Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were influential German philosophers and economists in the 19th century. They developed the theories of communism, socialism, and Marxism through works such as The Communist Manifesto. Marx believed that capitalism would inevitably give way to socialism and communism due to internal contradictions between the wealthy bourgeoisie class and the working proletariat class. He and Engels worked together closely in London promoting their political and economic theories of revolution to overthrow the capitalist system.

1. Communism of Marx and Engel

3. • Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist,
historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and
revolutionary socialist. Born in Trier to a middle-class
family, Marx studied law and Hegelian philosophy.
• Born: 5 May 1818, Trier, Germany
• Died: 14 March 1883, London, United Kingdom
• Spouse: Jenny von Westphalen (m. 1843–1881)
• Education: University of Jena, University of Bonn,
Humboldt University of Berlin
• Children: Eleanor Marx, Laura Marx, Jenny Marx
Longuet, Edgar Marx, Henry Edward Guy Marx, Jenny
Eveline Frances Marx

4. • One of nine children born to Heinrich and Henrietta Marx.
• 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.

5. • PARIS
• Paris was the political heart of Europe in 1843. There, along
with Arnold Ruge, Marx founded a political journal
titled Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French
Annals). Only a single issue was published before
philosophical differences between Marx and Ruge resulted
in its demise, but in August of 1844, the journal brought
Marx together with a contributor, Friedrich Engels, who
would become his collaborator and lifelong friend. Together,
the two began writing a criticism of the philosophy of Bruno
Bauer, a Young Hegelian and former friend of Marx’s. The
result of Marx and Engels’s first collaboration was published
in 1845 as The Holy Family.
• Later that year, Marx moved to Belgium after being expelled
from France while writing for another radical
newspaper, Vorwärts!, which had strong ties to an
organization that would later become the Communist

6. • Brussels
• In Brussels, Marx was introduced to socialism by
Moses Hess, and finally broke off from the
philosophy of the Young Hegelians completely.
While there, he wrote The German Ideology, in
which he first developed his theory on historical
materialism. Marx couldn’t find a willing publisher,
however, and The German Ideology -- along
with Theses on Feuerbach, which was also written
during this time -- were not published until after his
death.

7. • London
• In London, Marx helped found the German Workers’
Educational Society, as well as a new headquarters for
the Communist League. He continued to work as a
journalist, including a 10-year stint as a correspondent
for the New York Daily Tribune from 1852 to 1862, but
he never earned a living wage and was largely
supported by Engels.
• Marx became increasingly focused on capitalism and
economic theory, and in 1867, he published the first
volume of Das Kapital. The rest of his life was spent
writing and revising manuscripts for additional
volumes, which he did not complete. The remaining
two volumes were assembled and published

9. • Born: November 28, 1820 in Barmen, Rhine
province, Prussia.
• His father was an affluent businessman, who
owned a textile factory and was also a partner in
a cotton plant in Manchester, England.
• In 1843, Engels encountered Moses Hess, who
convinced him to believe that communism is the
only logical solution to progress, and advised him
to go to England, where class differences were
becoming more and more prominent.

10. • In 1845, Engels went to Brussels to join Marx in
organizing the German workers like the French and
English workers were uniting. They became members of
the German Communist League, and were asked to draft
a manifesto for the organization, which is now widely
known as the Communist Manifesto.
• In 1848, Marx and Engels began openly participating in
the revolution that had spread to Prussia from France.
They settled in Cologne, and began editing a paper,
Neue Rheinische Zeitung, that spread their revolutionary
notions advocating that a democracy would be the first
step towards communism.

11. • In 1849, the Prussian government shut down the paper
and revoked Marx’s Prussian citizenship. Engels did not
leave Prussia for some time, and organized an uprising in
South Germany, but upon its failure he fled to England
and reunited with Marx.
• In 1864, he was made a partner at the plant due to his
impressive and productive work record. Engels kept in
touch with Marx throughout his life, and also supported
him financially until Marx’s death. He assisted Marx in
editing a few articles as Marx regarded him as highly
informed on economics, political and military issues.

12. • In 1896, these articles were published under Engels’
name as the ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in
Germany in 1848’. The same year, Engels sold off his
share in the plant and moved to London to work with
Marx. They worked together till Marx’s death in 1883.
• Friedrich Engels died on August 5, 1895, after a
prolonged battle with throat cancer.

13. • Commissioned by the Communist League and originally
published in London (in German as Manifest der
Kommunistischen Partei) just as the revolutions of 1848
began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognised as
one of the world's most influential political documents. It
presents an analytical approach to the class struggle
(historical and then-present) and the problems of
capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather
than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.

15. • The critique of the political economy of capitalism proposes
that:
Wage-labour is the basic "cell-form" of a capitalist society.
The economic formation of society a process of natural
history.
The structural contradictions of a capitalist economy,
the gegensätzliche Bewegung, describe the contradictory
movement originating from the two-fold character of labour
and so the class struggle between labour and capital,
the wage labourer and the owner of the means of
production.
The economic crises that are rooted in the contradictory
character of the economic value of the commodity of a
capitalist society are the conditions that
propitiate proletarian revolution.
In a capitalist economy, technological improvement and its