Karl Marx

This materialist philosophy found its most urgent expression in 1848, a year when revolutions swept across the European continent. Commissioned by the Communist League, Marx and Engels drafted The Communist Manifesto. It was a pamphlet of astonishing rhetorical power, opening with the declaration that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." For Marx, the rise of industrial capitalism had simplified this ancient struggle, polarizing society into two hostile camps: the bourgeoisie, who owned the factories, land, and machinery (the means of production), and the proletariat, the working class who owned nothing but their own labor power, which they were forced to sell for wages. Marx did not merely moralize against capitalism; he analyzed it as a dynamic, historically necessary system that had unleashed productive forces of unprecedented scale, yet one that was fatally unstable. He argued that capitalism contained internal contradictions—chief among them the exploitation of the worker and a built-in tendency toward economic crises—that would inevitably lead to its self-destruction. The proletariat, developing a collective class consciousness, would rise up, seize political power, and usher in a classless, communist society characterized by the free association of producers.

The revolutions of 1848 were crushed, and Marx was hounded across borders, expelled from Belgium and Germany in rapid succession. In 1849, he crossed the English Channel to London, a city then serving as the crowded, foggy capital of the global capitalist empire. He would spend the rest of his life there, stateless and often in desperate poverty. Settling in cramped quarters, Marx relied heavily on the financial generosity of Engels and loans from his mother’s wealthy Dutch relatives, the Philips family, who would later found the electronics empire. Amidst personal tragedy—including the deaths of several of his children in the squalor of their London lodgings—Marx spent his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum, buried under mountains of blue books, government reports, and works of classical political economy.

The fruit of this grueling, decades-long labor was Das Kapital, the first volume of which was published in 1867. In this monumental work, Marx sought to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society. He dissected the commodity, analyzed the nature of money, and formulated his theory of surplus value—the idea that the profit of the capitalist is derived from the unpaid labor of the worker. Even as he wrote, Marx remained an active revolutionary. In 1864, he helped found the International Workingmen’s Association, also known as the First International, where he fought a fierce, years-long battle for intellectual dominance against the anarchist factions led by Mikhail Bakunin. For Marx, the emancipation of the working class required organized political action and the conquest of the state, a view he defended against both anarchist critics and moderate socialists, most notably in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme.

When Karl Marx died in London on March 14, 1883, he was a stateless exile, buried in a modest grave in Highgate Cemetery. Only a handful of mourners attended. Yet the ideas he synthesized in his lifetime would go on to shake the twentieth century. His name became the banner for global revolutions, inspiring mass movements, anti-colonial uprisings, and the formation of communist states that at one point governed a third of the world’s population. Beyond the political regimes that claimed his legacy, Marx’s analytical framework profoundly shaped the modern intellectual landscape, establishing him as one of the principal architects of modern sociology and a foundational figure in heterodox economic thought. He left behind a world forever altered by his insistence that philosophers had hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, he believed, was to change it.