Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Communist Manifesto

About the Author

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, born in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were from different parts of western Germany and from different levels of the middle class, or bourgeoisie—“a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class,” as the Communist Manifesto proclaims. Marx's father was trained as a lawyer and worked for the Prussian government. When Prussia took over the region after the fall of Napoléon, he converted from Judaism to Prussia's official Protestant Christian religion because Prussia allowed no Jews in its civil service, although the family was secular. Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Trier's most prominent family, and for some time in the 1850s Marx's brother-in-law was a prominent Prussian police official who caught and prosecuted radicals like Marx.

Marx attended the University of Berlin and associated with radical philosophical thinkers. His ideas were perceived as a danger to the authority of the monarchy and the official church, so he was blacklisted and banned from any potential university job anywhere in Germany. His doctorate (in philosophy) led to no academic employment, and he spent his life in ill-paid radical journalism, scholarly research, and political organization, all devoted to the overthrow of capitalism. For most of his life he lived chiefly on subsidies from his friend Engels.

Engels's father was a cotton-mill-owning capitalist. The family took its Protestant religion seriously, but Engels found his way to a secular outlook in his teens. He was expected to serve in the family business, so he was not sent to university; he sat in on classes in Berlin but was largely self-educated. Engels wrote critical articles on politics, religion, and economics, some of them in a paper that Marx edited. He spent twenty months in England (1842–1844), where he was trained in management at the Manchester branch of his father's business and observed all he could in the world's greatest center of textile production, one of the key sites of the Industrial Revolution. His own observations and his reading of available sources were combined in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), a tirade against the mistreatment of factory workers.

After the revolutions of 1848 were stamped out in Europe, Marx and Engels became political fugitives because of their published opposition to Prussia's crackdown on the democratically elected assembly that had tried to unite Germany. (Engels was also wanted for treason, having failed to report for duty in the Prussian army and having fought in the last-ditch resistance of German democratic nationalism in the spring of 1849.) As refugees in England, Engels went to work for his father's firm in Manchester while Marx settled in London. They wrote, analyzed capitalist society, and planned for the proletarian revolution that the Communist Manifesto had promised. Engels's father died in 1870, and he sold his share of the inheritance to his siblings. He was able to move to London, and he and the Marx family lived off his well-managed investments, existing within the capitalist system they had not been able to abolish. Marx died in 1883 and Engels in 1895, both convinced that the revolution would soon arrive.