He spent thirty years writing a book that blamed capitalism for turning human labor into a commodity.
Karl Marx was born in Trier, Prussia, in 1818, the son of a lawyer who had converted from Judaism to Protestantism to keep his career.1 He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin before earning a doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841. By his late twenties, he had been expelled from Germany and France for his political writing.
In 1848, Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, a forty-page pamphlet that outlined a theory of history driven by class conflict between those who owned the means of production and those who sold their labor.2 The document sold modestly at first. Within a century, it had been translated into more than a hundred languages.
Marx spent most of his adult life in London, writing in the reading room of the British Museum. The first volume of Das Kapital appeared on September 14, 1867.3 Its central argument was that the capitalist system extracts surplus value from workers, paying them less than the value their labor creates, and accumulating the difference as profit.
The concept Marx called alienation described what happened when workers lost connection to the products of their own effort. In a factory system where each person performed one narrow task, the worker became, in Marx's analysis, a commodity like any other input.4
Marx never saw the remaining two volumes of Das Kapital in print. Engels assembled them from Marx's manuscripts and published them in 1885 and 1894.5 Marx died in London on March 14, 1883, stateless and largely impoverished. Nine to thirteen mourners attended his funeral at Highgate Cemetery.6
His analysis of how capital separates workers from the value they produce remains the foundational critique of industrial labor. A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that Das Kapital was among the most influential books American readers had ever encountered. In 2017, one hundred fifty years after its publication, scholars were still debating its predictions about the concentration of wealth.