Karl Marx - read the author's books online for free

Karl Marx, Ph.D. (University of Jena, 1841) was a social scientist who was a key contributor to the development of Communist theory.

Marx was born in Trier, a city then in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. His father, born Jewish, converted to Protestantism shortly before Karl's birth in response to a prohibition newly introduced into the Rhineland by the Prussian Kingdom on Jews practicing law. Educated at the Universities of Bonn, Jena, and Berlin, Marx founded the Socialist newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. After being expelled from France at the urging of the Prussian government, which "banished" Marx in absentia, Marx studied economics in Brussels. He and Engels founded the Communist League in 1847 and published the Communist Manifesto. After the failed revolution of 1848 in Germany, in which Marx participated, he eventually wound up in London. Marx worked as foreign correspondent for several U.S. publications. His Das Kapital came out in three volumes (1867, 1885 and 1894). Marx organized the International and helped found the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Although Marx was not religious, Bertrand Russell later remarked, "His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" (Portraits from Memory, 1956). Marx once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist" (according to Engels in a letter to C. Schmidt; see Who's Who in Hell by Warren Allen Smith). D. 1883.