His parents were Jewish, but converted to Lutheranism when he was only six. It is difficult to know what effect this would have on his later philosophy, but we do know that Marx would be antithetical to religious belief, at one time pronouncing it, "the opiate of the masses".
He studied jurisprudence at Bonn and later in Berlin, where, however, his preoccupation with philosophy soon turned him away from law. In 1841, after spending five years in the “metropolis of intellectuals,” he returned to Bonn intending to habilitate. At that time the first “New Era” was in vogue in Prussia. Frederick William IV had declared his love of a loyal opposition, and attempts were being made in various quarters to organise one. Thus the Rheinische Zeitung was founded at Cologne; with unprecedented daring Marx used it to criticise the deliberations of the Rhine Province Assembly, in articles which attracted great attention.
At the end of 1842 he took over the editorship himself and was such a thorn in the side of the censors that they did him the honour of sending a censor from Berlin especially to take care of the Rheinische Zeitung. When this proved of no avail either the paper was made to undergo dual censorship, since, in addition to the usual procedure, every issue was subjected to a second stage of censorship by the office of Cologne’s Regierungspresident .But nor was this measure of any avail against the “obdurate malevolence” of the Rheinische Zeitung, and at the beginning of 1843 the ministry issued a decree declaring that the Rheinische Zeitung must cease publication at the end of the first quarter. Marx immediately resigned as the shareholders wanted to attempt a settlement, but this also came to nothing and the newspaper ceased publication.
In 1841, Marx received a doctorate in philosophy. In 1842, he became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, a liberal democratic newspaper for which he wrote increasingly radical editorials on social and economic issues. The Prussian government in 1843 banned the newspaper, and Marx left for Paris with his bride, Jenny von Westphalen. There he went further in his criticism of society, building on the Young Hegelian criticism of religion. Applying Ludwig Feuerbach idea of alienation to private property, Marx elaborated on the idea that alienation had an economic base. He called for a communist society to overcome the dehumanizing effect of private property.
In 1845, Marx moved to Brussels, and in 1847 he went to London. He had previously made friends with Friedrich Engels, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer who, like him, had been a Young Hegelian. They collaborated on a book, The Holy Family that was a criticism of some of their Young Hegelian friends for their stress on alienation. In 1845, Marx jotted down some notes, Theses on Feuerbach, which he and Engels enlarged into a book, The German Ideology in which they developed their materialistic conception of history. They argued that social and economic forces, particularly those related to the means of production, determined human thought. They developed a method of analysis they called dialectical materialism, in which the clash of historical forces leads to changes in society.
In 1847 a London organization of workers invited Marx and Engels to prepare a program for them. It appeared in 1848 as the Communist Manifesto. In it they declared that all history was the history of class struggles. Under capitalism, the struggle between the working class and the business class would end in a new society, a communist one.
Illness and depression marked Marx’s last years. He continued to write treatises on socialism, urging that his followers disdain softhearted bourgeois tendencies. His wife died in 1881, and his eldest daughter in 1883, shortly before his own death on March 14, 1883.
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