Karl Marx

Mike Aboala

Marx was born in Trier, Prussia (now Germany), in 1818. He studied philosophy at universities in Bonn and Berlin,

earning his doctorate in Jena at the age of twenty-three. His early radicalism, first as a member of the Young Hegelians,

then as editor of a newspaper suppressed for its derisive social and political content, preempted any career aspirations in academia and forced him to flee to Paris in 1843.

In 1849 Marx moved to London, where he continued to study and write, drawing heavily on works by David Ricardo and Adam Smith.

Marx died in London in 1883 in somewhat impoverished surroundings.

Most of his adult life, he relied on Engels for financial support (Kaidantzis ).

Early Life

He was the oldest surviving boy in a family of nine children.

    Marx was a bourgeois Jew who died an atheist.

He was a unique.    Shortly after his eighteenth birthday Marx

was excused military service because of his weak chest.

He was a co-president of the Trier Tavern Club(Wheen).

Facts About Karl Marx

Karl Marx made it clear that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” and what he meant by life was actual living everyday material activity. Human thought or consciousness was rooted in human activity not the other way round as a number of philosophers felt at the time. What this meant was the way we went about our business, the way we were organized in our daily life was reflected in the way we thought about things and the sort of world we created. The institutions we built, the philosophies we adhered to, the prevailing ideas of the time, the culture of society, were all determined to some extent or another by the economic structure of society. This did not mean that they were totally determined but were quite clearly a spin-off from the economic base of society. The political system, the legal system, the family, the press, the education system were all rooted, in the final analysis, to the class nature of society, which in turn was a reflection of the economic base. Marx maintained that the economic base or infrastructure generated or had built upon it a superstructure that kept it functioning. The education system, as part of the superstructure, therefore, was a reflection of the economic base and served to reproduce it. This did not mean that education and teaching was a sinister plot by the ruling class to ensure that it kept its privileges and its domination over the rest of the population. There were no conspirators hatching devious schemes. It simply meant that the institutions of society, like education, were reflections of the world created by human activity and that ideas arose from and reflected the material conditions and circumstances in which they were generated(Burke).

Karl Marx’s relevance to knowledge and education

The leader of the Communists was the German philosopher Karl Marx. Marx published his ideas in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto, written with his friend Friedrich Engels, and later in Capital. In these works Marx wrote about the problems of the working people, whom he called the proletariat. He thought that people's ideas and lives were largely controlled by money. The capitalists, he said, were not concerned about workers' problems. Marx believed that private ownership of property and control of wealth caused this hardship. These problems could be solved only by replacing capitalism with Communism. Eventually, Marx thought, the workers would lead a revolution and overthrow the capitalists.(Britannica Elementary Library).

The Ideas Of Marx

Burke, Barry “Karl Marx and education”. Infed. January 03, 2013 .29 April 2013 http://infed.org/mobi/karl-marx-and-education/

Kaidantzis, Janet Beales “The Concise Encyclopedia Of Economics”. Library Economics Liberty. 2008, Liberty fund.4/26/13 http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Marx.html

Work Cited