surplus value“ (the worker's unpaid extra labour) Marx explains how profit arises under capitalism.

material conditions

'Being determines consciousness': Marx stood Hegel's dialectic 'from its head onto its feet'.

💡 Did you know? History is driven not by ideas but by economic conditions, with this Marx set Hegel „back on his feet“.

opium of the people

A consolation soothing away earthly misery: the critique of religion, he held, is the premise of all critique.

💡 Did you know? Religion, he said, is „the opium of the people“: a comfort that makes real misery bearable while veiling it.

the point is to change the world

The theses of 1845: the sentence is also carved on Marx's gravestone in London.

💡 Did you know? „The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it“: his famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach.

Friedrich Engels

The factory owner's son financed the Marx family and completed 'Capital' from the papers left behind.

💡 Did you know? The manufacturer's son Friedrich Engels funded Marx for decades, without him Marx could hardly have finished his work.

London

For decades he researched in the reading room of the British Museum: often in bitter poverty.

💡 Did you know? Stateless and impoverished, Marx spent his last three decades in London exile, much of it in the British Museum reading room.

Rheinische Zeitung

The beginning of his exile: during the 1848 to 1849 revolution he edited the 'Neue Rheinische Zeitung'.

💡 Did you know? As a young editor of the „Rheinische Zeitung“, Marx so clashed with Prussian censorship that the paper was banned in 1843.

Highgate

In 1883 barely a dozen people stood at the grave; Engels nonetheless prophesied world fame: rightly, for good and for ill.

💡 Did you know? His grave in London's Highgate Cemetery, topped by a huge bronze bust, is still a place of pilgrimage.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a German philosopher and economist whose analysis of capitalism and call to class struggle shaped 20th-century world history.

💡 Did you know? In his lifetime he remained largely unknown: only after his death were governments founded in the name of his ideas.