Karl Marx was born on May 5th, 1818, in Trier in the German Rhineland. His grandfather was a rabbi and his father was a successful lawyer who had his entire family baptized for business and social reasons. Marx studied law at Bonn and philosophy at the University of Berlin. While in Berlin he became acquainted with the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. At age twenty-four he became editor of a paper in Cologne, Germany but his radical ideas soon got him into censorship trouble, and he went to Paris, partly to escape arrest. With him went his beautiful young wife, Jenn

y von Westphalen, whom he had married in spite of both families' misgivings. Because of his uncompromising nature, he had few friends and in turn was devoted to his children and wife. One friend, however, remained faithful to him and paid his bills. He was Friedrich Engels, a textile manufacturer whose ideas were in complete accord with Marx's and who collaborated with him in his writing. Expelled from Paris in 1845, Marx lived for a time in Brussels, Belgium. While in Brussels Marx and Engels had written the pamphlet ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party', published in 1848. It contains the simplest expression of Marx's beliefs and the ideas in it were later developed at length in the three volumes of Marx's major work, ‘Das Kapital' (Capital). This also was written in collaboration with Engels, who published the last two volumes after Marx's death. The first volume appeared in 1867, soon after which he later returned to Paris but was expelled once again in 1849. Marx then went to England where he made his home in London for the remaining thirty-four years of his life. He lived in wretched poverty and spent day after day studying in the British Museum library.

A man without a mission is a lost man, or so Marx believed. Considering he lived in poverty for most of his adult life because he was unable to persuade people and governments to employ his theories, he was still determined never to give in to the theories which were forced upon him and society. His ambition, like other philosophers, was to influence politics in what he saw as a positive way. Unfortunately, the milestones that he set during his life were either small or unworthy to note. Dismissal from cities and countries was a regular occurrence in his early adult life; consequently he was seldom able to form a solid geographical foundation where he could promote his ideologies and institute a revolution for the people, which was his aspiration.

The article used as reference for the majority of this paper was written by Patricia Springborg in 1984, titled ‘Karl Marx on Democracy, Participating, Voting, and Equality’. The 1980’s was the last decade of the cold war between the United States of America and the Former Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. Anti-communist sediment was at an all time high in the United States, mainly to propaga

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