Marx did not really grow up rich, his father Heinrich was a lawyer and the Marx family enjoyed a relatively prosperous, but solidly middle-class life. This is not to say that his bürgerlich background had no impact on his views. One of the priorities for middle-class Germans of this era was Bildung, a fusion of education and philosophy that would produce a complete individual. This stress on education and philosophy did imprint itself upon Marx's thought. The young Marx's Gymnasium education stressed classical education and much of his writings are littered with phrasings from antiquity. The middle-class social milieu of the 1820s and 30s also brought Marx into contact with various revolutionaries of all stripes since many of the German states at this time looked upon the emerging middle classes with great suspicion. Marx's tenure at the university brought him into contact with Hegelian philosophy and Hegel's disciples, the Young Hegelians. In short, Marx's middle-class background imparted to him a network of personal connections with other like-minded philosophers and radicals and the conviction that ideas not only help people understand the world, but also to change it.

Marx's great collaborator, Friedrich Engels, did grow up fairly rich. His father was a pioneer of German industrial development in the Wuppertal valley and Friedrich traveled to Manchester, then the epicenter of industrialization, to observe English manufacturing. Engels would later write "in the factory of my old man . . . it is just too dreadful not only to remain a bourgeois, but, still more, to be a manufacturer, a bourgeois actively opposing the proletariat.” Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England outlined the squalor and misery caused by men like his father. Engels swam in the same intellectual circles as Marx, but was much more uneasy with his background. Engels enjoyed champagne and fox-hunting and other social pursuits of the upper classes, but was more intellectually at home with the middle-class intellectualism typified by Marx, and politically self-identified with the oppressed of society. His father was a strict Protestant and their relationship was incredibly strained. Some of Engels's stances and actions stood in direct opposition to his father. For example, one of Friedrich's long-time paramours was an Irish working-class woman, Mary Burns, whom he met in Manchester. The younger Engels refused to marry, claiming marriage was a social institution, which deeply angered his father. During the 1848 Revolution, Marx hoped that he could gain the financial support of the elder Engels, but the industrialist responded "rather than giving us a thousand talers, would like to fire a thousand rounds of grapeshot at us.”

Sources

Hunt, Tristram. Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.

Sperber, Jonathan. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. New York: Liveright Pub. Corp, 2013.