Karl Marx has been without doubt one of the most influential socialist thinkers till date. Although he was largely ignored by scholars, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance.

Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany. He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family and lived in a three room flat in London. His father had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he would not lose his job as a lawyer. He had six children, of these only three survived. He moved into journalism and became editor of Rheinische Zeitung, a newspaper backed by industrialists. His articles, particularly those on economic questions, forced the Prussian government to close the paper and he immigrated to France. Arriving in Paris, Marx made contact with organized groups of émigré German workers. He became a communist and set down his views in writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In it he outlined a humanist conception of communism based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production.

The eminent jurist also produced a gigantic manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, foreign trade and the world market. Theories of Surplus Value

Marx discovered the law of development of human history. He also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society.

discussed the theoreticians of political economy and Capital, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. Karl Marx also wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune. During the last decade of his life his health declined. The deaths of his eldest daughter and his wife clouded the last years of his life and the renowned jurist left for heavens on 14th March 1883 and was buried at Highgate Cemetery in North London. Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, Marx discovered the law of development of human history. He also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society. Theory of surplus value helped to solve problems of previous investigations of bourgeois economists and socialist critics.

The jurists’ real mission in life was to overthrow capitalist society and state institutions and to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat.

He was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work. Marx’s contribution to the understanding of society has been enormous and will never be looked over without being

-LawZ Bureau