At the age of 17, Karl Marx set off from Trier, a small and ancient city in western Prussia (although recently a part of France), where he was born 5 May 1818. He left for university studies first in Bonn and soon afterwards in Berlin. He went to study law but āfelt the urge to wrestle with philosophyā as he wrote to his father in 18371 (MECW 1, p. 11). He immersed himself in the work of Hegel , the great German philosopher who, at his death in 1831, had left an elaborate and complex system of ideas about concepts and change that dominated the philosophical and intellectual landscape of the timeāand continues to be important in the history of philosophy . Marx was focused on these ideas and their development, but he also immersed himself in all aspects of university life.
His activities included writing lyrical poetry, all of which he sent to his beloved the beautiful Jenny von Westphalen , whom he had left behind in Trier. Jenny waited years for Karlās return. Finally in 1843 they began their long but impoverished married life together, during which she dedicated herself to the goals she shared with Marx, committed to both his intellectual and his political life. In those early poems that he sent her, Marx reported to his father that the poems were āmarked by attacks on our times, diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling ā¦ everything built out of ā¦ complete opposition between what is and what ought to beā (MECW 1, p. 11). This was a harbinger for both Marx and Jenny .2 The point for both of them, from beginning to end, was to change the world,3 which they pursued with resoluteness and passion.
Throughout his life, Marx raged against the bourgeois capitalist corporate system, sometimes burying his head in books, research, and writing and sometimes virtually consuming himself in helping others, especially revolutionaries (including refugees from the Paris Commune in 1871), and playing a prominent role in associations, especially the International Working Menās Association (IWMA , based in London from 1864 to 1872).4 He had a deep antipathy throughout his life towards those who had virtually complete political and economic power and a distrust of those who promoted fantasy and utopian solutions. From the beginning and throughout his life, Marx fought against injustices and inequality which he considered were inherent in state power and corporate control. Those had to be overcome, but he knew he had to understand the world with all its corruption and robbery of the alienated, but upright, workers who produced for society.
In Marxās endeavour to understand the worldāwith the point of changing itāhe was fortunate in associating with another person, Frederick Engels (1820ā1895),5 who stood by him, supported him, and wrote and criticized with him, with intellectual vigour and literary adeptness. Even before Marx and Engels had met in Paris in 1844, Engels had moved to Manchester where he helped run the family business (based in Germany) and where he met his life partner Mary Burns, an Irish working-class radical who introduced him to the conditions of workers in England. Engels was an inquisitive observer of the times with a strong sympathy for the workers and a keen interest in understanding the system that oppressed them. The result was a stunning and influential work, The Condition of the Working-Class in England: From Personal Observations and Authentic Sources (MECW 4, pp. 297ā596; 1845) which made a strong impression on Marx.
Engelsā work was perceptive and well written showing the stark conditions in Manchester, but most importantly it described the radical times and revolutionary culture and revealed Engelsā communist ideas, even at a young age. Engels was at the forefront (probably with some influence on Marx) in supporting workersā unions and the growing movements of Chartism and socialism (MECW 4, pp. 501ā529, in section āLabour Movementsā). Marx and Engels were unique among socialists in their day in supporting trade unions. (See Draper 1978, pp. 81ā146, for convincing evidence, and Chap. 6 for further discussion.) Engels also described the literary sophistication of the workers who read editions of authors that āthe bourgeoisie owns only [in] castrated editions ā¦ cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of todayā (MECW 4, p. 528). Among the most noteworthy, according to Engels , was āShelley , the genius, the prophet, Shelleyā (MECW 4, p. 528)6 whose revolutionary credentials were also acknowledged by Marx. Marxās daughter Eleanor reported that her father, āwho understood the poets as well as he understood the philosophers and economists,ā said that people āgrieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.ā7
Some passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792ā1822) that were well known by the workers (but not the landlords and bosses with their expurgated versions) give a sense of what Engels knew about the working-class culture and what Marx and his family discovered when they moved to London in 1849 for the rest of Marxās and Jennyās lives, first in Soho and then near Hampstead Heath. Shelleyās poem āTo Libertyā begins:The workers also knew āThe Mask of Anarchyā which ends:
O let not Liberty
Silently perish;
May the groan and the sigh
Yet the flame cherish
Till the voice to Natureās bursting heart given,
Ascending loud and high,
A worldās indignant cry,
And startling on his throne
The tyrant grim and lone,
Shall beat the deaf vault of Heaven. (Shelley 2014, p. 15)
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable numberā
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on youā
Ye are manyāthey are few. (Shelley 2014, p. 368)
It was a working-class culture that Marx valued as a connoisseur of literature and whose goal was to change the world. He recognized Shelley as a revolutionary who wrote for the workers. But it was not just the culture that Engels introduced to Marx. Engels also knew the theoretical importance of the economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who needed to be understood and criticized. Engels had already written some of the preliminaries in his āOutlines of a Critique of Political Economyā in 1843 (MECW 3, pp. 418ā443). This set Marx, who was already concerned about the economy and its social effects, on his life-long project of understanding the structure and workings of what was coming to be known as capitalism. From 1845, Marx and Engels became close collaborators with Engels as a supporter, contributor, and eventually executor.
After Marx was expelled from France, he moved to Brussels with his family and was joined by Engels where they wrote some of the most influential joint writings in their career. The German Ideology (1846) was a massive work on German philosophy and the beginning of their ideas about the materialist conception of history. It was virtually unknown, but now widely read and quoted, after it finally saw the light of day in the first English version in 1964! They left the work incomplete and āabandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice ā¦ since we had achieved our main purposeāself-clarificationā as Marx reported years later (MECW 29, p. 264).8
Soon afterwards, still in Brussels, they were drawn into their politically most influential work by accepting the decision of the Communist League that they write The Communist Manifesto . The final document, which had as a basis Engelsā Principles of Communism (1847), was completed by Marx, accepted by the League, and then published in 1848. Since then it has been translated and published throughout the world and is the focus of anyone who has wanted a primer to Marxism or who wants to reignite their passion for change.9 Writing the preface in 1888 for the English edition after Marxās death, Engels said that he was ābound to state that the fundamental proposition [the] nucleus, belongs to Marxā (MECW 26, p. 517). That proposition Engels continued is:
that in every historical epoch , the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up [and explains that] the whole history of mankind ā¦ has been a history of class struggles.[A] stage has been reached [in that history] where the exploited...