Karl Marx (1818–1883) is one of the most influential and foundational architects of modern social theory. His historical materialist approach, analyses of class struggle, and comprehensive critiques of the capitalist system have left a lasting mark on the social sciences. Alongside Friedrich Engels, he co-authored The Communist Manifesto and his magnum opus Capital, both of which rank among his most renowned works. Marx’s ideas extended far beyond economic structures; they transformed disciplines such as political theory, philosophy, sociology, and education. His critical perspectives on social inequality, alienation, and ideology have generated enduring impacts in both academic circles and political struggles.

Birth, Youth, and Family Origins

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, a city in the Rhineland region then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. His family was of Jewish origin; his father, Heinrich Marx, was a lawyer who embraced Enlightenment ideas and admired the secular legal system shaped by Napoleonic influence. However, due to Prussian restrictions that barred individuals of Jewish descent from public office, Heinrich Marx converted to Protestantism in 1816 along with his family. This circumstance would later form the socio-political contradiction underlying Marx’s critical stance toward religious institutions.

Karl Marx’s childhood unfolded in an environment marked by intellectual curiosity and openness to bourgeois liberal values. Trier, having experienced the effects of the French Revolution, was not alien to revolutionary ideas. Growing up in this atmosphere, the young Marx enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1835 to study law. His student life there blended classical education with romantic poetry. However, pressured by his family to pursue a more serious academic path, he transferred to the University of Berlin in 1836. While continuing his legal studies in Berlin, his primary interest shifted to philosophy. During this period, he encountered the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and became involved with the circle of radical Young Hegelians.

This philosophical milieu in Berlin played a decisive role in shaping Marx’s later materialist conception of history. Hegel’s historical dialectic provided the philosophical foundation for Marx’s theory of history centered on class struggle. Yet Marx rejected Hegel’s idealist approach and adopted a materialist orientation: it is not ideas but material relations of production that determine the course of history.

Adulthood, Exile Years, and Political Activism

In the early 1840s, Marx began working as a journalist for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. However, his criticisms of the Prussian monarchy and the landed aristocracy led to the paper’s closure. In 1843, Marx moved to Paris, which at the time was the center of revolutionary intellectuals in Europe. There he met French socialists and German émigrés. In 1844, he met Friedrich Engels, who became both an intellectual and material partner, helping Marx ground his ideas in economic and historical foundations.

After Paris, Marx relocated to Brussels and then Cologne, intensifying his political activities during the Revolutions of 1848. However, following the failure and suppression of these revolutions, Marx, like many revolutionaries, was expelled from Prussia and France. In 1849, he settled in London with his family, where he spent the remainder of his life. England, the most advanced industrial capitalist country, served as a kind of “living laboratory” for Marx. During this period, he spent years working in the library of the British Museum, laying the groundwork for Capital.

During his years of exile, Marx endured severe financial hardship. While his family struggled with illness, death, and poverty, he never compromised his scholarly output. He was able to complete his writings largely thanks to the financial support of his friend Engels. Marx’s life during this period was not only an intellectual endeavor but also a political struggle. He played an active role in founding the First International (International Workingmen’s Association). However, from the 1870s onward, his health steadily deteriorated.

Main Works

1. The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Full title: Manifesto of the Communist Party, this text was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 at the request of the Communist League, headquartered in London, just before the revolutions of that year. Although merely a short pamphlet, it became one of the most famous and widely circulated documents of revolutionary socialist movements worldwide. Marx and Engels assigned the revolutionary proletariat a historical mission: not only to overthrow the bourgeoisie but to abolish classes entirely and establish a classless, exploitation-free society.

The text consists of four main sections. The first emphasizes that history is the history of class struggles. It explains how the bourgeoisie, through the Industrial Revolution, dismantled feudal classes but simultaneously produced a new oppressed class: the proletariat. The second section summarizes the principles of communism and clarifies its differences from other workers’ party movements. The third section critiques contemporary socialist currents—such as Feudal Socialism, Petty-Bourgeois Socialism, and True Socialism—highlighting their distinctions from the communist perspective. The fourth section ends with a call for international revolution: “Workers of all countries, unite!”^【1】

At the time of its writing, continental Europe was swept by a wave of revolution. Yet Marx’s primary aim was not merely to support existing uprisings but to provide them with theoretical direction. The Manifesto was written not only as a literary and political text but as a revolutionary strategy document. It has since been translated into countless languages and served as a foundational text for political struggles from the Soviet Union to guerrilla movements in Latin America throughout the twentieth century.

