Karl Marx | Economic/Political Philosopher
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KARL MARX (1818-1883)
Thanks to the crisis of neo-liberalism, Karl Marx is en vogue again. I was introduced to him by my friend Sanjay Nigam, when I was 14 and studying in school. Sanjay's father was then the Ambassador to USSR. He emphasized that Karl Marx was an Economist and not a politician.Sanjay knew Marx like the back of his hand.Karl is being talked in lecture room to coffee house, and he is smiling in his grave .....I told you so.
Marx, whose thinking on banks seems oddly contemporary these days. Marxist theorists recall that the financial crisis of 1857 in the U.S. inspired Marx to intensify his studies on finance capital and its cycles of boom and bust. Ten years later, he published Das Kapital, in which he described capitalism as anarchic, irrational and blind competition led by the frantic pursuit of profit and accumulation. In place of this doomed system, Marx argued, state-managed economy would be needed, based on a rational system of rules to eliminate poverty and social inequality. Twenty years before publishing Das Kapital, Marx had argued in The Communist Manifesto in 1848 that "history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
Karl attended the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Trier for 5 years, graduating in 1835, at the age of 17. The gymnasium curriculum was the usual classical one - history, mathematics, literature, and languages, particularly Greek and Latin. Karl became proficient in French and Latin, both of which he learned to read and write fluently. In later years he taught himself other languages, so that as a mature scholar he could also read Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Scandinavian, Russian, and English. As his articles in the New York Daily Tribune show, he came to handle the English language masterfully (he loved Shakespeare, whose works he knew by heart), although he never lost his heavy Teutonic accent in speaking.
In October 1835 Marx matriculated in Bonn University, where he attended courses primarily in jurisprudence, as it was his father's ardent wish that he become a lawyer. Marx, however, was more interested in philosophy and literature than in law. He wanted to be a poet and dramatist, and in his student days he wrote a great deal of poetry - most of it preserved - which in his mature years he rightly recognized as imitative and mediocre. He spent a year at Bonn, studying little but roistering and drinking. He spent a day in jail for disturbing the peace and fought one duel, in which he was wounded in the right eye.
