It was then that Marx cemented his lifelong friendship with Frederica Engel’s. In 1849 Marx moved to London, where he continued to study and write, drawing heavily on works by David Richard and Adam Smith. Marx died in London in 1883 in somewhat impoverished surroundings. Most Of his adult life, he relied on Engel’s for financial support. At the request of the Communist League, Marx and Engel’s authored their most famous work, “The Communist Manifesto,” published in 1848.
A call to arms for the proletariat-?”Workers of the world, unite! “-?the manifesto set down the principles on which communism was to evolve. Marx held that history was a series of class struggles between owners of capital (capitalists) and workers (the proletariat). As wealth became more concentrated in the hands of a few capitalists, he thought, the ranks of an increasingly dissatisfied proletariat would swell, leading to bloody revolution ND eventually a classless society.
It has become fashionable to think that Karl Marx was not mainly an economist but instead integrated various disciplines-?economics, sociology, political science, history, and so on-?into his philosophy. But Mark Beluga, a noted historian of economic thought, points out that Marx wrote “no more than a dozen pages on the concept of social class, the theory of the state, and the materialist conception of history’ while he wrote “literally 1 0,000 pages on economics pure and simple. L According o Marx, capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. Communism was the inevitable end to the process of evolution begun with feudalism and passing through capitalism and socialism. Marx wrote extensively about the economic causes of this process in Capital. Volume one was published in 1867 and the later two volumes, heavily edited by Engel’s, were published posthumously in 1885 and 1894. The labor theory of value, decreasing rates of profit, and increasing concentration of wealth are key components of Mar’s economic thought.
