Karl Marx

German political economist and revolutionary — capital, class and critique

International Workingmen's Association (First International) · Germany · d. 5 May 1818 (Trier, Prussia) — 14 March 1883 (London)

Left Prussia in 1843 and was expelled from France and Belgium in turn before settling in London in 1849, where he read in the British Museum and buried three children in poverty. Capital appeared in 1867; Engels assembled the second volume from his notes in 1885 and the third in 1894. He died on 14 March 1883 and is buried at Highgate Cemetery.

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Record

Life: 5 May 1818 (Trier, Prussia) — 14 March 1883 (London)
Country: Germany
Period: 19th century
Affiliation: International Workingmen's Association (First International)
Areas: Political economy, Political philosophy, Social theory, History, Critique of ideology
Major works: The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)
The Communist Manifesto (1848)
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
Capital, Volume I (1867)
The Civil War in France (1871)
Capital, Volume II, edited by Friedrich Engels (1885)
Critique of the Gotha Programme (1891)
Capital, Volume III, edited by Friedrich Engels (1894)
Key concepts: Historical materialism, Surplus value, Commodity fetishism, Class struggle, Alienated labour, The mode of production, Ideology, The reserve army of labour
Influenced by: G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Henri de Saint-Simon, Friedrich Engels
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Karl Marx
Wikipedia, Karl Marx

Stories

Contemporary Philosophers

Varoufakis's technofeudalism and the claim that it is still capitalism

Yanis Varoufakis says capitalism is dead and that 'cloud capital' now extracts rent from digital fiefs rather than profit from markets. We set out the technofeudalism thesis as an argument to be tested, then weigh the strongest objections from Morozov, Snow and Gane, and Varoufakis's 2026 reply to his Marxist critics.

David Harvey, Karl Marx, Shoshana Zuboff

Newsroom3 October 2026

Agenda

The ownership question: property, labour and the economics of artificial intelligence

Strip away the talk of minds and machines and a plainer question sits underneath artificial intelligence: who owns the compute, the data and the models, and who keeps the returns. The labour evidence is more modest than the valuations assume, and the disagreement among economists is real.