Karl Marx: A Research Paper - Essay Example

Marx familiarized and became a proponent of the philosophy of the then-prominent Young Hegelians, an intellectual society whose primary focus was the application of Hegel's dialectical method. The group produced radical critiques of religion, Christianity in particular. (Blunden) Marx received a doctorate in philosophy in 1841. In 1842 Marx left university and moved into journalism. That same year he eventually became the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, which was shut down by the Prussian government the following year because of the newspaper's conflicts with the government.

Marx left for Paris, France because he could no longer stay in Germany due to his radical political statements. (Lenin) In Paris he became the editor of the Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher, and once again started producing his radical political works. He also developed his relationship with Friedrich Engels in Paris, with whom Marx would collaborate for most of the rest of his life. Engels interested him in communism, and it was in Paris that Marx became a communist. Once again because of his political views, Marx and Engels were forced to leave Paris, and they left for Brussels, Belgium. (Lenin) In Brussels Marx studied history and developed what would be later called historical materialism.

Marx and Engels joined the Communist League, a group in which they became the most important theoreticians. The two would later write The Communist Manifesto. (Lenin) Marx was later arrested and . He returned to Paris, and finally to London, where he would stay for the rest of his life. In London he once again joined the Communist League. (Lenin)Marx and his family lived in poverty in the early 1850's. Of their six children only three survived. Marx depended on Engels' income from his family business, and on his writing as a foreign correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune. (Lenin) For the remainder of his life, Marx acted as a consultant of many Socialist party activities.

He died on March 14, 1883, at the age of 65. The works of MarxIn 1845, Marx, together with Engels, produced The German Ideology, where they expounded on their theories on history, which were basically of materialistic conception ("The Philosophy," 2003). They contended that social and economic forces governed human thought. Their method of analysis they called dialectical materialism, in which social changes are brought about by conflicts in historical impetuses. In 1848, Marx and Engels produced The Communist Manifesto, which Engels stated were actually largely composed Marx's ideas.

In it he declared that all history was the history of class struggles. Under capitalism, the struggle between the working class and the business class would end in a new society, a communist one (Wolff, 2003).Marx also analyzed religion in extensive detail, calling it the 'opiate of the people' in Critique of Hegel's Philisophy of Right. Marx contended that religion is the natural response of humans to the pervasive alienation found in a materialistic society; he claimed that it would be upon the attainment of socialism that religion would be discarded (Wolff, 2003).

The writings of Ludwig Feuerbach were an influence on Marx. Feuerbach wrote that humans invented God as a projection