2. Capital (Das Kapital) – 1867 and Beyond

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is Marx’s most extensive theoretical work, the subject of his lifelong research. The first volume was published in 1867. The subsequent volumes were compiled and published after Marx’s death by Friedrich Engels from Marx’s notes. Capital builds upon the labor theory of value developed by classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but deepens and systematically critiques the capitalist mode of production.

In the first volume of Capital, Marx begins with the concept of the commodity. He emphasizes that a commodity has both use value and exchange value. In a society organized around commodity production and exchange, all social relations are mediated through economic forms. Marx introduces the concept of “commodity fetishism”: social relations between people appear as relations between things. Human labor circulates in an abstract and objectified form.

One of his most important concepts is surplus value (Mehrwert). The capitalist pays the worker only enough to sustain life, yet appropriates the entire value produced by the worker. The difference—the surplus value—serves the expansion of capital. Marx defines this process as structural, not merely formal, exploitation. Capital details numerous complex topics, including the logic of capital accumulation, the reproduction of labor power, the impact of machinery on workers, the reserve army of labor, and cycles of crisis.

During the writing of Capital, Marx conducted years of intensive research in the British Museum library, taking thousands of pages of notes. This work became not only an economic but also a foundational text in history, sociology, and political science. Moreover, Marx endured severe financial hardship during this period and continued writing only with the material support of Friedrich Engels. Capital is not a simple economics textbook; it is the epistemological foundation of Marxist thought.

3. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, written by Marx during his Paris years, reveal his youthful philosophical orientation and his understanding of the relationship between humans, nature, and production. These manuscripts were discovered and published only after his death. They herald the emergence of an anthropological materialism influenced by but surpassing Feuerbach. Marx argues here that human essence is realized through productive activity, yet under capitalism, this relationship of production becomes alien to the worker.

In these manuscripts, Marx identifies four levels of alienation: (1) from the product of labor, (2) from the activity of production, (3) from human species-being (Gattungswesen), and (4) from other human beings. This forms the philosophical basis for his later theory of exploitation in Capital. He also argues that the relationship with nature is disrupted, as humans begin to view nature solely as an object of consumption.

These writings demonstrate that Marx was not merely an economist but also deeply concerned with ethical and existential questions. Humans produce not only for bread but for meaning. Yet when production under capitalism serves only the market and profit maximization, human essence is lost.

4. The German Ideology (1845–46)

Written by Marx and Engels, The German Ideology is a powerful critique directed against the idealist German philosophy of the time, particularly Hegelianism and Ludwig Feuerbach. In this work, historical materialism is systematically formulated for the first time. It argues that systems of thought arise from social modes of life and therefore must be examined alongside the history of material existence.

The statement “The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class”^【2】 is grounded in this text. That is, ideas become dominant because they are the product of the material power held by the dominant class. This view, which demonstrates that consciousness is not independent of social conditions, is considered the foundational text of modern ideology critique. Marx and Engels argue here that “real history” begins with the material production of individuals and that these relations of production determine political and ideological superstructures.

This work marks Marx’s decisive break from idealist philosophy. He grounds his analysis not in consciousness but in social being. However, Marx did not publish it during his lifetime; in his own words, he left it “for the mice to chew.” Nevertheless, it has since been read as the foundational text for a systematic epistemology of Marx’s thought.

His Ideas and Ideologies

1. Historical Materialism and Class Struggle

The cornerstone of Marx’s thought is historical materialism. This approach asserts that the driving force of history is not ideas or individual heroes but material relations of production and class struggles. For Marx, fundamental questions—how human societies produce, who controls production, and who occupies which position within the production process—determine the direction of history. Societies have historically passed through different modes of production: primitive communal, slave, feudal, and capitalist. Each mode of production carries its own class structure and contradictions. For instance, in feudal society, the lord confronts the serf; in capitalist society, the bourgeoisie confronts the proletariat.

Class struggle is the manifestation and resolution of these contradictions. Marx argues that with the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeoisie seized ownership of the means of production, rendering the proletariat economically dependent. The working class, lacking ownership of the means of production, must sell its labor to survive. Yet within this process, workers develop “class consciousness”—an awareness of their own interests. This consciousness ultimately creates the conditions for revolutionary transformation. For Marx, this revolution is not merely a change of power but a radical transformation of relations of production and social structure.

