Who was Karl Marx?

Karl Marx was arguably the most influential political thinker of the modern era — a philosopher whose ideas inspired revolutions, shaped the policies of governments controlling a third of the world's population, and remain central to debates about economics, inequality, and social justice to this day.

Born in Trier, Prussia, in 1818 to a middle-class Jewish family that had converted to Christianity, Marx studied philosophy and law before turning to radical journalism. Expelled from several countries for his revolutionary writings, he spent most of his adult life in London, often in poverty, supported financially by his collaborator Friedrich Engels. Despite his personal hardships, he produced a body of work of extraordinary intellectual range and ambition.

Marx's central insight was that economic relations — who owns the means of production and who works for wages — determine the structure of society, politics, and even culture. History, he argued, was driven by class struggle: in each era, a dominant class exploited a subordinate class, and the tensions this created eventually produced revolutionary change. Feudalism had given way to capitalism when the bourgeoisie overthrew the aristocracy; capitalism would give way to socialism when the proletariat (working class) overthrew the bourgeoisie.

His analysis of capitalism was brilliant and devastating. In Das Kapital, he argued that profit derived from the exploitation of labor — workers produced more value than they received in wages, and capitalists appropriated the surplus. He predicted that capitalism would produce increasing inequality, recurring crises of overproduction, and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands — observations that have proved remarkably prescient, even if his predicted revolutionary outcome has not unfolded as he envisioned.

Marx's legacy is complex and contested. The Communist Manifesto (1848), written with Engels, provided the rallying cry for revolutionary movements worldwide. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, and dozens of other movements claimed Marxist inspiration. But the authoritarian regimes that resulted — Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, the Khmer Rouge — produced oppression and mass death that Marx himself might not have endorsed. Whether these regimes represented genuine Marxism or its betrayal remains fiercely debated. What is undeniable is that Marx's critique of capitalism — its inequalities, its crises, its tendency to commodify every aspect of human life — continues to resonate in the 21st century.