Marx Dies in Obscurity: His Ideas Reshape the World

Eleven people attended the funeral. Karl Marx died in his armchair on March 14, 1883, at his home in London, a stateless exile who had been expelled from Germany, France, and Belgium. He was sixty-four, plagued by boils, liver disease, and chronic bronchitis. His life's work, Das Kapital, had sold poorly. His family had lived in grinding poverty for decades, surviving on loans from Friedrich Engels and occasional journalism. Marx had spent his intellectual life in the reading room of the British Museum, where he developed a theory of history and economics that would reshape the twentieth century more than any other body of thought. The Communist Manifesto, written with Engels in 1848, argued that all of human history was the story of class struggle and predicted that capitalism would inevitably destroy itself through its own internal contradictions. Das Kapital, published in three volumes between 1867 and 1894 (the final two volumes edited posthumously by Engels), provided the theoretical framework. Marx argued that capitalism extracted surplus value from workers, that the accumulation of capital concentrated wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and that periodic crises of overproduction would eventually radicalize the working class into revolutionary action. During his lifetime, Marx's ideas influenced European socialist movements but remained marginal in mainstream politics. He feuded bitterly with rival socialists, was expelled from the International Workingmen's Association he helped found, and spent his final years in declining health, unable to complete his planned additional volumes of Das Kapital. Within forty years of his death, a revolution fought in his name would topple the Russian Empire. Within seventy years, governments claiming to follow his theories controlled a third of the world's population. Marxism shaped the ideologies of China, Cuba, Vietnam, and dozens of liberation movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The obscure exile who died in a London armchair became the most consequential political philosopher since the Enlightenment.