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time, Marx received a sizable settlement from the shareholders of the Rheinishe
Zeitung,and he and his new bride were able to live comfortably. Freed from his
editing duties, Marx wrote extensively on economic and political matters. He also
met the man who was to be his lifelong friend, collaborator, and financial backer:
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Engels came from a family of wealthy textile indus-
trialists and was, himself, the manager of his family’s Manchester, England, branch.
Together Marx and Engels produced The Holy Family(1845), Marx’s first pub-
lished book, which criticized a number of their fellow leftists.
While pursuing his writing projects, Marx was politically active among
German communists living in Paris—activity that led to his expulsion from
France in 1845. Living for a time in Brussels, Marx produced The German
Ideology(1846) and The Poverty of Philosophy(1847) while continuing his polit-
ical involvement. In 1847, he attended the congress of the newly formed
Communist League in London. He and Engels were commissioned to produce an
easy-to-read pamphlet outlining the league’s doctrines. The result was the
immensely influential Manifesto of the Communist Party(1848).
Following another attempt at editing an opposition newspaper in Cologne—and
another expulsion by the government—Marx eventually settled in London. The
next two decades were a time of poverty and hardship for the Marx family due as
much to financial mismanagement as to lack of income. (Marx reflected often on
the irony of his extensive work on capital when he had so little talent for managing
it personally.) Marx received some income as a correspondent for the New York
Tribune;but for the rest of his life, his primary source of income was Engels’s
gifts. In London, Marx became a fixture in the reading room of the British
Museum, where he pored over government records, histories, and the writings of
other economists, gathering data to document his thought. There he wrote Critique
of Political Economy(1859) and began his magnum opus, Das Kapital(Capital;
1867). He also continued his political involvement, becoming the leader of the
International Working Men’s Association. He worked with the International until
factional strife, particularly conflict with the anarchist Mikhail Aleksandrovich
Bakunin (1814–1876), led Marx to dismantle the organization in 1872.
It wasn’t until Marx’s final years that he managed to gain some financial
stability and to live the life of a bourgeois Victorian gentleman. But these years
also brought tragedy and hardship of a different kind. Marx developed boils over
his entire body and used creosote, opium, and arsenic, among other remedies, in a
futile attempt to effect a cure. His beloved Jenny died in 1881 and his eldest
daughter two years later. Shortly thereafter, Marx himself developed bronchitis
and also died in 1883.
While a student in Berlin, Marx was influenced by Hegelian philosophy. Hegel
had understood historyas a progressive actualization of the Absolute, but he was
somewhat ambiguous about the future. One group of followers, the Old Hegelians,
argued in a reactionary way that this progressive actualization was now complete
and that Christianity was the Absolute Religion, Hegelianism the Absolute
Philosophy, and Prussia the Absolute State. Another group, the Young Hegelians,
led by Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), argued that the dialectical movement of history
was continuing. To move to the next stage in this historical dialectic, they sought to
expose the contradictions of the existing order.
