Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary whose ideas about class struggle, capitalism, and communism made him one of the most influential — and controversial — thinkers in human history. His work provided the theoretical foundation for communist movements that governed a third of the world's population at their peak.

Marx's analysis of capitalism was systematic and penetrating. In Das Kapital, he argued that capitalism rested on the exploitation of workers, who created value through their labor but received only a fraction of that value as wages — the rest being appropriated as profit by capitalists. He predicted that capitalism's inherent contradictions — periodic crises, increasing inequality, concentration of wealth — would eventually lead the working class to overthrow the system.

Marx spent much of his life in poverty in London, supported by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto (1848), co-authored with Engels, remains one of the most widely read political documents in history. Marx's legacy is deeply contested: his analysis of capitalism's dynamics was remarkably prescient in many respects, but the political systems built in his name — from the Soviet Union to Maoist China — produced authoritarian regimes that violated the human freedom Marx claimed to champion.