The Lives of Marx and Engels: Founders of Communism

Few intellectual partnerships have shaped modern political thought as profoundly as the one between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Together, they developed the theoretical framework of communism – a system of ideas that went on to influence revolutions, governments, and social movements across the globe. But before they became the architects of Marxism, Marx and Engels were young men navigating family expectations, academic pressures, and the turbulent politics of 19th-century Europe. Understanding their lives helps us see how personal experiences, economic realities, and philosophical encounters converged to produce one of history’s most consequential ideologies.

Early life of Karl Marx 🔗

Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland. He was one of nine children born to Heinrich Marx and Henriette Pressburg. Both of his parents came from long lines of rabbis, but his father – a lawyer by profession – converted from Judaism to Lutheranism around 1817. This conversion was largely a practical response to Prussian laws that barred Jews from practising law and entering higher society. Young Karl was baptised at the age of six.

Marx’s father was an educated man who admired Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Voltaire and was active in advocating for political reform in Prussia. This liberal household environment had a clear effect on Marx’s intellectual development from an early age.

Education at Bonn and Berlin 🔗

Marx attended the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Trier from 1830 to 1835, receiving a classical education centred on history, mathematics, literature, Greek, and Latin. He became particularly skilled in French and Latin – languages he would read and write fluently throughout his life.

In October 1835, at the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled at the University of Bonn to study law, as his father wished. However, his time at Bonn was marked more by student life than serious academics. He joined a poets’ club that included political radicals, got into a duel, and even spent a night in jail for disorderly conduct. His grades suffered, and his father decided to transfer him to the more rigorous University of Berlin.

It was at Berlin that Marx’s intellectual trajectory changed decisively. While he had enrolled to study law, his attention quickly shifted to philosophy. He attended lectures by Eduard Gans, a progressive Hegelian scholar, and was drawn into the orbit of the Young Hegelians – a circle of radical thinkers who used Hegel’s dialectical method to critique religion, politics, and society. Marx’s early fascination with Romantic poetry and literature gave way to a deep engagement with Hegelian philosophy, which would permanently shape his worldview.

In 1841, Marx completed his doctoral dissertation on the differences between the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. He submitted it to the University of Jena rather than Berlin, partly because his radical reputation among the Young Hegelians would have hurt his prospects in Berlin.

Marx’s transition to communism 🔗

With a doctorate in hand but no realistic path to an academic career – his radical associations had seen to that – Marx turned to journalism. In 1842, he became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper based in Cologne. Marx used the paper to publish sharp critiques of the Prussian government and its censorship policies. His editorials were so provocative that the authorities sent a special censor from Berlin to oversee the newspaper. Even dual censorship could not restrain Marx’s pen, and by early 1843, the Prussian ministry ordered the paper shut down.

This experience pushed Marx further toward radicalism. In the summer of 1843, he married Jenny von Westphalen – the daughter of a liberal Prussian aristocrat – and the couple moved to Paris. The French capital was at that time the centre of socialist and communist intellectual life in Europe.

The Paris years and the turn to communism 🔗

Paris proved to be transformative. Marx immersed himself in studying political economy and the history of the French Revolution. He also began associating with communist workers’ societies made up of French and German labourers. Though he found their theoretical ideas crude, he was deeply moved by their solidarity and sense of brotherhood.

It was during this period that Marx wrote the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, a set of notes that laid out early ideas on alienated labour under capitalism. He also contributed to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Yearbooks), co-edited with Arnold Ruge. In these writings, Marx began to articulate a materialist critique of Hegel and of religion, drawing heavily on the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued that theology should be replaced by a focus on human, material existence. Marx accepted Feuerbach’s materialism but would soon go beyond it, arguing that changing ideas alone was not enough – what mattered was changing the real, material conditions of society.

By the time he was expelled from France in 1845 by the Guizot government, Marx had become a committed communist.

Friedrich Engels: the collaborator 🔗

Friedrich Engels was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Prussia (now part of Wuppertal, Germany), into a prosperous family deeply embedded in the textile industry. His father, Friedrich Engels Sr., co-owned the cotton manufacturing firm Ermen & Engels, with operations in both Barmen and Manchester, England. The family were devout Pietist Protestants who valued discipline, hard work, and piety.

Engels grew up in what was known as the “German Manchester” – the Wupper valley, an early centre of industrialisation. From his earliest days, he was exposed to the stark contrasts of industrial life: polluted rivers, dangerous factories, and the vast gap between the wealthy merchant class and the impoverished workers.

From business apprentice to radical thinker 🔗

Engels’s father pulled him out of secondary school a year before graduation, insisting he prepare for a career in business. From 1838 to 1841, Engels worked as a clerk at an export firm in Bremen. But even while fulfilling his commercial duties during the day, he was privately reading radical literature – particularly the works of the “Young Germany” literary movement and, soon after, the philosophy of Hegel.

Engels also began publishing political and literary essays under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald, likely to spare his conservative family embarrassment. Among his earliest pieces were the Letters from Wuppertal, written at age nineteen, which offered a vivid account of industrial exploitation and religious hypocrisy in his home region.

After completing a year of voluntary military service in Berlin in 1841, Engels was drawn into the Young Hegelian circle known as “The Free.” He attended Schelling’s inaugural lecture at the University of Berlin and was so outraged by Schelling’s rejection of rationalism that he wrote three anonymous pamphlets defending progressive Hegelianism. It was also around this time that Engels met Moses Hess, a radical thinker who convinced him that the logical outcome of Hegelian philosophy was communism – and that England, with its advanced industry and growing working class, was the country where revolution was most likely to occur.

