Karl Marx, the founder of communism, is one of the most influential thinkers of all time — his memory revered by some and loathed by others.
Karl Marx, the founder of communism, is one of the most influential thinkers of all time — his memory revered by some and loathed by others.
Marx was born in Trier, Germany, in 1818 and educated at the universities of Bonn and Berlin.
In 1842 he became editor of the Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung. But his articles attacking the government caused a storm and he was forced to resign.
Marx moved to Paris, where he developed his communist beliefs after further studies in philosophy, history and economics.
During this period he struck up what was to be a lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels.
The two men discovered they had each formed almost identical views on the necessary conditions for a revolution by the workers.
They began a collaboration to spell out the principles of communism and to organise an international working-class movement dedicated to those principles.
In 1845 Marx was told to leave Paris because of his revolutionary activities.
He went to Brussels, where he began organising a network of revolutionary groups called Communist Correspondence Committees.
In 1847 these committees, which had been set up in European cities, formed the Communist League.
Marx and Engels set out a statement of principles, a document known as the Communist Manifesto after its publication in February 1848.
The manifesto, printed in London, was the first systematic statement of modern socialist doctrine.
Its central thesis is that history is dominated by the struggle between the oppressed working classes and their oppressors in the ruling class.
Marx came to the conclusion that the current ruling class — the capitalists — would be overthrown by a worldwide working-class revolution. This would then see the dawn of a classless society.
The manifesto’s publication came in the same year as revolutions in France, Italy, Austria, Hungary and Germany.
The Belgian government became alarmed and banished Marx. He went first to Paris, then to Germany.
In Cologne he set up a communist newspaper. In 1849 Marx was arrested and tried on charges of inciting armed rebellion.
He was acquitted, but expelled from Germany.
Marx returned to France for a few months but was barred from there too. He moved to London, where he spent the rest of his life.
In England Marx devoted himself to writing a number of works now seen as classics of communist theory, including Das Kapital.
For a while he was a correspondent for a New York newspaper, but he spent most of his time studying in the library of the British Museum.
Marx’s lack of income meant that he and his family lived in considerable poverty, often surviving on handouts from Engels.
In 1852 the Communist League dissolved and Marx set about forming another worldwide revolutionary group.
His efforts were rewarded in 1864 when the First International, a federation of workers’ groups, was established in London.
Marx was dogged by ill health in later years and died in 1883.
California gold rush
Gold was discovered close to the Sacramento River in early 1848 — causing a frenzy that would send more than 250,000 prospectors to California.
It began when Swiss-born trader John Sutter started building a sawmill on his land.
On January 24 his carpenter John Marshall found gold. Sutter and Marshall agreed to become partners and keep their discovery secret.
But news spread and they were soon besieged by thousands of fortune-seekers living in huge makeshift camps with little sanitation or law and order.
The prospectors quickly overran Sutter’s land, stealing his goods and livestock.
By the next year, 1849, about 80,000 “Forty-niners” had stampeded to the California goldfields.
By 1853 there were 250,000.
The gold finds were initially large, but the most easily-reached deposits were quickly exhausted.
In total nearly $2billion in gold was taken from the earth.
One of the by-products of the 1848 Gold Rush was the invention of jeans — designed as work trousers to be worn while prospecting.
For Sutter the discovery of gold was a disaster. The U.S. courts ruled he had no ownership rights on the land. By 1852 he was bankrupt.
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