Karl Marxthe reader in the reading room

He trained as a philosopher, went into journalism, and was expelled from Prussia, then France, then Belgium in turn. He reached London in 1849 expecting to stay a few months and stayed the rest of his life. For years the family lived in two rooms in Soho on money sent by Friedrich Engels, who worked in his father's Manchester cotton mill in part to keep them fed. Three of their children did not survive childhood.

He filed copy to the New-York Daily Tribune to cover the rent and read economics at the British Museum most days it was open. Volume One of Capital appeared in 1867 and sold slowly. The remaining volumes were assembled after his death by Engels, out of notebooks written in a hand so bad that Engels was one of the few people alive who could read it.

Whatever you make of the conclusions, the method stuck: that an economy is a set of relationships between people rather than a fact of nature, and that those relationships can be described. Nearly every argument about work, ownership and value in the century and a half since has been conducted either with him or against him.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.”

Karl Marx