Life and Influence of Karl Marx

Karl Marx has been said to be the most influential political philosopher of the 19th century. His ideas are widespread with about a third of the world practicing a style of government he helped create.

In Prussia on the fifth of May 1818, Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a middle-class Russian family. From a very young age, Karl was a thinker. He was also a rebel. He believed in what he said and would stick by it no matter what. Marx believed that the cause for most of the conflicts in Europe was an imbalance of economy and government. “The means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production,” he said. For example, we invent new devices and technology before we create laws to regulate the use of that technology.

Jumping ahead, in 1843, Marx marries Jenny Von West Phalen who later gives birth to Marx’s 5 children.

That year, Marx traveled to Paris and studied there. During his first few months there, he embraced the ideas of communism and became more politically active. While in France he met Friedrich Engels. Marx lived in Paris about a year when he was forced to leave in 1844. He, his family, and Engels moved to Brussels. While there, Marx studied history and economy. He and Engels joined the Communist League and both became important theoreticians for the group. In 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write The Communist Manifesto. The manifesto called for “the workers of the world to unite and break free of the capitalism that oppressed them.” Some small revolutions broke out in Europe, but Marx’s ideas were suppressed. In the early 1850’s, Marx and his family were living in a small apartment and Marx’s only job was to write occasional short columns as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. By the late 1850’s, Marx has written a huge, 800-page manuscript on economy and labor. For the next 10 years, Marx’s life was fairly uneventful, but around 1873 he became ill. Marx traveled around Europe trying to find a way to cure his sickness, but on March 14, 1883, Marx died of lung abscess.

Marx’s work did not become well known and socially accepted until years after his death in Russia where three men used the ideas of communism and sparked a revolution that changed history.

The main principle of Marxism, also called communism, was that each person would work towards supporting the country and not just work for personal gain. Each person would be assigned a job and would work to make money for the government that in turn would support each person with food, land, clothes and services. Marx sums it up in one sentence: “From each man according to his ability, to each man according to his need.” Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, followed by the political party called “The Bolsheviks” revolted against the Russian government in November of 1917. After Lenin died in 1924, there was a short power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, but Stalin prevailed and Trotsky was exiled to Mexico.

Stalin twisted Marxism into the faulty system of government it is viewed as today. The biggest fault in Marxism is that it relies on trust and doesn’t take human nature into perspective. People will always find a way to take advantage of the government and Stalin did just that. In a perfect society, Marxism might’ve worked, but unfortunately, we can only dream of a utopia. Marx’s ideas are very influential, and still continue today, but they are not the final solution for political problems as he had hoped they would be.