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HISTORY, SORT OF.

Little known historical facts, for good reason.

Bruce McDougal, Managing Editor

Karl Marx was a Nincompoop

Karl Marx

    Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany, in 1818. His dad, Heinrich Marx, was a lawyer which, I suppose, explains a lot. In 1835, Marx entered Bonn University to study law. Bonn U. apparently was a rip roaring party school. In no time, Marx had borrowed money from every available source, with no real capacity to repay. In a nutshell, this explains Marx's understanding of economics. It never improved.

    His dad showed up and bailed him out, thinking the boy was simply monetarily inept. He was shocked, however, to learn that his son had been wounded in a duel. One can't help but ponder how much better the world would have been if Marx had been killed rather than wounded. Anyway, his old man decided that his son was close to being classified as an idiot, so he had him transferred to Berlin University, a school not known for frivolity. It was there that Marx came under the influence of one of his lecturers, Bruno Bauer, whose atheism and radical political opinions often got him into trouble with the authorities. Bauer introduced Marx to the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, who had been the professor of philosophy at Berlin until his death in 1831. Marx was especially impressed by Hegel's theory that a thing or thought could not be separated from its opposite. For example, the slave could not exist without the master, and vice versa.

    Well, duh!

    Karl's dad died in 1838. Marx now had to earn his own living so he decided to become a university lecturer. No surprise there. He spent much of his time writing articles that outraged the authorities. He was forced out of Germany and moved to France where he was expelled and sent back to Germany.

The local authorities there shipped him back to France which expelled him to England. Along the way, he got married and fathered five kids. He and his wife lived in poverty, probably because he never looked for real work.

   He had a real contempt for the bourgeoisie and a fondness for the proletariat. A friend wrote a song called "To Hell With The Bourgeoisie" but it never caught on. Finally, Marx wrote "The Communist Manifesto", wherein he theorized that people would gladly work hard to support other people who were less inclined to work hard, or for that matter, work at all.