1.Karl Marx was born in the little German town of Trier in the Rhine land in 1818, in a three story farmhouse in a fashionable part of the town. #KarlMarx
2.The Marxes, like their neighbors and friends, had servants,had property,education and local prominence.
Karl Marx was baptized a Lutheran, and throughout his life he spoke of Jews in third person- and seldom complimentarily.
Karl Marx was baptized a Lutheran, and throughout his life he spoke of Jews in third person- and seldom complimentarily.
3.His father was a prosperous lawyer who owned vineyards, as well as houses whose rents supplemented his income.He was man of wide culture and political liberalism.
4.Marx's mother was a devoted housewife,not a woman of learning, and though her son loved her in childhood, they were soon estranged in early adulthood. When she died, many years later,Marx expressed not the slightest sorrow.
5. As a young man Marx attended the University of Bonn for one year.There he was an enthusiastic student, but also an enthusiastic drinker, and took part in rowdiness and at least one duel.His father transferred him to the University of Berlin, a more serious institution.
6. But the self indulgent, bohemian and spendthrift habits that Marx had exhibited at Bonn continued in Berlin, where he was sued several times for non-payment of debts.
7.His father's letters show growing recriminations directed not only at his son's capacity to waste money -but also a more disturbing personal characteristic, egomania.
The themes of destruction, savagery and corruption run through Marx's poems of his time.
The themes of destruction, savagery and corruption run through Marx's poems of his time.
8. There was nothing political about his writings, had not yet turned his attention in that direction. He was simply as one biographer said,"a man with a peculiar faculty for relishing disaster".Marx's angry apocalyptic vision existed before he discovered capitalism as his focus.
9. In the early 1840s Marx had a decisive break with his family.His father was dead and the estate had to suffice for eight people to live. Frau Marx was not inclined to continue indefinitely sending money for her eldest son,now fully grown and holding a doctoral degree.
10.Marx had continued his longstanding practice of running up bills that he could not pay, and was outraged that his mother cut off his remaining small allowance.Such financial difficulties were to become a permanent feature of Marx's life over the next four decades.
11. As late as 1849, Marx's mother advanced him enough money from his future inheritance to enable him to live comfortably for years-though in fact it was all gone within one year, much of it spent to buy arms for abortive uprisings and to finance Marx's newspaper.
12.The firm, in which Engels' father had half interest,employed about 800 workers. Though Engels began on a modest level in the management,his position and his pay rose over the years until he was able to retire at age fifty with substantial funds.
13. Engels provided a generous annuity to Marx that relieved him of financial worry for the rest of his life but before that the financial position of Marx and his growing family was often dire and desperate.
14. In 1850 the Marx family moved into the slums of London, where they spent most of the next twenty years.The family often dodged creditors,were evicted for nonpayment of rent, on some occasions had to live on bread and potatoes, frequently pawned their meager belongings.(contd)
..(contd) and had three children die amid the squalor-including one for whom there was no money for a burial until a gift was received for the purpose.
15. Yet despite the very real and painful poverty in which Marx often found himself, his known sources of income were sufficient for a lower middle class family standard of living at that time, and was about three times the amount of an unskilled worker.
16.The problem was Marx's chronic inability to manage money, and especially his and his wife's tendency to splurge when large sums came in.
17. Ironically, Marx's most important research and writing were done during the years of travail and heartbreak, and he produced little during the last dozen or so years of his life when he led a bourgeois existence.
18.Physical ills dogged Marx increasingly with the passing years.His irregular sleeping habits,alcohol consumption,and lack of personal cleanliness or exercise may well have contributed to these,as his improvidence made his family prey to hunger,disease,and the deaths (contd)
19.(contd) of three children in infancy and early childhood.But he blamed these tragedies-like most of his troubles-on other people.The death of his infant son he blamed on "bourgeois misery", which he apparently considered also the cause of the boils that covered his body.
20.He promised to make the bourgeois pay via his revolutionary writings.Marx repeatedly denounced creditors who insisted on collecting on what he owed them.He even lost his temper at his wife for her bouts of tears in the midst of mounting tragedies.
Source: Marxism-Philosophy and Economics by Dr Thomas Sowell.
21.Even during the long years of poverty,the Marx household had a maid,Helen Demuth,better known by her nickname of Lenchen.She had been a servant of the elder Baroness von Westphalen,who in 1845 sent her as a present to her daughter,who was unprepared to take care of children.
22.Though the Marxes were seldom in a position to pay her,"dear, faithful Lenchen" remained in their service to their days-and then went to work for Engels. In her youth she passed up suitors and other jobs to stay and serve the Marxes.
23. In 1851,during the most desperate period of the Marx family,when Marx's wife was pregnant,Lenchen soon became pregnant too.Few people know of the child's birth,he was sent away to be raised by a working class family,and there was no father's name on the birth certificate.
24.Marx's wife was told that Engels-a bachelor-was the father,but long after the death of Marx and his wife, it came out that in fact the father was Karl Marx.Engels confirmed it on his death bed to Marx's tearful daughter.
25. In his life Engels had taken the blame for Marx, in order to save his friend's marriage,but in death Engels was apparently not prepared to take the blame forever.
26. The child himself,Freddy Demuth, grew up with no relationship with Marx, and never visited his mother as long as the Marxes were alive.Only after their death, when Helen became Engel's housekeeper,did the boy begin visiting his mother-entering and leaving by the back door.
27.He was sacrificed first to Marx's convenience,then to Marx's image.His mother apparently loved him;when she died,she left everything to him.
