Karl Heinrich Marx was a radical German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theoretician, writer, and socialist. Marx was born in Trier, Germany, and studied university law and philosophy.

See the fact file below for more information on the Karl Marx or alternatively, you can download our 22-page Karl Marx worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

EARLY LIFE

• Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, Rhenish Prussia. He is a son of a lawyer, Heinrich Marx, and a Dutch Woman, Henriette Presburg Marx.
• His parents were both Jewish and came from a long line of rabbis, but in 1816 his father was converted to Lutheranism because of contemporary laws that excluded Jews from higher society.
• Karl Marx was baptized in the same church at the age of 6 but later became an atheist.
• Marx was a middle-class student. He was educated at home until he was twelve and spent five years at the Trier Jesuit high school, then known as the Friedrich-Gymnasium, from 1830 to 1835.

EDUCATION AND MARRIAGE

• Marx started to study at the University of Bonn in October 1835. It had a vibrant and rebellious culture, and Marx took part in his student life with enthusiasm. However, he was imprisoned for drunkenness and disturbing the peace for two semesters, accrued debts, and took part in a duel.
• Marx’s father demanded at the end of the year that he enroll in the more rigorous University of Berlin.
• He studied law and philosophy in Berlin and was exposed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy, who had been his professor until his death in 1831.
• Initially, Marx did not enamor Hegel, and he soon became associated with the Young Hegelians, a revolutionary group of students like Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, who opposed their day’s political and religious institutions.
• As he became more politically active in 1836, Marx was secretly engaged with Jenny von Westphalen, a sought-woman from a respectable Trier family who was his senior of four years.
• This caused his father anxiety, along with his growing radicalism. Marx’s father expressed concerns in a series of letters about what he saw as the “demons” of his son and cautioned him not to take the obligations of marriage seriously enough, particularly when his wife-to-be came from a higher class.
• Marx did not settle down, instead, he obtained his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841, and was prevented from gaining a teaching position by his radical politics.
• He then started working as a journalist and became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne newspaper, in 1842. 
• A year later the government ordered the closure of the journal, effective April 1, 1843. Marx resigned on  March 18, 1843. 
• He eventually married Jenny von Westphalen three months later in June and moved to Paris in October.

MARX BOOKS

• The writings of Marx fall into two general categories, the polemical-philosophical and the political-economic. The first reflected its idealistic Hegelian period; the second reflected its revolutionary-political interests.
• Marx wrote hundreds of articles, brochures, and studies during his lifetime, and published five novels. Two of these were polemical, and three were economic-political. 
• The first, The Holy Family (1845), written in collaboration with Engels, was a polemic against the former teacher of Marx and Young Hegelian, philosopher Bruno Bauer.
• The second was Misère de la philosophie (Poverty of Philosophy), written in French by Marx himself, and published in 1847 in Paris and Brussels. This polemical work was, as its subtitle indicates, “An Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon.”
• Marx’s third book is The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, it is a brilliant historical-political study of the rise and intrigues of the Bonaparte who became Napoleon III, published serially in a German publication in New York City in 1852.
• The rest of Marx’s publications, often posthumously printed, are composed of brochures. Herr Vogt (1860) is a raging polemic about a man named Karl Vogt, suspected by Marx of being a police spy. Wage Labour and Capital (1884) is a reproduction of publications in newspapers.

MARXISM

• Marxism is a body of theory established in the middle of the 19th century by Karl Marx and, to a lesser degree, by Friedrich Engels. 
• It was originally composed of three related ideas: metaphysical anthropology, a history theory, and an economic and political system.
• There is also Marxism, as the various socialist movement, especially before 1914. And there is Soviet Marxism as worked out by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and updated by Joseph Stalin who became the ideology of the Communist Parties founded after the Russian Revolution (1917) under the name of Marxism-Leninism.
• Offshoots of this included Marxism as interpreted by the Anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and his followers, the Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism by Mao Zedong, and various Marxisms in the developing world.
• There was also the non-dogmatic Marxism of the post-World War II that changed Marx’s philosophy with borrowings from modern philosophies, especially from those of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also from Sigmund Freud and others.

DEATH, LEGACY, AND THEORY

• Marx died in London, on March 14, 1883, of pleurisy. Although his original grave had only a nondescript stone, a massive tombstone, including a bust of Marx, was erected in 1954 by the Communist Party of Britain. 
• The stone is engraved with the last line from The Communist Manifesto (“Workers of All Lands Unite”), as well as a quote from the Feuerbach Theses.
• The 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital are his best-known titles. 
• His historical and philosophical philosophy had a profound impact on subsequent academic, economic and political history, and his name was used as an adjective, a noun, and a social theory school.
• Like the other classical economists, Karl Marx believed in labor value theory to justify relative market price differences. This theory suggested that the value of an economic good produced can be objectively determined by the total number of working hours needed to produce it. In other words, if a table takes twice as long as a chair to produce, then the table should be considered twice as important.

Karl Marx Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle that includes everything you need to know about Karl Marx across 22 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use worksheets that are perfect for teaching about Karl Marx who was a radical German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theoretician, writer, and socialist.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

• Karl Marx Facts
• Karl Marx Info
• Periods of History
• Word Bank
• All Economics 
• Marx’ Books
• Two Categories
• Marx’ Writing
• True or False
• Political Issues
• Marx’ Capitalism

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Karl Marx best known for?

Karl Marx is best known for creating Marxism. But he also had ideas for communism. He wrote Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto which started Marxism.

What did Karl Marx believe in?

Marxism is a philosophy that was created by Karl Marx. It is about social, political, and economic theory. It focuses on the conflict between the working class and the ownership class. Marxism usually supports communism and socialism over capitalism.

What did Marx call religion?

In the book called Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he said that religion is like a drug that makes people feel better about being oppressed. He said that people in power use religion to control workers.

Link/cite this page

If you reference any of the content on this page on your own website, please use the code below to cite this page as the original source.

<a href="https://kidskonnect.com/people/karl-marx/">Karl Marx Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com</a> - KidsKonnect, January 19, 2022

Link will appear as Karl Marx Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com - KidsKonnect, January 19, 2022