Karl Marx
The exiled German journalist whose theory of history became the official doctrine of a third of humanity within seventy years of his death.
Karl Marx spent most of his adult life as a broke exile in London, writing in the British Museum reading room and filing newspaper columns to pay the rent. About a dozen people came to his funeral in 1883. Seventy years later, governments claiming to follow him ruled the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and much of Southeast Asia. No other private individual's ideas have been turned into state power that fast or on that scale.
He was born in Trier in 1818 into a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism so his father could keep practicing law. He trained as a philosopher, moved into radical journalism, had his newspaper shut down by the Prussian censors, and was then expelled from France and from Belgium. In Paris in 1844 he met Friedrich Engels, a factory owner's son who had just written a devastating study of working conditions in Manchester and who would support him financially for the rest of his life.
The argument
The Communist Manifesto came out in February 1848, days before revolution broke out in Paris and spread across the continent. It is a pamphlet, not a theory. The theory is in the later work, above all the first volume of Capital in 1867.
The core claim is that the way a society produces things, meaning its technology and who owns what, shapes its politics, laws, and ideas rather than the other way around. Change how goods are made and everything else eventually follows. From this comes the claim that history moves through conflict between classes, and that every system creates the class that will destroy it, the way feudalism produced the merchants and industrial capitalism produced the factory workers.
The economic engine is what Marx called surplus value. Workers sell their time for a wage but produce more value than the wage costs, and the difference is profit. Competition then forces owners to squeeze out more of it. Marx expected this to concentrate capital in fewer hands, produce repeated crises of overproduction, and eventually break a system whose production had become collective while its ownership stayed private.
The Manifesto is also one of the most admiring descriptions of capitalism ever written. Marx credits the factory owners with creating more productive power than every previous generation combined, tearing up every old tradition, and forcing a single world market into existence. He is describing globalization in 1848.
Right, wrong, and enormously consequential
He was right that capital would concentrate, that markets would go global, that crises would keep happening, and that class interest shapes politics more than politicians admit. He was wrong that workers in industrial countries would get steadily poorer, and wrong about where the revolution would happen. It came not in industrial Britain or Germany but in agricultural Russia and peasant China, and it took Lenin's additions, a disciplined vanguard party and a theory of imperialism, to make the doctrine work there.
That gap is most of the political history of the twentieth century. Marx wrote almost nothing about how a socialist state should actually be run, which left his successors free to fill in the blank however they liked. What they filled it with ranged from Scandinavian social democracy to the Gulag.
Today his political program has few takers and his analytical vocabulary is everywhere: the idea that economic structure drives ideology, that history has material causes, that class interests hide inside neutral-sounding institutions. Where a government still cites him officially, as China does, it is a claim to legitimacy rather than a description of what it does.