Karl Marx

Marx was born in Trier to a Jewish lawyer who had converted to Protestantism. He studied law and philosophy at Bonn and Berlin, joined the Young Hegelians, and in 1841 took his doctorate with a thesis on Epicurus. Barred from a university career by his radicalism, he edited the Rheinische Zeitung until it was suppressed, married the aristocratic Jenny von Westphalen in 1843 and moved to Paris, where he met Engels, began studying political economy and wrote the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 on alienated labour.

Expelled from France in 1845, he wrote The German Ideology with Engels in Brussels, setting out historical materialism: people must first eat, drink and shelter, and the mode of production determines social structure and ideology. On the eve of the 1848 revolutions the two wrote The Communist Manifesto for the Communist League: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle, and the bourgeoisie, which has created unprecedented productive forces, has also created the proletariat that will bury it. After the revolutions failed he was expelled from Germany and France and in 1849 went into exile in London, where he lived for the rest of his life.

The first London decade was one of extreme poverty; three children died, and he lived on Engels' support and articles for the New York Daily Tribune, working daily in the British Museum reading room. In 1864 he helped found the First International and fought bitterly with Bakunin's anarchists. In 1867 the first volume of Capital appeared, analysing the commodity, money, surplus value, the working day, machinery and accumulation, and concluding that capitalism's laws of accumulation must concentrate wealth and accumulate misery until 'the expropriators are expropriated'. Engels edited volumes two and three after his death.

The core of his philosophy is practice: through labour people transform nature and themselves, consciousness is the product of social being, and the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. Under capitalism the worker is alienated from the product, the process, the species-essence and other people. He never described the future society in detail, saying only that it would be 'an association of free individuals'. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery under the words 'the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it'. In the twentieth century a third of humanity lived under regimes bearing his name, and his thought also shaped sociology, history and critical theory.