Karl Marx

Philosopher

Karl Marx was born on May 5th, 1818. Marx, a German Philosopher, wrote what is known today as “The Communist manifesto”, the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. On October 15, 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. As such, he was obliged to write editorials on a variety of social and economic issues, ranging from the housing of the Berlin poor and the theft by peasants of wood from the forests to the new phenomenon of communism. Since he then took for granted the existence of absolute moral standards and universal principles of ethics, he condemned censorship as a moral evil that entailed spying into people’s minds and hearts and assigned to weak and malevolent mortals powers that presupposed an omniscient mind. He believed that censorship could have only evil consequences. During his Brussels years, Marx developed his views and, through confrontations with the chief leaders of the working-class movement, established his intellectual standing. In 1846 he publicly excoriated the German leader Wilhelm Weitling for his moralistic appeals (McLellan).

            Karl Marx was one of the first social scientists to focus mainly on social class. His main focus on social class was that one's social class dictated one's social life. Basically, Marx meant that if one is in the upper class, life was one of leisure and abundance, while those in the lower class lived lives of hardship and poverty. According to Marx, there was one social element that would determine where one fit in the social class hierarchy: that of who controls the means of production, meaning who owned the resources necessary to produce what people needed to survive.

The wealthy would be the individuals who owned the land and factories. The wealthy would then control all elements of society - including the livelihoods of the lower, working class. The lower, working class would work for hourly wages on the land or in the factories.

During the next and last decade of his life, Marx’s creative energies declined. He was beset by what he called “chronic mental depression,” and his life turned inward toward his family. During his last years Marx spent much time at health resorts and even traveled to Algiers. He was broken by the death of his wife on December 2, 1881, and of his eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet, on January 11, 1883. He died in London, evidently of a lung abscess, in the following year (McLellan). -TC