Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German philosopher, economist and revolutionary, born in Trier to a Jewish family converted to Protestantism. Educated at Bonn and Berlin among the Young Hegelians, he turned to journalism, was expelled from Prussia, France and Belgium in turn, and with Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto on the eve of the revolutions of 1848. From 1849 he lived in London in poverty relieved by Engels, working in the British Museum on the analysis of capitalism published in 1867 as the first volume of Capital, and helping found the International Workingmen's Association. His theory of history as class struggle shaped the politics of the following century.