Karl Marx (Trier, May 5, 1818-London, March 14, 1883) was a Prussian

philosopher, economist, journalist, intellectual and communist militant of Jewish

origin.
Karl Marx came from a middle-class Jewish family, he was the third of nine
siblings; his father was a lawyer recently converted to Lutheranism. He wanted
to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a field of
study more practical. He studied in the universities of Bonn, Berlin and Jena,
obtaining a doctorate in philosophy by Jena in 1841. From that time the thought
of Marx would be based on the dialectic of Hegel, although he replaced the
Hegelian idealism by a materialistic conception, according to which economic
forces constitute the underlying infrastructure that ultimately determines
"superstructural" phenomena such as the social, political and cultural order.
In 1843 he married Jenny von Westphalen, whose father initiated Marx in the
interest of the rationalist doctrines of the French Revolution and the early
socialist thinkers. Becoming a radical democrat, Marx worked for some time as
a professor and journalist; but his political ideas forced him to leave Germany
and settle in Paris (1843).
At that time he established a lasting friendship with Friedrich Engels, which
would be reflected in the close intellectual and political collaboration of both. He
was expelled from France in 1845 and took refuge in Brussels; finally, after a
brief stay in Cologne to support the radical tendencies present in the German
Revolution of 1848, he went on to lead a more stable life in London, where he
developed most of his written work since 1849. His dedication to the cause of
socialism made him suffer great material difficulties, surpassed by the financial
help of Engels.
Marx and Engels sought to make a "scientific socialism", based on the
systematic critique of the established order and the discovery of the objective
laws that would lead to its overcoming; the force of revolution (and not peaceful
conviction or gradual reforms) would be the way to end bourgeois civilization. In
1848, at the request of a clandestine revolutionary league made up of German
emigrants, Marx and Engels embodied such ideas in the Communist Manifesto,
a pamphlet of incendiary rhetoric set in the context of the European revolutions
of 1848.
Later, during his stay in England, Marx deepened his study of classical political
economy and, drawing on David Ricardo's model, built his own economic
doctrine, which he embodied in Capital; of that monumental work only published
the first volume (1867), while the remaining two were edited after his death his
friend Engels, putting in order the manuscripts prepared by Marx.

Starting from the classical doctrine, according to which only human labor
produces value, Marx pointed to the exploitation of the worker, which is evident
in the extraction of surplus value, that is, that part of the work not paid to the
worker and appropriated by the capitalist, the accumulation of capital arises. He
denounced the unjust, illegitimate and violent essence of the capitalist
economic system, in which he saw the basis of class domination exercised by
the bourgeoisie.
On this basis, Marx pointed to a socialist future understood as the full realization
of the ideas of freedom, equality and fraternity, as the fruit of an authentic
democracy. Marx's vital endeavor had been to criticize the bourgeois order and
to prepare for its revolutionary destruction, avoiding falling into the idealistic
reveries of which he accused the utopian visionaries; for that reason he did not
say very much about the way in which the socialist State and the economy had
to be organized once gained the power, giving rise to very diverse
interpretations between its adherents. These followers split between a social-
democratic branch increasingly oriented to the parliamentary struggle and the
defense of gradual improvements safeguarding the individual political liberties
(Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Friedrich Ebert) and a communist branch that
gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the establishment of
socialist states with planned economy and single-party dictatorship (Lenin and
Stalin in the USSR and Mao Tse-tung in China).
After the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a strong
flu that kept him poor health for the last 15 months of his life. Over time, he
contracted bronchitis and pleurisy that led to his death on March 14, 1883 in
London. He died as a stateless person; his relatives and friends in London
buried his body in London's Highgate Cemetery on March 17, 1883. There were
between nine and eleven people at his funeral.
Several of his closest friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht
and Friedrich Engels. Engels' speech included the following passage:
On March 14, at three minus four in the afternoon, he stopped thinking the
greatest thinker of our day. We barely left him two minutes alone, and when we
returned, we found him sleeping softly in his chair, but forever.

References
Biographies and lives. September 12 2017,
https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/m/marx_karl.htm.
Wikipedia, September 12 2017,
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifiesto_del_Partido_Comunista