Dyspeptic Codger

Friedrich Engels, the trust-fund kid who spent forty years bankrolling the man who called capitalism exploitation. Ironic. Engels inherited co-ownership of Ermen & Engels, a Manchester cotton mill, in 1864. He worked there as a partner, managed workers, collected profits, and wired money to Marx in London for decades. Marx, meanwhile, wrote about the immiseration of the proletariat from rented rooms his friend's textile workers paid for. Marx fathered a child with his unpaid housekeeper, Helene Demuth, denied paternity, and let Engels take the blame publicly for years. Engels obliged. The man was a doormat with a trust fund. Marx himself produced almost nothing marketable. "Das Kapital" Volume One appeared in 1867; he never finished Volumes Two and Three. Engels assembled them from Marx's notes after his death in 1883. The great theorist of historical inevitability couldn't finish his own book. Two men, one the son of a factory owner and the other a chronic debtor who borrowed from his own mother, invented a theory that claimed capital accumulation is theft. Engels accumulated capital. Marx stole from everyone around him, privately and personally, before proposing to do it systematically at gunpoint through the state. Every currency debased, every factory nationalized, every famine engineered under regimes waving their banner traces back to two comfortable Europeans who never once went hungry because prices rose, stood in a breadline, or dug a mass grave for dissidents.