The great German philosopher Karl Marx once said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Marx, often referred to as the father of Communism, was also a political economist and a revolutionary. Born in 1818, Marx was home-schooled until his teen years. He was set to study law but his law studies went astray when Marx developed a drinking problem. Marx did go on to earn his doctorate in 1841 in philosophy and joined the Young Hegelians, an atheistic group of journalists and philosophers who were prominent in Berlin at the time.

Toward the end of 1843, Marx moved to Paris, France where he wrote for the most radical of German newspapers, the Vorwärts, run by a secret society called League of the Just. Marx also met and began to collaborate with Friedrich Engels. Engels sparked Marx’s interest in the situation of the working class and in economics. Engels was a committed communist and converted Marx, who then documented his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which remained unpublished until the 1930s. When the Vorwärts celebrated the attempted assassination of the King of Prussia, all of the writing staff fled the country. Engels and Marx moved to Brussels.

Both the Marxes and the von Westphalens opposed Marx’s engagement and subsequent marriage to Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny was from a wealthy family, yet she and Marx lived in poverty and constant fear of creditors. Living this way helped Marx truly understand social classes and made him see classes in truly objective terms. Marx died in 1883 after an illness he developed after his wife passed away. He would never know how his thinking would affect the 20th century and how great his legacy truly is.

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