Karl Heinrich Marx was a revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and an economist. He was born on May 5th, 1818 in Trier, Rhineland, Germany, or Prussia at that time. He was born into a professional family with deep Rabbinic roots. His father, Heinrich, at the time was a successful lawyer. Baptized at the age of 6, he was not greatly influenced by religion; rather, it was the radical social policies during the Enlightenment that influenced him greatly. The reasons for this was partly because of his Jewish background, which exposed him to prejudice and discrimination, that caused him to question the role of religion in life, thereby fuelling his interest for a change in his society. In October 1836, he left for the University of Bonn, where he joined the "Young Hegelians- who were more or less, disciples of Hegel's philosophy. Over time, he began to reject the "Young Hegelians- as being sufficiently less materialist and realist. After moving to Paris and writing his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, he already saw himself as a communist. He saw "socialism- as being a pacific term veering more towards Utopian ideas, while "communism- was a more militant word, implying the revolutionary concept of the abolition of private property, echoed by the Parisian Commune back in 1793. It was after his meeting with Engels in the famous Café le Régence in Paris that The Communist Manifesto' (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) and later Capital' (Das Kapital) was written. It was mainly from these, and other works of Marx and Engels that lead to the body of thought and belief now known as Marxism, which formed the basis of socialism, with communism as the final stages of socialism. .
Marxism, or scientific socialism is the name given to the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that provides the theoretical basis for the struggle of the working class to reach the higher form of human society, which is socialism.
