Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The text is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for wide consumption the historical materialist idea that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published amid the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's lifelong friend and closest collaborator, serving as a leading authority on Marxism.
The Rheinische Zeitung was a 19th-century German newspaper, edited most famously by Karl Marx. The paper was launched in January 1842 and terminated by Prussian state censorship in March 1843. The paper was eventually succeeded by a daily newspaper launched by Karl Marx on behalf of the Communist League in June 1848, called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Franz Erdmann Mehring was a German communist historian, literary and art critic, philosopher, and revolutionary socialist politician who was a senior member of the Spartacus League during the German Revolution of 1918–1919.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie was a German daily newspaper, published by Karl Marx in Cologne between 1 June 1848 and 19 May 1849. It is recognised by historians as one of the most important dailies of the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany. The paper was regarded by its editors and readers as the successor of an earlier Cologne newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, also edited for a time by Karl Marx, which had been suppressed by state censorship over five years earlier.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a short book first published in 1880 by German-born socialist Friedrich Engels. The work was primarily extracted from a longer polemic work published in 1878, Anti-Dühring. It first appeared in the French language.
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany is a book by Friedrich Engels, with contributions by Karl Marx. Originally a series of articles in the New York Daily Tribune published from 1851 to 1852 under Marx's byline, the material was first published in book form under the editorship of Eleanor Marx Aveling in 1896. It was not until 1913 that Engels' authorship was publicly known although some new editions continued to appear incorrectly listing Marx as the author as late as 1971.
"Wage Labour and Capital" was an 1847 lecture by the critic of political economy and philosopher Karl Marx, first published as articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in April 1849. It is widely considered the precursor to Marx’s influential treatise Das Kapital. It is commonly paired with Marx's 1865 lecture Value, Price and Profit. Previously, Marx had been studying political economy; evidence of this being his unpublished Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The Poverty of Philosophy in France in 1847.
For Marx is a 1965 book by the philosopher Louis Althusser, a leading theoretician of the French Communist Party (PCF), in which the author reinterprets the work of the philosopher Karl Marx, proposing an epistemological break between the young, Hegelian Marx, and the old Marx, the author of Das Kapital (1867–1883). The book, first published in France by François Maspero, established Althusser's reputation. The texts presented in For Marx are theoretical interventions in a definite conjuncture, particularly aiming at the definition of the lines to be pursued by the PCF after Stalin's years in the Soviet Union. Althusser's position is of theoretical antihumanism, and is against the teleology of history. Althusser defends that history is a process without subject and with an open end, but that has determinations that can be theorized by the science of history as constructed by Marx in his mature work, Das Kapital. Society is then conceptualized as a complex whole articulated in dominance by the economy where several social practices co-exist with a relative autonomy, introducing the concept overdetermination to characterize the levels of effectivity.
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment is a 1939 intellectual biography of the philosopher, social scientist, economist and revolutionary Karl Marx by the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin.
Karl Marx : His Life and Thought is a 1973 biography of Karl Marx by the political scientist David McLellan. The work was republished as Karl Marx: A Biography in 1995.
Marxist humanism is an international body of thought and political action rooted in a humanist interpretation of the works of Karl Marx. It is an investigation into "what human nature consists of and what sort of society would be most conducive to human thriving" from a critical perspective rooted in Marxist philosophy. Marxist humanists argue that Marx himself was concerned with investigating similar questions.
The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a break in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.
Moses (Moritz) Hess was a German-Jewish philosopher, early communist and Zionist thinker. His theories led to disagreements with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He is considered a pioneer of Labor Zionism.
Classical Marxism is the body of economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their works, as contrasted with orthodox Marxism, Marxism–Leninism, and autonomist Marxism which emerged after their deaths. The core concepts of classical Marxism include alienation, base and superstructure, class consciousness, class struggle, exploitation, historical materialism, ideology, revolution; and the forces, means, modes, and relations of production. Marx's political praxis, including his attempt to organize a professional revolutionary body in the First International, often served as an area of debate for subsequent theorists.
In Marxist theory, false consciousness is a term describing the ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation and inequality intrinsic to the social relations between classes. As such, it legitimizes and normalizes the existence of different social classes.
The Communist League was an international political party established on 1 June 1847 in London, England. The organisation was formed through the merger of the League of the Just, headed by Karl Schapper, and the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels, Belgium, in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the dominant personalities. The Communist League is regarded as the first Marxist political party and it was on behalf of this group that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto late in 1847. The Communist League was formally disbanded in November 1852, following the Cologne Communist Trial.
This page gives an overview of biographies of Karl Marx, the German born philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Born in Trier to a middle-class family, he studied Hegelian philosophy, and political economy, lived in many places, like Berlin, Paris, Brussels and London, and developed a fundamental, theoretical and practical critique on industrial capitalism.
Communism has been a part of French politics since the early 20th century at the latest. It has been described as "an enduring presence on the French political scene" for most of the 20th century.
