Karl Marx's exile in London leaned on loans from the Philips family
The theorist who predicted capitalism would destroy itself had a surprising relative: his mother's sister was grandmother to the founders of Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. While Karl and Jenny Marx lived in exile in London, they often turned for loans to Lion Philips, a wealthy tobacco industrialist.
Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland. His father's line had supplied the town's rabbis since 1723, and his mother Henriette came from a well-off Jewish merchant family in the Netherlands. His father Heinrich, the first in his line to have a secular education, became a lawyer with Moselle vineyards; after Prussia annexed the Rhineland and rolled back Jewish emancipation, he converted to the state Protestant church to keep practising. Heinrich admired Kant and Voltaire and campaigned for a constitution in absolutist Prussia.
Karl took a philosophy doctorate from Jena in 1841, moved into radical journalism, and wrestled with Hegel and the Young Hegelians. In Paris he began his partnership with Friedrich Engels, and in Brussels the two wrote The Communist Manifesto for the Communist League in 1848. Expelled from Germany after that year's revolutions, he settled in London, filling notebooks later published as the Grundrisse and writing Das Kapital, whose volumes appeared between 1867 and 1894.
His theory, historical materialism, holds that societies change through class conflict. Under capitalism the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and the proletariat sells its labour for wages. Marx argued that capital accumulation breeds internal contradictions that would, as in earlier systems, bring the order down, with workers gaining class consciousness and founding a classless, stateless, moneyless society of freely associated producers.
In the First International he fought anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin and hailed the Paris Commune of 1871. He died in 1883 and lies in Highgate Cemetery. His ideas became the basis for Marxism-Leninism and the communist states of the 20th century, and he is counted among the chief architects of modern sociology. His work has been both widely praised and heavily criticised.
Source: Karl Marx
