Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in 1818 at Trier in the Prussian Rhineland, the son of a lawyer. He studied law and philosophy at Bonn and Berlin, joined the Young Hegelians, and took his doctorate with a dissertation on the difference between the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. At twenty-four he became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, which the Prussian government soon suppressed. He then lived in exile in Paris and Brussels, and in Paris began his lifelong friendship with Engels. After the failure of the revolutions of 1848 he settled in London, where he spent the more than thirty years of his later life in great poverty, losing several children and depending on Engels's support. Day after day he read and wrote in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and there produced the first volume of Capital. He helped found the First International. At his grave Engels said: 'His name and his work will endure through the ages.'