Full Name: Karl Heinrich Marx.
Known as: Karl Marx.

Father: Hirschel Marx (attorney, b. 1777, d. 1838).
Mother: Henrietta (b. 1787, d. 1863).
Wife: Jenny von Westphalen (m. 1843, d. 1881).
Son: Heinrich Guido (b. 1849, d. 1850).
Daughter: Laura (b. 1845, d. 1911).
Daughter: Jenny ("Jennychen", b. 1844).
Son: Edgar (b. 1847, d. 1855 ).
Daughter: Franziska (b. 1851, d. 1852).
Daughter: Eleanor ("Tussy", b. 1855, d. 1898).

Date of Birth: 5 May 1818.
Birth Place: Trier, Kingdom of Prussia.

Date of Death: 14 March 1883 (aged 64).
Death Place: London, United Kingdom.
Cause of Death: Unspecified.
Remains, Buried: Highgate Cemetery, London, England.

Religion: Atheist.
Race or Ethnicity: White.
Residence: Germany, United Kingdom.
Nationality: Prussian, German.
Occupation: Historian, Economist, Sociologist.
Era: 19th-century philosophy.
Region: Western Philosophy, German philosophy.
School: Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Materialism.
University: University of Bonn, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Humboldt University of Berlin.

Main Interests: Politics, Economics, Philosophy, Sociology, Labour, History, Class Struggle.

Notable Ideas: Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels), surplus value, contributions to the labor theory of value, class struggle, alienation and exploitation of the worker, The Communist Manifesto, Materialist conception of history.

Books: 
  • Das Kapital
  • The Communist Manifesto
  • The German Ideology
  • Grundrisse
  • Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, where he received a classical education. Karl Marx began exploring sociopolitical theories at university among the Young Hegelians. He became a journalist, and his socialist writings would get him expelled from the Federal Republic of Germany and France. In 1848, he published The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels and was exiled to London, where he wrote the first volume of Das Kapital and lived the remainder of his life.

Early Life: Karl Heinrich Marx was one of nine children born to Heinrich and Henrietta Marx in Trier, Prussia. His father was a successful lawyer who revered Kant and Voltaire and was a passionate activist for Prussian reform. Although both parents were Jewish with rabbinical ancestry, Karl’s father converted to Christianity in 1816 at the age of 35. This was likely a professional concession in response to an 1815 law banning Jews from high society. He was baptized a Lutheran, rather than a Catholic, which was the predominant faith in Trier. When Marx was 6, Karl was baptized along with the other children, but his mother waited until 1825 after her father died.

Marx was an average student. He was educated at home until he was 12 and spent five years, from 1830 to 1835, at the Jesuit high school in Trier, at that time known as the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium. The school’s principal, a friend of Marx’s father, was a liberal and a Kantian and was respected by the people of Rhineland but suspect to authorities. The school was under surveillance and was raided in 1832.

Education: In October 1835 Marx enrolled in Bonn University in Bonn, Germany, where he attended courses primarily in law, as it was his father's desire that he become a lawyer. Marx, however, was more interested in philosophy (the study of knowledge) and literature than in law. He wanted to be a poet and dramatist (one who writes plays). In his student days, he wrote a great deal of poetry—most of it preserved—that in his mature years he rightly recognized as imitative and unremarkable. He spent a year at Bonn, studying little but partying and drinking a lot. He also piled up heavy debts.

In Berlin, he studied law and philosophy and was introduced to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, who had been a professor at Berlin until his death in 1831. Marx was not initially enamoured with Hegel, but he soon became involved with the Young Hegelians, a radical group of students including Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, who criticized the political and religious establishments of the day.

Marx's dismayed father took him out of Bonn and had him enter the University of Berlin, then a center of intellectual discussion. In Berlin, a circle of brilliant thinkers was challenging existing institutions and ideas, including religion, philosophy, ethics (the study of good and bad involving morals), and politics. Marx joined this group of radical (extreme in opinion) thinkers wholeheartedly. He spent more than four years in Berlin, completing his studies with a doctoral degree in March 1841.

Personal life: Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, who was known as the "most beautiful girl in Trier," on June 19, 1843. Jenny von Westphalen was his childhood sweetheart. She was totally devoted to him. She died of cancer on December 2, 1881, at the age of sixty-seven. For Marx, it was a blow from which he never recovered. The Marxes and Jenny von Westphalen had seven children, four of whom died in infancy or childhood. He deeply loved his daughters, who, in turn, adored him. Of the three surviving daughters—Jenny, Laura, and Eleanor—two married Frenchmen. Both of Marx's sons-in-law became prominent French socialists and members of Parliament. Eleanor was active as a British labour organizer.

Marx's excessive smoking, wine drinking, and love of heavily spiced foods may have been contributing causes to his illnesses. In the final dozen years of his life, he could no longer do any continuous intellectual work. He died in his armchair in London on March 14, 1883, about two months before his sixty-fifth birthday. He lies buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, where his grave is marked by a bust (sculpture of a person's head and shoulders) of him.

Marx's Works: Marxism achieved its first great triumph in the Russian Revolution (1917–21; when the lower class overthrew three hundred years of czar rule), when its successful leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870–1924), a lifelong follower of Marx, organized the Soviet Union as a proletarian dictatorship (country ruled by the lower class). Lenin based the new government on Marx's philosophy as Lenin interpreted it. Thus, Marx became a world figure and his theories became a subject of universal attention and controversy (open to dispute). Marx wrote hundreds of articles, brochures, and reports, but only five books.

Death: Marx died in London on March 14, 1883, suffering from pleurisy. While his original grave had only a nondescript stone, the Communist Party of Great Britain erected a large tombstone, including a bust of Marx, in 1954. The stone is etched with the last line of The Communist Manifesto, as well as a quote from the Theses on Feuerbach.