He became an international figure and his name “became synonymous throughout Europe with the revolutionary spirit symbolized by the Paris Commune.”

An opposition to Marx developed under the leadership of a Russian revolutionist, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin. Bakunin was a famed orator whose speeches one listener described as “a raging storm with lightning, flashes and thunderclaps, and a roaring as of lions.” Bakunin admired Marx’s intellect but was personally opposed to him because Marx had an “ethnic aversion” to Russians. Bakunin believed that Marx was a “German authoritarian and an arrogant Jew who wanted to transform the General council into a personal dictatorship over the workers.” Bakunin organized sections of the International for an attack on the “dictatorship” of Marx and the General Council. Marx didn’t have the support of a right wing and feared that he would lose control to Bakunin. However, he was successful at expelling the Bakuninists from the International and shortly, the International died out in New York.

During the next decade of his life, his last few years, Marx was beset by what he called “chronic mental depression” and “his life turned inward toward his family.” He never completed any substantial work during this time although he kept his mind active, reading and learning Russian. In 1879, Marx dictated the preamble of the program for the French Socialist Workers’ Federation and shaped much of its content. During his last years, Marx spent time in health resorts and dies in London of a lung abscess on March 14, 1883, after the death of his wife and daughter.

Marx’s work seems to be more of a criticism of Hegelian and other philosophy, than as a statement of his own philosophy. While Hegel felt that philosophy explained reality, Marx felt that philosophy should be made into reality, an hard thing to do. He thought that one must not just look at and inspect the world, but must try to transform the world, much like Jean Paul Sartre’s view that “man must choose what is best for the world; and he will do so.”

Marx is unique from other philosophers in that he chooses to regard man as an individual, a human being. This is evident in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. There, he declares that man is a “natural being” who is endowed with “natural [and] vital powers” that “exist in him as aptitudes [and] instincts.” Humans simply struggle with nature for the satisfaction of man’s needs. From this struggle comes man’s awareness of himself as an individual and as something separate from nature. So, he seeks to oppose nature.