Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Karl Marx
Summary
Karl Marx (maʁks; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German-born philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, representing his greatest intellectual achievement. His theories and ideas, and their subsequent development, are collectively known as Marxism, and have exerted enormous influence on intellectual, economic, and political history.
Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, German Confederation, Marx studied at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, receiving a doctorate in philosophy from the latter in 1841. As a Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed his ideas in works such as The German Ideology (written in 1846) and the Grundrisse (written in 1857–1858). In Paris in 1844, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and met Friedrich Engels, a lifelong friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx's key ideas and ends with a call for revolution: "Working men of all countries, unite!" Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital. In 1864, Marx helped found the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he countered the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote on revolution, the transition to communism, and the state. He died stateless in 1883, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.
Marx's critical theories about society, economics, and politics hold that human societies develop through class conflict.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related courses (2)
HUM-340: History of economic thought
Ce cours constitue une introduction à une économie politique critique de la valeur, de la monnaie et du capital, où l'histoire de la pensée économique vient éclairer les débats les plus contemporains
AR-445: The rise of capitalist urban space
This course aims at building a genealogy of capitalism through the spaces it has produced retracing history from the English 'Agricultural Revolution' of the 18th century to the rise of the Welfare St
Related lectures (19)
Exchange Interaction: Basic Aspects
Covers the basic aspects of exchange interaction in magnetic materials, including direct exchange and Heisenberg model.
Crystal Structures: Arrangement and Diffraction
Explores crystal structures, unit cells, Miller indices, and X-ray diffraction principles.
Agriculture and Architecture: Negotiating Urbanism
Explores the integration of agriculture into urban spaces and the potential for reshaping urban ecosystems through agro-urban design.
Related publications (2)
Architecture and Abstraction
In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the p ...
The MIT Press2023Le Locle/La Chaux-de-Fonds: Public histories and industrial heritage in contemporary cities
Florence Graezer Bideau, Filippo De Pieri
Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds were inscribed in the World Heritage List in 2009 under the label “watchmaking town planning”. The contribution aims at developing a few questions linked to this heritage site. To what extent the “outstanding universal values ...
2022Related concepts (23)
Adam Smith
Adam Smith (baptised 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the thinking of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by some as "The Father of Economics" or "The Father of Capitalism", he wrote two classic works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter, often abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work that treats economics as a comprehensive system and as an academic discipline.
Marxism
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, no single, definitive Marxist theory exists.
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.