Carl Marx a Revolutionary socialist thinker and activist of German

origin (Trier, West Prussia, 1818 - London, 1883). Karl Marx came
from a middle-class Jewish family (his father was a lawyer
recently converted to Lutheranism). He studied at the universities
of Bonn, Berlin and Jena, Ph.D. in philosophy from the latter in
1841.
Since that time, the thought of Marx would be sitting on the
dialectic of Hegel, although it replaced the idealism of a
materialist conception according to which economic forces are the
infrastructure that ultimately determines the phenomena
"superstructure" of the social order , political and cultural.
Karl Marx
In 1843 he married Jenny von Westphalen, whose father started to
Marx in the interest in rationalist doctrines of the French
Revolution and the early socialist thinkers. Become a radical
democrat, Marx worked briefly as a teacher and journalist, but his
political views forced him to leave Germany and settle in Paris
(1843).
It then established a lasting friendship with Friedrich Engels,
who would usher in the close collaboration of both intellectual
and political. He was expelled from France in 1845 and took refuge
in Brussels, at last, after a short stay in Cologne to supporot
radical tendencies present in the German Revolution of 1848, came
to lead more stable lives in London since 1849 where he developed
the Most of his written work. His dedication to the cause of
socialism made him suffer great material difficulties, overcome by
the financial assistance of Engels.
Marx started from the criticism of the previous socialist, who
called 'utopian', although they took many elements of his thought
(by authors such as Saint-Simon, Owen and Fourier), these thinkers
had been confined to imagine how could be the perfect society of
the future and hope that its implementation proves the general
belief and the example of a few model communities.
By contrast, Marx and Engels sought to make a "scientific
socialism", based on the systematic critique of the established
order and the discovery of objective laws that would lead to their
overthrow, the power of the Revolution (and not the peaceful
conviction or reforms gradual) would be the way to end bourgeois
civilization.
In 1848, at the request of an underground revolutionary league
formed by German immigrants, Marx and Engels effectively
translated such ideas in the Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet of
inflammatory rhetoric situated in the context of the European
revolutions of 1848.
Later, during his stay in England, Marx elaborated on the study of
classical political economy, relying predominantly on the model of
David Ricardo, built its own economic doctrine, as manifested in
Capital; of this monumental work was only to publish the first
volume (1867), while the remaining two after his death was editing
his friend Engels, putting in order the manuscripts prepared by
Marx.
Based on the classical doctrine, under which only human labor
produces value, Marx denounced the exploitation patent on the
extraction of surplus value, i.e., the unpaid labor appropriated
by the worker and the capitalist, which gives rise to the
accumulation capital. He criticized the substance to the extent
unfair, illegal and violent capitalist economic system, which was
the basis of class domination exercised by the bourgeoisie.
However, their analysis asserted that capitalism was a historical,
like any other system, and did not respond to an immutable natural
order as they had claimed the classics that had arisen as a
historical process by which replaced feudalism, capitalism was
doomed to sink by its own internal contradictions, giving way to
socialism. The inevitable trend of declining profit rates would be
reflected in periodic crises of increasing intensity until the
virtual collapse of bourgeois society, by which time the system
logic would have polarized society into two opposing classes by
irreconcilable interests of so that the masses proletarian zed,
aware of its operation would end up starring in the revolution
that would lead to socialism.
In other works, Marx completed the economic basis of their
reasoning with other reflections of historical and political:
explained the logic of class struggle, in his view, underlies all
human history and that makes this progress to jumps dialectical
revolutionary result of a collision between exploiters and
exploited, as a transcript of the inevitable contradiction between
the development of productive forces and the strait-jacket which
the subject of social relations of production.
Marx also said the meaning of socialist revolution that he hoped,
as definitive and comprehensive emancipation of man (to abolish
private ownership of means of production, which was the cause of
the alienation of workers), completing the purely legal and
political emancipation by the bourgeois revolution (which
identified with the French model), on that basis, pointing toward
a socialist future understood as realization of the ideas of
liberty, equality and fraternity, as a result of genuine
democracy, the "dictatorship of the proletariat ' would be purely
instrumental and transitory, because the objective was not the
strengthening of state power with the nationalization of the means
of production, but the step-as soon as possible "to the communist
phase in which class contradictions missing , would no longer need
the coercive power of the state.
Marx was also a tireless activist in the workers' revolution.
After his membership in the tiny Communist League (disbanded in
1852), moved into the environments of the conspirators
revolutionary exiles, until, in 1864, the creation of the
International Workers Association (IWA) gave the opportunity to
impregnate the world labor movement of his socialist ideas. Much
of his energy absorbed them struggle, within that first
International against moderate unionism and British workers to
counter the trend represented by continental anarchists Proudhon
and Bakunin. Marx won and imposed his doctrine as official line of
the International, although it would eventually collapse as the
combined effect of internal divisions and repression unleashed by
European governments after the revolution of the Paris Commune
(1870).
Retired since political activity, Marx continued to exert its
influence through its German disciples (such as Bebel and
Liebknecht), they created the 1875 German Social Democratic Party,
dominant in the second International under decidedly Marxist
inspiration, was founded in 1889.
Dead and Marx, Engels assumed the moral leadership of that
movement and the ideological influence of both continued to be
decisive for a century. However, the vital efforts of Marx was to
criticize the bourgeois order and prepare it for destruction
revolutionary avoiding the idealistic dreams of accusing the
utopian visionaries, hence did not say hardly anything about how
they should organize the socialist state and economy once seized
power, leading to widely varying interpretations among his
followers.
These fans were split between a social branch increasingly
oriented to the parliamentary struggle and the defense of
incremental improvements while safeguarding individual political
freedoms (Kautsky, Bernstein, Ebert) and a communist branch led to
the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the establishment of
socialist states with planned economies and one-party dictatorship
(Lenin, Stalin, Mao).