Talk:Karl Marx

House in Trier, Germany, where Marx spent his childhood and youth
Heinrich Marx, the father of Karl Marx, bought the small mansard roof building in Trier´s Simeonstrasse in 1819 when Karl was only one year old. The later socialist grew up here with his parents and five siblings and moved out aged 17 after his graduation from secondary school (Gymnasium). Yet as a grown up man, he returned to Trier several times to visit his relatives. Compared to today, little has changed in the historical city center of Trier: The main characteristics of the old town around the market place have been preserved and looked more or less the same back in the days when Karl Marx lived there. In particular the neighbourhood of the house to the Trier's most famous landmark, the Roman city gate Porta Nigra, is still impressive. In most parts unchanged to this day, it is likely that Karl Marx took the very same route to school every day that tourists can walk today. The house in Simeonstraße had a lasting impact on Karl Marx, especially since he had been educated here in home schooling until the age of 12. As an adult, Karl Marx returned to live with his family in this house during his visits several times. For example in 1841 after his doctoral studies in Berlin, Marx travelled back to Trier. The main reason for his return home was to be close to his long-term fiancée Jenny von Westphalen. Also in the following year, 1842, Karl Marx spent some months in the house in Simeonstraße 8 (then Simeongasse 1040) in order to take care of family matters.

Location of the house The former home of Karl Marx in Simeonstraße 8 (then Simeongasse 1040) looks rather unremarkable at the beginning of Trier's shopping promenade close to the famous Porta Nigra. Only a few minutes walk leads visitors to the bronze statue of Karl Marx by Wu Weishan – a present from the People's Republic of China to Trier.

Semi-protected edit request on 19 March 2024
Moses Mordecai Levi, otherwise known as Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818-March 14, 1883) was a German-Jewish philosopher, economist, historian, revolutionary, and journalist from Trier, Germany. Prism Steno Book (talk) 12:06, 19 March 2024 (UTC) — Urro[ talk ] [ edits ] ⋮ 13:43, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made.
 * I am not finding any reliable sources on this. The only ones I found were articles using his Jewish identity to attack him. Here is one very biased article that mentions Moses mordecai Levi https://www.news24.com/news24/karl-marx-and-his-hateful-dream-of-atheism-20120913
 * There is also a random reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/karlmarx/comments/riufhh/was_karl_marx_his_birth_name/
 * The only potentially legitimate source I found is this one where it says his paternal grandfather's name was Mordechai Levi
 * All the other sources are baseless conspiracy theories connecting him to the Rothschilds.
 * Please present reliable sources before starting a topic on talk pages. Frankserafini87 (talk) 21:06, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Critiques of Marx as a person.
Little to nothing about the personal character or contradictions of Marx as a human being. Seems one sided. Not looking for character assassination but a more balanced view. Redonefifty (talk) 21:48, 14 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Any suggestions on what to add? Please elaborate a bit more Frankserafini87 (talk) 21:09, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

‘International relations’ section contains some apparently misleading stuff
The article cites Kevin Anderson's Marx at the Margins for the claim that ‘Marx viewed Russia as the main counter-revolutionary threat to European revolutions’. But while chapter two of Anderson's book does indeed contain a section titled ‘Russia as a counter revolutionary threat’, if you actually read the section, you find Anderson saying:


 * 1) By the 1870s, Marx had dispensed with the idea of Russia as a counter-revolutionary threat that can be found in his writings of the 1850s (when Marx focused ‘on the absence of a Russian revolutionary movement [and] argued that the Russian village’s communal form undergirded a despotic social and political system.’ Anderson then gives a preview of a later chapter of his book: ‘Marx changed his position by the 1870s, when he began to see the Russian communal village as a possible center of revolution.’)
 * 2) While it is ‘true that Marx tended to portray Russia and its people in a one-dimensional, condescending manner in his mid-1850s writings,’ Marx ‘nowhere stooped to the type of ethnocentrism that one finds in these writings by Engels.’ By ‘these writings’, Andrson is referring to the text from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (beginning ‘To the sentimental phrases about brotherhood...’) that the present article attributes to Marx and Engels writing together.

~ Aingotno (talk) 18:47, 3 May 2024 (UTC)


 * See also Kristin Ross’s discussion of the literature (David Harvey, Raya Dunayevskaya, Teodor Shanin) on how the Paris Commune and Vera Zasulich, in different ways, challenged Marx to rethink his assessment of Russian agrarian communalism (ch. 3 of Ross's Communal Luxury). ~ Aingotno (talk) 19:04, 3 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Ok so what revision do you propose? Simonm223 (talk) 19:51, 3 May 2024 (UTC)
 * It's easier to criticize than to implement an improvement, and I don't have much leisure now for the harder thing. But if one were to take Anderson as a way in, one could organize a revision around a distinction and a periodization.
 * Distinction: Marx on 'peripheral' countries (e.g. India, Russia, Algeria, China), their relations to capitalism, and the significance of colonialism, and Marx on movements for emancipation based around ethnic/national identities (Jewish, Irish, Polish), on racism, and on the relationship between these things and working class organizing.
 * Periodization: I haven't gotten deep into Anderson, but his general suggestion is that in the 1840s and 1850s Marx held to a unilinear conception of world history and the transition beyond capitalism: you could only get to communism via capitalism (here Anderson includes what he calls Marx's 'qualified support', at that time, for colonialism). The passage currently included from the Stanford Encyclopaedia is focused on the 1853 article on India, in which, according to Anderson, Marx is expressing this unilinear perspective -- it could be contextualized within the periodization to show this.
 * More generally, the unilinear conception is (according to Anderson) also familiar to readers of the Communist Manifesto and most editions of vol. 1 of Capital ('The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.' -- 1867 preface). But Marx later shifted, Anderson says (and Ross, as I mentioned above, seems to concur), to a multiliniar conception of history and became much more open to the idea of transitions to communism that would not proceed via capitalism (Anderson argues that the French edition of Capital vol. 1, which was the last to be worked on by Marx himself, shows signs of this later perspective).
 * I'd say the periodization is more important than the distinction (the two sides of the distinction are clearly closely related), and alerting readers to the existence of the periodized way of interpreting Marx on these topics would be a great start.
 * I also wonder if the section title 'international relations' is itself misleading. It seems to imply that Marx was primarliy concerned with differences and conflicts between sovereign states, whereas he was primarily concerned with conflicts between classes and was an exponent of working class internationalism. Hence Anderson describes himself as studying Marx's writings 'on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-Western societies', not 'Marx on international relations'. Anderson's phrase is probably not perfect, but maybe something like it could work as a section title. ~ Aingotno (talk) 18:00, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
 * It's easier to criticize than to implement an improvement, but the former here has been much appreciated! Remsense  诉  19:06, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 6 May 2024
Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx and Henriette Pressburg. He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, an ancient city then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine.[15] Marx's family was originally non-religious Jewish but had converted formally to Christianity before his birth ("Death"). His maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx.[16] His father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education. He became a lawyer with a comfortably upper middle class income and the family owned a number of Moselle vineyards, in addition to his income as an attorney. Prior to his son's birth and after the abrogation of Jewish emancipation in the Rhineland,[17] Herschel converted from Judaism to join the state Evangelical Church of Prussia, taking on the German forename Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.[18] The Maelstorm 40K (talk) 12:15, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Red question icon with gradient background.svg Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Charliehdb (talk) 12:18, 6 May 2024 (UTC)