2. Alienation: The Estrangement of the Human Being from Self and World in the Labor Process

The concept of alienation (Entfremdung) is one of the most philosophical aspects of Marx’s critique of capitalist society. He developed this concept primarily in his early 1844 Manuscripts. According to Marx, human nature is productive; humans express themselves by producing and transforming the world. Yet capitalist relations of production strip this creative process from the worker. The worker no longer produces for himself but for the interests of the capitalist. This leads the worker to become alienated from his labor, his product, the process of production, other human beings, and ultimately his own essence.

This alienation represents a multi-layered rupture. First, the worker cannot recognize himself in the product he creates; second, he has no control over the production process; third, competition with fellow workers makes him alienated from them; fourth, there is a sharp divide between the time spent working and “real life.” This condition leads to psychological fragmentation, moral decay, and identity crisis. The process reduces the modern human to “an abstract activity and a stomach”: human values disappear, leaving only a functional body.^【3】

3. Critique of Ideology: The Ruling Ideas Are the Ideas of the Ruling Class

According to Marx, dominant ideas take shape because the ruling class, by virtue of its control over material means of production, also controls ideological instruments. In other words, the perpetuation of social order is achieved not only through physical coercion but also through intellectual hegemony. At this point, Marx’s concept of ideology rests on the claim that people’s ways of perceiving the world can conceal their true interests. People are often unaware of their own interests because their modes of thought are shaped to sustain the system’s continuity. This leaves them living in illusion.

Views on Education

Although Marx did not write a lengthy work specifically on education, his critiques of class structure and ideology clearly reveal his views on the educational system. For Marx, education in capitalist society does not merely foster individual development; it serves a deeper function: reproducing the existing class structure. Educational institutions, while preparing individuals for specific economic roles, also internalize social norms, hierarchies, and ideologies. Thus, schools, like factories and families, ensure the continuity of the capitalist social order.

These ideas are vividly observable in post-colonial countries such as Pakistan. There, the education system generates deep inequality between private and public schools. Upper classes send their children to elite schools, acquiring not only academic but also cultural capital, while children of lower classes are educated in under-resourced public schools with low expectations. Thus, the claim that education promotes equality serves to entrench class privileges. This situation renders Marx’s analysis of the education system as a mechanism reproducing the interests of the ruling class still relevant today.

Views on Religion

Karl Marx’s understanding of religion is tightly bound to his materialist conception of history. When critiquing religion, Marx does not simply label it as “false” or “bad”; rather, he analyzes it as a social symptom. His famous phrase “religion is the opium of the people” is often misunderstood superficially but is in fact the result of a far more complex analysis. According to Marx, people turn to religion to alleviate the pain of their social conditions. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the soul of a soulless world; yet this also turns it into an instrument of escape from human reality.

Marx’s approach to religion builds on Feuerbach’s idea that humans create God as a reflection of their own essence. However, Marx diverges from Feuerbach by emphasizing that religion is not merely an individual psychological project but a social phenomenon rooted in class. Religion is used by ruling classes as an ideological tool: it dulls the anger of the poor with promises of heaven, produces obedient individuals, and thereby sanctifies the social order. Thus, the critique of religion is not merely theological but also political: “the critique of religious illusion” is a precondition for social emancipation.

This analysis remains relevant today. Many social systems continue to legitimize themselves through religious discourse; people are comforted with metaphysical promises in the face of poverty, inequality, and injustice. In Marx’s view, true freedom is possible only when humans consciously transform their social conditions. Therefore, for him, religion is an ideological veil obstructing genuine liberation.

Death and Legacy

Karl Marx died on 14 March 1883 at the age of 64 in his home in London. In his final years, he endured the deaths of his wife Jenny and several children, and his health had severely deteriorated. After his death, his closest friend Engels, speaking at the simple funeral at Highgate Cemetery, described Marx thus: “Marx’s name will live for centuries. For he was not merely a thinker but a revolutionary.”^【4】

At the time of his death, Marx’s ideas had not yet gained widespread global influence. Yet shortly afterward, his writings became a theoretical framework for workers’ movements, socialist parties, and revolutionary organizations. Capital was compiled and published in subsequent years by Engels. Marx’s ideas, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, formed the ideological basis for political regimes in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and elsewhere. Simultaneously, they were reinterpreted philosophically and sociologically by the Frankfurt School, Althusser, Gramsci, and many others.