ABSTRACT
Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier in the Prussian Rhineland, of Jewish parents, recently converted to Protestantism; educated at the Trier High School and the universities of Bonn and Berlin; received his doctorate from Jena in 1841. Failing to secure a university post, became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung and shortly after the suppression of this newspaper married Jenny von Westphalen, leaving Germany for Paris. There developed his theory of historical materialism and began his life-long collaboration with Engels. Expelled from France, lived in Brussels between 1845 and 1848, where he wrote The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy and The Communist Manifesto, his best-known work written for the Communist League. After its publication in 1848, returned to Germany to edit the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and play an active part in the unsuccessful revolution of that year; in the following year arrived in England as a refugee and lived in London for the rest of his life. After 1848 wrote The Class Struggle in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, his most brilliant contributions to contemporary history. Constantly short of money, despite the help of Engels and paid journalistic work for the New York Daily Tribune, amassed material for his great work on economics; only the first volume of Capital appeared in his lifetime, in 1867. Between 1864 and 1872 played a leading role in the First International but poor health increasingly limited his intellectual and political activities. Marx died in 1883 and was buried in Highgate cemetery.
