Marx

Marx, Karl (1818-83), the Socialist writer and agitator, was born at Trier, where his father held a post in the Civil Service. He studied law and philosophy at Bonn and Berlin, and became an adherent of the young Hegelian school. In 1842 he hegan to edit the Rhenish Gazette, a revolutionary organ, after the suppression of which he went to Paris, where he assisted to conduct the Beutsche Franzosische Jahrbiicher. In that organ he published several important articles, one of which was on the Hegelian philosophy of law. In 1844 Guizot expelled him from France at the request of the Prussian Government. He now settled at Brussels, where he continued to attack the government of his native province and published his reply to Proudhon's Philosophic de la Misire. Here also, in 1847, he published his Communist Manifesto, a declaration of the principles of International Socialism, which was soon circulated throughout Europe. Expelled from Brussels, Marx went to Paris in 1848 at the request of the Provisional Government, but left it for Cologne a few months later, and established with Engels and others the New Rhenish Gazette. The paper was twice unsuccessfully prosecuted, but in June, 1849, was suppressed. The rest of his life Marx spent (often in the utmost poverty) in London, where he wrote for the New York Tribune, and published various pamphlets and the Kritik der Politischen Economie in 1857, his first economical work. In 1864 the International Working Men's Association was founded, and Marx appointed to draw up its rules and deliver the first inaugural address, but in 1872 it died. Not long after this he retired from active life and devoted his time to the completion of his great work Bos Kajrital, the first volume of which had been published in 1867. When he died, at Hampstead, he left the second and third volumes in MS. His daughter, Mrs. Eleanor Marx Aveling, was a well-known English Socialist.