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In 1863, Chancellor of the Exchequer William Ewart Gladstone gave a budget speech to Parliament in which he commented on the increase in England's national wealth, and added, "I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that it was confined to the class who are in easy circumstances." But, Gladstone added, the wealth was improving the lot of the British laborer, too.
In 1864 Marx organized the International Workingmen's Association, later called the First International, as a base for continued political activism. In his Inaugural address, he misquoted Gladstone. He claimed the Chancellor had said, "This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property." The actual quotation was well known and the discrepancy was soon employed to discredit the International.
To this day, anti-Marxists such as the journalist Paul Johnson invoke Marx's reversal of Gladstone's meaning as evidence of clear falsification and a more general dishonesty.
The International survived that controversy, but collapsed in 1872 in part because of the fall of the Paris Commune, and in part because many members turned to Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism. In London Marx also dedicated himself to historical and theoretical works, the most famous of which is the multivolume Das Kapital (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy), the first volume of which was published in 1867. Throughout the London period of Marx's life his family were generally impoverished and depended on generous contributions from Engels to get by.
Marx died in London in the year 1883, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. The remaining volumes of Capital were published by Engels posthumously from notes.
Marx's wife, Jenny von Westphalen, came from an aristocratic background. Her uncle was Lion Philips, owner of the famous Philips company. They had many children, several of whom died young — The Marxes' daughter Eleanor (1855-1898), born in London, was also a committed socialist and helped edit her father's works. Jenny Marx died in December 1881.
In general, Marx's thought has been influenced by two often contradictory elements: determinism and activism. On the one hand, Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically, and derive laws that explain and predict the course of history and the outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx conclude that a communist revolution is inevitable. On the other hand, Marx famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it," and dedicated himself to trying to change the world. Consequently, some followers of Marx conclude that dedicated revolutionaries must organize Social Change. Karl Marx on a 100 East German mark note
Marx's philosophy, which he called dialectical materialism, is largely based on Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically, through a clash of opposing forces; whereby a thesis and an antithesis produce a synthesis, the higher form of the original thesis. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is charactarized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real. Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against existing status quo. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, unlike him, Hegel was an epistemological idealist and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in historically materialist terms. He believed that, in this respect, Hegelianism stood on its head, and he wished, as he said, to set it upon its feet.
Marx acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism, was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity , Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man, and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real, and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.
The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was Engels' book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict, and to see the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution.
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