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Karl Marx 's Philosophy And Literature

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On May 5th, 1818 Karl Marx was born in the western German city of Trier, in what was then a part of the Kingdom of Prussia. One of nine children born to Heinrich Marx and Henrietta Pressburg, Marx ancestrally descended from a line of Jewish families both maternally and paternally. However, amidst the Christian control that Prussia maintained, Marx’s father, in order to achieve further educational and economical means for his family and himself, converted to Lutheranism. In doing so, Heinrich Marx was legally able to practice law, which he was already qualified to practice, but was prohibited from doing so because of his Jewish identity. At his father’s bidding, Karl Marx was educated at home until the age of twelve at which point he …show more content…

While Marx’s roots came from late german idealist Georg Hegel, Marx sought to depart from the idealism of the past and provide more concrete solutions, theories that could be tested, to what he considered the base of societal conflict, as opposed to abstract ideas. While Marx wrote many works in his lifetime, the latter days of his life he shifted primarily toward political economics. It was his work in political economics that produced what he is most well known for today. In 1948, Marx met Friedrich Engels in Café de la Régence in Paris. Here, Engels introduced Marx to his own theory that working class uprising would be the cause of the final human revolution. Together Marx and Engels embellished on the theory of working class struggle. A trip to England to visit the Chartist, an emerging socialist movement, gave Marx the opportunity to observe the inner workings of English economics, which helped him to further expand on his already high criticism of capitalism. Accordingly, Marx postulated that in capitalism people are divided between the bourgeoisies, those who controlled the means of production, and the proletariat, those who sought the laborers driven by wage. He surmised that the conflict between the proletariat, who wish to have as high of a wage as possible, and the bourgeoisie, who wish to keep wages low for their own benefit, would be the catalyst

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