Karl Marx is one of the most influential thinkers in modern history, yet few people know much about the man himself. He was not a head of state, a general or a wealthy industrialist. He was a journalist, a philosopher and a political exile who spent much of his adult life without a stable income, a settled home or a country that would keep him. By the time he died in London in 1883, he was known mainly in radical and labour circles, and the first volume of his great work on economics, Das Kapital, had been published only in German. This chapter follows the life the DW documentary traces, from a Rhineland childhood to a London reading room, and asks how a marginal exile came to outlive his own century.
Trier, Bonn and Berlin
Karl Marx was born in Trier on 5 May 1818, in the Rhineland, then part of Prussia. Trier was an old Roman city on the Moselle, a wine-growing and trading town with French revolutionary traditions close at hand, and young Marx grew up in a household shaped by the law and by the Enlightenment. His father, Heinrich Marx, was a lawyer, and his mother, Henriette, came from a Dutch family. Marx studied law, first at the University of Bonn and then in Berlin, but his attention moved steadily from law to philosophy, history and the radical Young Hegelian circle that debated the legacy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He completed his doctorate at the University of Jena in 1841 with a dissertation on ancient Greek philosophy, on Democritus and Epicurus. An academic career in Prussia was closed to a thinker of his views, so he turned to journalism, which put him in direct contact with censorship, with peasant and worker poverty, and with the question that would occupy him for life: how ideas, law and the state relate to the way people earn their living.
Journalism, exile and Engels
In 1842 Marx became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper in Cologne. The paper reported on poverty, on the law governing the gathering of fallen wood by peasants, and on the relationship between the Prussian state and the Catholic Church. Marx learned to write quickly, to argue from evidence and to deal with censors who could close a paper. The Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed in 1843, and Marx left Prussia. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843, and the couple moved to Paris, where Marx mixed with French socialists, German exiles and French workers. Expelled from Paris at the request of the Prussian government, he moved to Brussels. It was in Paris, in 1844, that Marx began the friendship and working partnership that would define his life, with Friedrich Engels, the son of a wealthy manufacturer who had studied industrial conditions in Manchester at close quarters. Together they wrote, in 1847 and 1848, the text for which they are best known, The Communist Manifesto, published in London in February 1848. After the revolutions of 1848 and the counter-revolution that followed, Marx was expelled again, and in August 1849 he arrived in London, which would be his home for the rest of his life.
London and the British Museum
London in the middle of the nineteenth century was the centre of the world economy, the largest city on earth and the capital of an empire built on trade, industry and finance. For Marx it was both a refuge and a place to work. He lived first in crowded lodgings in Soho, then in Kentish Town, and spent his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum, working through parliamentary reports, newspapers and the works of earlier economists, in particular Adam Smith and David Ricardo. There he built the research that would become his critique of political economy. These London years were also years of organisation. In 1864 Marx helped to found the International Workingmen’s Association, later known as the First International, bringing together trade unionists and socialists from several countries to discuss wages, the working day, strikes and the place of labour in politics. The work was unpaid and often thankless, but it showed the other side of Marx the exile: not only a solitary scholar, but a political organiser who believed ideas should be tested in the labour movement.
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, published in German in 1867 as the first volume of a larger work, is Marx’s most substantial and demanding book. Its subject is the working of the capitalist system as a whole, and its argument is built from a close study of the commodity, money, wages, the working day, machinery and the division of labour. Marx argues that the value of a commodity is shaped by the labour time required to produce it, that workers produce more value than they receive in wages, and that this surplus is the source of profit. He traces how competition forces employers to invest in machinery, to lengthen the working day or to push wages down, and how that process produces both enormous wealth and recurring crises. Readers do not need to accept every part of that theory to see why the book mattered. It gave the labour movement a serious economic language of its own, distinct from moral appeals and from the liberal economics of its time. Marx continued to work on the later volumes until his death, but did not finish them. After his death Engels edited the second volume from Marx’s manuscripts and published it in 1885, and the third in 1894.
Poverty, illness and death in 1883
The public figure of the British Museum coexisted with a private life of poverty and illness. The Marx family often lived on irregular income from journalism, on loans and on money sent by Engels, and Jenny Marx managed a household in which rent, schooling and medical bills were constant worries. Several of their children died young, and those losses, together with crowded housing and poor health, marked the family deeply. Marx himself suffered for years from boils, liver trouble and other ailments, and worked through pain that repeatedly interrupted his writing. Jenny died in December 1881, and Marx’s health declined sharply afterwards. He died in London on 14 March 1883, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, where Engels spoke at his graveside. He was sixty-four, and the movement he had helped to create was still small.
What the documentary contributes
The DW documentary contributes a portrait rather than a lecture, and its strength lies in following the connections between life and thought. By tracing Marx from Trier to Bonn and Berlin, from Cologne to Paris and Brussels and finally to London, it shows how each move changed the questions he asked and the evidence he used. The early journalist who reported on peasant poverty in the Rhineland becomes the economist who studied English factory reports in the British Museum, and the partnership with Engels that began in Paris becomes the collaboration that sustained decades of research. The film also restores the domestic side of the story, showing Marx as a husband and father, a friend and a quarrelsome colleague, rather than as a stone statue. Whether viewers admire Marx or oppose him, it offers a clear way into a life often obscured by the arguments made in his name.