How Karl Marx went from student to revolutionary

Philosopher. Historian. Revolutionary. Who was Karl Marx? Born May 5, 1818, in the Rhine province of Prussia, Karl Heinrich Marx was the oldest surviving boy of nine children. At the high school and college Marx attended, political action was par for the course. But it wasn’t until he entered the University of Berlin in 1836 that Marx began truly engaging in political criticism. There he joined the Young Hegelians, a radical group interested in using Hegel’s philosophy to reform the ruling class. Having received a doctoral degree in 1841 from the Friedrich-Schiller University at Jena, Marx moved to Paris in 1843, and there he came to identify as a revolutionary and a communist. It was about this time that he befriended Friedrich Engels, a German philosopher who would become his lifelong collaborator. Together, Marx and Engels wrote and published The Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet intended to serve as the platform of the Communist League. Over the following decades, this pamphlet established Marx and Engels as founding voices of the international communist movement. Marx spent the rest of his career as a writer, theorist, philosopher, and speaker. In 1867 he published the first volume of Das Kapital, a critical text that some consider his most important work. Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883, at age 63. The second and third volumes of Das Kapital, edited by Engels, were published posthumously. About 70 years after Marx’s death, the Communist Party of Great Britain built a memorial at his grave inscribed with the last line of The Communist Manifesto: “Workers of all lands unite.”