C GALLOWAY clearly knows little or nothing about Karl Marx (1818-83), the greatest thinker the world has yet produced (Question Marx, Wirral Globe, January 30, 2020).

In answer to his sarcastic question about Marx's struggle for survival all his revolutionary life, I refer him to Franz Mehring's biography.

For the benefit of your readers, rather than a clearly jaundiced Galloway, here is a brief synopsis.

Marx was a brilliant Journalist, as well as the creator of Marxism, the most devastating, unrivalled critique of capitalism ever produced, and the key to understanding how human society has developed, and will develop in the future - providing Trump and his Pentagon hawks do not trigger a nuclear World War Three.

He was involved in writing for and editing radical newspapers in his native Germany, but was forced to flee persecution in 1843.

He went to Paris and likewise earned a meagre living from journalism until the French Government ordered him to leave in 1845.

He spent the next period of his life in Brussels (1845-48) and Cologne (1848-49), participating in the Revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848.

During this time he also co-authored The Communist Manifesto, with his life-long friend, co-thinker, and comrade, Friedrich Engels (1820-95).

This pamphlet reads as fresh and relevant today as it did when it was released in 1848.

Marx again had to flee political persecution in Cologne and came to his final port of call, England, in June, 1849, where he lived in poverty with his wife, Jenny, and children until his premature death at only 64 years of age, having been plagued by ill-health most of his all too brief life due to political persecution, and resulting hardship.

The critical financial help he received from Engels enabled the family to avoid the Workhouse, but certainly did not provide for a life of luxury.

Whilst in London, Marx continued his journalistic work for the New York International Tribune, amongst other publications, but focused most of his time on writing his magnum opus, Capital, the first volume of which was published in 1867.

Volumes 2 and 3 were published posthumously thanks to Engels' invaluable work of collation in 1893 and 1894.

Whilst adding immeasurably and immortally to human understanding of capitalism, Marx was also an active Revolutionary, founding and leading the First Communist International from 1864 to 1876.

Such was the grinding poverty in which Marx lived most of his life, only three of his seven children with his wife, Jenny, survived to adulthood.

He asked for nothing from the capitalist class, against whom he waged war all his adult life, and he got nothing in return, other than what was due to him for his journalism and his books.

Unlike the legions of his bourgeois critics, who fear Marx in the same way as Dracula fears the crucifix, Karl Marx is a giant and immortal of history, whose ideas win new adherents all over the world to this day, and will continue to do so until the triumph of world Socialism to which he devoted his entire life and work.

As Marx stated: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it."

James Roberts,

Wallasey