11 December 2006: who was Karl Marx?

The whole idea of socialism can be expressed very simply: No-one should
go hungry. No-one should be rich, and no-one else should have to be poor. People should live equally: bringing the skills they can each provide, taking whatever they need. Such ideas are hardly new. Two hundred years ago, such dreams were common: people would hope for some religious leader or some king who could be persuaded to institute freedom in their country. The rest of the world would surely follow.

Many of the great European writers of the nineteenth century were socialists: including Charles Fourier, the radical feminist, and Saint-Simon, who wanted to take the land from its owners, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who declared 'all property is theft'. Yet each of them lacked a group of people who could make their vision happen.

The genius of Karl Marx was to show that the new industrial society of his day was bringing a new class into existence, the working class. The workers, he argued, were the first people in history who could make socialism real. So who was Marx?

Born in 1818, Karl Marx grew up in a small town on the border between France and Germany. He lived in the Rhineland, one of the richest areas in Europe at that time, the cradle of industry, and a home to migrant workers from all over Europe.

Marx's family were Jews: although his father converted to Christianity when Marx was young. Their house was full of books, and Marx dreamed for many years of becoming a teacher in some university. He left Trier, travelling first to Bonn and then to Berlin.

At that time, Berlin was known as one of the world's centres of philosophy. But it was also a despotic society, where ideas were censored and no-one could be entirely free. The young Marx fell under the influence of a generation of older students, who were political activists against their ruler, Friedrich Wilhelm, the King of the Prussians.

By the early 1840s, Marx had begun to dominate his circle of friends. He had also started to develop his adult thinking. He no longer believed that philosophy alone could solve the problems of the world. He became a socialist. He began to look for allies.

Weavers went on strike in neighbouring Silesia. Marx witnessed their struggle: and the ferocity of the rich who opposed it. Marx edited a radical newspaper. He used the paper not just to criticise the wealthy, but to demand solidarity with the workers. The rich had his paper closed. Marx was forced to move again, settling eventually in London.

There are two great books in which Marx set down his developed thinking. The first was the Communist Manifesto. Published at the start of 1848, this pamphlet summarises in just a few thousand words the whole of Marx's philosophy. 'There is a spectre haunting Europe', he wrote, 'the spectre of Communism'.

Marx argued that his own society was being shaped by revolution, which was replacing the countryside with towns, and farming with industry. The whole world was being sucked into one giant market. All older ways of living, all ways or organising society, were falling apart. He called the new ruling class, the 'bourgeoisie'.

Above all, capital was creating a global class of workers (he used the word 'proletarians'); people who had the same interests whether they lived in New York, Johannesburg or Cairo, whose interests were different from their rulers', who 'had nothing to lose but their chains'.

When revolution broke out in Germany in 1848, Marx returned home with his co-thinker Frederick Engels. They settled in the city of Cologne, where Marx edited the revolutionary paper, and Engels was a general in the revolutionary army. The left was defeated, however, and many people jailed: Marx lived the rest of his life in exile.

In London, he devoted the rest of his life to writing Capital, a great book which set out to explain the entire inner workings of the capitalist system. The manuscripts were never completed: although one volume was published in Marx's lifetime, and two later.

Capital opens with a question. Where does all the wealth in our society come from? Marx argued that its source was labour. Why does one product sell for more than another? Because more time has been spent creating it: more working planning it, more time making it. All profit, he argued, was extracted in surplus from the workers.

Marx also spent many years trying to create a workers' international: an alliance of socialist parties in every country. He lived to see the Paris Commune of 1871, when workers briefly took power, but the revolution was defeated and thousands killed. He lived to see also the rise of Marxist parties all around the world.

How much of his message is still relevant? We live undoubtedly in a capitalist society. The rich still have their power because they own or manage capital; and the majority still have nothing to sell but their labour.

Marx was the first thinker to predict that capitalism would become a global system. But even he, the first prophet of globalisation, would be astonished at the rise since then of a global working-class. There are more workers just in South Korea today than there were in the whole world when the Communist Manifesto was written.