Karl Marx's experience as a campaigning newspaper editor in the early 1840s was crucial to his development into the leading activist and theorist of the European revolutionary movement, which exploded just after the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. This session will give an overview of Marx's earliest writings in the Rheinische Zeitung, a paper financed by liberal capitalists in the Prussian Rhineland. More importantly, it will outline the changing nature of European society at this time.