{\b Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)}.

{\b Date of Birth}.:    5 May 1818

{\b Date of Death}.: 14 March 1883

{\b Works}.

German economist, sociologist and 'historical-materialist' philosopher, 
founder of the eponymously named Marxism. The most important published works, 
as well as the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei or Communist Manifesto 
(1848) written with Engels, are the oft-republished Das Kapital (Capital) 
(1867) and The Poverty of Philosophy (1900) first published in French in 1847. 
However Marx's importance is in no way limited to the specifically political 
and economic spheres, just as the force of his political ideas is in no way 
rescinded by the political events of the late Twentieth Century. In sum, Marx 
must be construed, as is often suggested, as being, alongside Freud and 
Nietzsche, one of the three great founding figures of Twentieth Century 
thinking. His ideas are still at work today in the hands of such continental 
thinkers as Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to name just a 
few.

{\b General Comment}.

As a student Marx studied history and philosophy at the Universities of Bonn 
and Berlin. In particular he read the German Idealists, of which, for Marx, 
the most important would be Hegel. With his Idealistic dialectics of Spirit 
(Geist), Hegel provided the ultimately antagonistic basis for Marx's reworked 
and materially based dialectics, the very foundation stone of Marxism per se.

In 1841 Marx received a doctor's degree from the University of Jena and, in 
1842, became an editor at the Rheinische Zeitung newspaper in Cologne. Two 
years later he married Jenny von Westphalen and, following the suppression of 
his newspaper, went, with his new wife, to Paris where he became friendly with 
Engels and wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). After a further move to 
Brussels, there followed the majestic Manifesto in which Marx sounds a 
haunting warning, now all too easily forgotten, from the very first line: "A 
spectre is haunting Europe ...".

After the 1848 revolutions Marx was able to return to his native Germany and 
to revive his newspaper, but, just one year later, he was again expelled and 
left Germany for the last time to spend the rest of his life in England. After 
his demise, Marx's literary remains were edited by his friend, co-author and 
benefactor Engels.