Karl Marx

Karl Marx produced the most influential critique of capitalism ever written and spent most of his life in poverty. Born in Trier in the Prussian Rhineland in 1818 into a Jewish family that converted to Lutheranism so his father could keep practising law, he studied at Bonn and Berlin, where he joined the Young Hegelians, and took a doctorate on Greek atomism. Barred from academic work by his politics, he became a journalist, and the paper he edited was suppressed in 1843. He moved to Paris, met Friedrich Engels — whose observations of Manchester factory conditions and whose money sustained him for forty years — and was expelled to Brussels, then to London after 1849. The Communist Manifesto, written with Engels for a small group of exiles and published weeks before the revolutions of 1848, argued that all history is the history of class struggle. He spent decades in the British Museum reading room writing Das Kapital, the first volume of which appeared in 1867. Its argument is that profit arises from surplus value — the difference between what labour produces and what it is paid — that capital concentrates, that the rate of profit tends to fall, and that the system generates crises and eventually its own opponents. He lived on Engels's remittances and journalism for the New York Tribune. Three of his six children died young, and one of hunger-related illness; the family was repeatedly evicted. He helped found the International Working Men's Association in 1864 and destroyed it fighting Bakunin. He died in London in 1883 with the later volumes unfinished; Engels edited them.

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