Manchester and the discovery of working-class misery 🔗

In late 1842, Engels’s father sent him to Manchester to gain experience at the family’s cotton mill. What Engels found in Manchester changed him permanently. The city, with its roughly 350,000 inhabitants, was the epicentre of industrial Britain – a place of smoking factory chimneys, twelve-to-sixteen-hour work shifts, overcrowded slums, and appalling public health conditions.

Guided by Mary Burns, an Irish factory worker who became his lifelong companion, Engels saw the human cost of capitalism firsthand. He recorded his observations in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), a book that described in vivid detail the unsanitary streets, degrading living conditions, and dangerous factories that defined working-class life. The book became hugely influential and remains a key text in the history of labour studies.

Their lifelong partnership 🔗

Marx and Engels first met briefly in Cologne in 1842, but their real partnership began in Paris in 1844. Engels stopped in the city on his way back to Germany from Manchester, and the two men spent ten days together, discovering that they shared the same fundamental outlook on philosophy, economics, and politics. That meeting marked the start of a collaboration that would last nearly four decades.

Building a shared philosophy 🔗

Their first major joint work was The Holy Family (1845), a polemical attack on the idealist philosophy of their former Young Hegelian allies. This was followed by The German Ideology (written 1845-46, but not published in their lifetimes), in which Marx and Engels fully articulated their materialist conception of history. They argued that the way a society produces its material goods – not abstract ideas or religious beliefs – is the driving force behind historical change.

Both men became active in the Communist League, a revolutionary organisation that grew out of earlier workers’ societies. The League commissioned them to write a programme setting out its principles and goals. Engels drafted two preliminary versions in a catechism format, but he suggested they abandon that structure and write something more forceful. The result was the Communist Manifesto, published in February 1848.

The Communist Manifesto and revolution 🔗

The Manifesto was primarily written by Marx but drew heavily on Engels’s earlier drafts and their shared ideas. It opened with the now-famous declaration that all of history is the history of class struggles and ended with a call for workers of all countries to unite. The pamphlet laid out a vision of capitalism as an inherently exploitative system destined to be overthrown by the working class, leading eventually to a classless society.

Its publication coincided with the wave of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. Marx and Engels threw themselves into the upheaval. In Cologne, they edited the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, using it to promote revolutionary ideas. Engels even participated in armed combat during the uprisings. But when the revolutions were defeated, both men were forced into permanent exile in England.

Engels as Marx’s financial lifeline 🔗

After the failure of 1848, Marx settled in London, where he lived in poverty with his growing family. Engels made a difficult but decisive choice: he returned to the family firm in Manchester, resuming the business career he detested, specifically to provide Marx with the financial support he needed to continue writing.

For nearly twenty years, Engels led what he himself described as a double life – a respectable cotton merchant by day and a clandestine communist by night. He sent Marx regular payments, initially small sums but eventually much larger amounts. When Engels sold his partnership in 1869, he received enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life and to provide Marx with an annual income that allowed him to focus on his magnum opus, Das Kapital.

Their near-daily correspondence during the Manchester years – more than a thousand letters – reveals the depth of both their intellectual exchange and personal friendship. Engels supplied Marx with information on business and economics, ghostwrote hundreds of articles for him in the New York Daily Tribune, and served as a sounding board for his evolving theories.

Legacy of Marx and Engels 🔗

Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867, a dense and comprehensive critique of the capitalist economic system. He spent the remainder of his life working on the second and third volumes but never completed them. Marx died in London on March 14, 1883, at the age of sixty-four.

Engels as editor and guardian of the legacy 🔗

After Marx’s death, Engels took on the enormous task of editing and publishing the unfinished volumes of Das Kapital. Working from Marx’s often-difficult manuscripts and notes, he completed and published Volume 2 in 1885 and Volume 3 in 1894. Without Engels’s editorial work, these foundational texts of Marxist economic theory might never have seen the light of day.

Engels also continued to produce important works of his own during this period, including The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), which drew on Marx’s research notes to analyse the historical roots of gender inequality and private property. He wrote new introductions to reprinted editions of the Communist Manifesto, making the text accessible to new generations of socialists across Europe.

In his final years, Engels served as the foremost authority on Marxist theory, corresponding with socialist leaders and movements across the continent. He died in London on August 5, 1895, at the age of seventy-four.

A partnership without parallel 🔗

The Marx-Engels partnership was remarkable not just for its intellectual output but for its personal dynamics. They came from different class backgrounds – Marx from a middle-class professional family, Engels from the industrial bourgeoisie – yet they arrived at the same revolutionary conclusions. Where Marx was the deeper theorist, Engels was the more accessible writer and the practical organiser. Engels’s willingness to sacrifice decades of his life to business he despised, solely to fund Marx’s work, speaks to the extraordinary commitment that bound them together.

Their combined body of work – from the Communist Manifesto to Das Kapital, from The Condition of the Working Class in England to The German Ideology – remains foundational reading in political philosophy, economics, and sociology. Whether one agrees or disagrees with their conclusions, there is no denying that Marx and Engels fundamentally changed the way the world thinks about class, labour, and the structure of society.

What do you think? Can a partnership between two people from vastly different social classes produce genuinely universal ideas about equality? And to what extent do the personal experiences of thinkers – their hardships, exiles, and compromises – shape the philosophies they leave behind?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Marx
2. https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Marx.html
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Young-Hegelians
4. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/marx/eng-1869.htm
5. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ludwig-Feuerbach
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels
7. https://www.britannica.com/money/Friedrich-Engels
8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1447947/
9. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/marx-and-engels-publish-communist-manifesto