Born on May 5, 1818 , in Trier Prussia (Germany) in to a petty-bourgeois Jewish family
converted to Protestanism in 1824.
father was a lawyer.
graduated High School in Trier, entered the university at Bonn later in Berlin
studied law, history and philosophy.
doctoral thesis 1841.

Joined young or "Left Hegelians" (with Bruno Bauer) who sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusions from Hegel's philosophy.

Marx moved to Bonn, hoping to be a professor. But Ludwig Feuerbach deprived of his chair in 1832 and in 1841 the government had forbade Professor Bruno Bauer to lecture at Bonn.

1842 radical paper called Rheinische Zeitung
in October 1842 Marx became editor-in-chief and moved from Bonn to Cologne.

The newspaper's revolutionary-democratic trend became more and more pronounced under Marx's editorship, and the government on January 1 1843 suppressed it. Marx was forced to resign the editorship before that date, but his resignation did not save the paper, which suspended publication in March 1843.

In 1843, Marx married, at Kreuznach, a childhood friend he had become engaged to while still a student. His wife came from a bourgeois family of the Prussian nobility, her elder brother being Prussia's Minister of the Interior during an extremely reactionary period - 1850-58.

In the autumn of 1843, Marx went to Paris in order to publish a radical journal abroad,

In September 1844, Frederick Engels came to Paris for a few days, and from that time on became Marx's closest friend. Shortly after meeting, Marx and Engels worked together to produce the first mature work of Marxism - The German Ideology. In this work, largely produced in response to Feuerbach's materialism, Marx and Engels set down the foundations of Marxism with the materialistic conception of history, and broke from Left Hegelian idealism with a critique against Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;" Marx wrote in an outline for the begining of the book, " the point is to change it."

In the mid to late-1840s both Marx and Engels took a most active part in the then seething life of the revolutionary groups in Paris (of particular importance at the time was Proudhon's doctrine), which Marx broke into pieces in his Poverty of Philosophy, (1847).

At the insistent request of the Prussian government, Marx was banished from Paris in 1845, considered by both governments a dangerous revolutionary. Marx then moved to Brussels. In the spring of 1847 Marx and Engels joined a secret propaganda society called the Communist League. Marx and Engels took a prominent part in the League's Second Congress (London, November 1847), at whose request they drew up the Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. With outstanding clarity, this work outlines a new world-conception based on materialism. This document analysises the realm of social life; the theory of the class struggle; the tasks of the Communists; and the revolutionary role of the proletariat -; the creators of a new, communist society.

On the outbreak of the Revolution of February 1848, Marx was banished from Belgium. He returned to Paris, whence, after the March Revolution, he went to Cologne, Germany, where Neue Rheinische Zeitung was published from June 1 1848 to May 19 1849, with Marx as editor-in-chief. The victorious counter-revolution first instigated court proceedings against Marx (he was acquitted on February 9, 1849), and then banished him from Germany (May 16, 1849). First Marx went to Paris, where he was again banished after the demonstration of June 13, 1849, and then went to London, where he lived until his death.

Marx's life was an extremely difficult, had it not been for Engels'; constant and selfless financial aid, Marx would not only have been unable to complete Capital

Following the downfall of the Paris Commune (1871) – of which Marx gave a clear-cut materialistic analysis of these events in The Civil War In France, 1871 – and the Bakunin cleavage in the International (See: Marx's conflict with Bakunin), the organization could no longer exist in Europe.

Marx's health became undermined He continued work on the refashioning of political economy and on the completion of Capital, for which he collected a mass of new material and studied a number of languages (Russian, for instance; Marx was fully fluent in German, French, and English)..

Marx's wife died on December 2, 1881, and on March 14, 1883, Marx passed away peacefully in his armchair. He lies buried next to his wife at Highgate Cemetery in London.