Engels and Marx:
Fathers of Communism

Alfredo Lopez

English 1A
Professor Snyder
12 May 2014

“In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.” –Karl Marx
This single sentence is the foundation on which Karl Marx and Frederick Engels founded Communism. Their mission was to free the oppressed from the powers of economy and religion.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary Communism is “A political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.” Communism was formed to show that the working and poor class, often called proletarians or “blue-collar” workers, was the foundation for any strong country, that without these lower members of society, a country would fall apart. Marx wanted to show the world this so he laid out a plan for Communism, with ten essential points.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier in western German, the son of a successful Jewish lawyer. Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, but was also introduced to the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach. In 1841, he received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. In 1843, after a short spell as editor of a liberal newspaper in Cologne, Marx and his wife Jenny moved to Paris, a hotbed of radical thought. There he became a revolutionary communist and befriended his lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Expelled from France, Marx spent two years in Brussels, where his partnership with Engels intensified. They co-authored the pamphlet 'The Communist Manifesto' which was published in 1848 and asserted that all human history had been based on class struggles, but that these would ultimately disappear with the victory of the proletariat.
In 1849,