Midwife to the Red Ghost

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

He was born in Trier, Prussia, in 1818 — a moody boy to a Jewish lawyer father who had converted to Lutheranism for survival. No one would have imagined then that this restless child, forever scribbling, forever defiant, would midwife an idea that would haunt empires.

Karl Marx did not create the working class. But he gave it language, rage and prophecy.

As a young man, Marx was everything a revolutionary shouldn’t be — fond of fine wine, exasperatingly academic, and hopeless with money. But beneath the disorder of his life, burned a moral clarity that would define an age.

At the University of Berlin, he abandoned poetry for philosophy, and philosophy for politics — not through debate, but through disillusionment.

Capitalism, he believed, was not just an economic system — it was a religion of exploitation, the factory floor its altar. In the libraries of London, buried in debt and damp manuscripts, he laboured over Das Kapital — a dense, ruthless dissection of industrial greed. He called religion the “opium of the people”, but his true enemy was profit without humanity.

And yet, he was no cold prophet. In a cramped Soho flat, with six children (three of whom died in poverty), a devoted wife, and the occasional loaf of borrowed bread from Friedrich Engels, Marx lived his beliefs — painfully, defiantly.

It was in 1848, with the Communist Manifesto, that he summoned the Red Ghost. His words would echo through picket lines and prison walls for generations.

But history is not always kind to its prophets.

His critics accused him of romanticising class struggle, of ignoring liberty in his pursuit of equality, of birthing ideologies that became dictatorships. And yet, to reduce Marx to Stalin’s shadow is to mistake the storm for the seed.

He died in 1883, largely unnoticed, buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Just eleven people attended his funeral. But the Red Ghost he birthed did not sleep.

In the 20th century, it marched across Russia, China and Cuba — sometimes as revolution, sometimes as ruin. And today, as inequality deepens and the working class fractures once more, his ghost stirs again.

Karl Marx remains maddening, misunderstood, misused — but never irrelevant. He was not a god. He was not a villain.

He was a man who tried to read history backwards, and write the future forwards. And in that, he succeeded — dangerously, gloriously, eternally.

Features