Karl Marx
Read this biographical article about Karl Marx. It also explains a number of his views and gives context to the birth of his ideas about the social impacts of capitalism.
Biography
Later Life
Karl Marx Tomb in London
From 1850 to 1864, Marx lived in poverty only taking a job once. He and his family were evicted from their apartment and several of his children died, his son, Guido, who Marx called "a sacrifice to bourgeois misery" and a daughter named Franziska. They were so poor that his wife had to borrow money for her coffin.
Frederich Engels was the one who gave Marx and his family money to survive on during these years. His only other source of money was his job as the European correspondent for The New York Tribune, writing editorials and columns analyzing everything in the "political universe".
Marx was generally impoverished during the later period of his life, depending on financial contributions from close friend and fellow author, Friedrich Engels, to help with his family's living expenses and debts. Following the death of his wife Jenny in 1881, Marx died in London in 1883, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. The message carved on Marx's tombstone – a monument built in 1954 by the Communist Party of Great Britain – is: "Workers of the world, unite!" Marx's original tomb was humbly adorned.