So, while he was sleazing off the working people, you know, the ones he says he was there to help, his wife and numerous children were starving.
Here's a man totally out of touch with the self-industrial, moraly-responsible, self-sufficient people, which he was the totally opposite.
Excerpt:
The Cerberean Conception
Since it's almost become a cliché to observe that Marxism is dead in practice -- that is, if you overlook its authoritarian half-life in China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam -- but thriving in theory, we can at least ask exactly what that theory is, a question that returns three very different answers:
Some should get all of the pie. This is classic manual-labor theory of value Marx: Since the manual laborers produce all wealth (somehow), anyone else who has any wealth must be leeching off that labor. Every slice of the pie belongs to "the workers" who baked it, i.e., all wealth must be redistributed to the proletariat. This is why Communism eventually adopted the hammer-and-sickle as its emblem. (An embarrassing choice, by the way, for what those tools really represent is the investment of capital. A truer symbol of the manual-labor theory would have been simply a pair of dirty hands, a fact ironically reflected in the Bolshevik workers' term of derision for the Party's nonworker majority: beloruchki -- "white hands.")
All should get some of the pie. This is Critique of the Gotha Program Marx: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Now those slices belong, not to the bakers, but to the hungry, i.e., wealth must be redistributed from the proletariat to the poor -- and other cases of "economic necessity." (An earlier variant of this was the proposal that each should get an equal slice of the pie, with everyone working equally and compensated so.)
None should get any of the pie. This is the Marx of The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. "[W]e don't want a communist society," paraphrases a Green disciple, "where people greedily redistribute the wealth of capitalism; we want a society where the craving for wealth has been overcome by a more fully realized state of human being." The pie belongs to no one, and all slices must be redistributed away from anyone and everyone. The people will no longer want (or even need?) pie either here on earth or in the sky, for their "obsession with Having" will be superseded "by a fulfilled condition of Being."
The upshot of all this should have been obvious from the start: Marx sired a monster whose three heads each pull in a different direction. What was going to tear itself apart with "contradictions" was not market capitalism but this tripolar concept of "socialism." We are to believe -- what? That each one of these incompatible theses is an example of how "[j]ust as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic matter, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history"? That the assembler of this pile of inconsistencies -- who obscurantly dismissed critical analysis as "not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is the enemy, [whom] it wishes not to refute but to destroy" -- was a scientific theorist? That Je ne suis pas marxiste! was ever anything other than the cry of a schizophrenic zealot?
We cannot let it go without note that while Darwin never falsified data, Marx did -- chronically. As early as the 1880s, Cambridge scholars demonstrated that Marx manipulated source materials "with a recklessness which is appalling ... to prove just the contrary of what they really establish." One example will suffice. He prophesied: "In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery ... at the opposite pole." But did the statistics for wages actually show workers growing poorer as their employers grew richer? Not at all, so in 1867's Das Kapital he jettisoned the contemporary figures and passed off as contemporary those from 1850.
We behold in Marx a man who evidently could accept being contradicted by himself, but not by reality. So war dieser Mann der Wissenschaft. An epitaph appropriate for those who exalted him, in contrast, remains elusive...
PIE? DID I HEAR SOMEONE SAY PIE?
“Its amazing that people listen to Marx not realizing the man was a welfare case living off the money donated to him and generated from industrialization.”
The reality is that Marx, like so many who want to ‘change’ the world, was just a guy who felt personally ‘wronged by life’ in some manner and advocated to overthrow the system because he wasn’t personally happy. If he were so concerned with the ‘downtrodden’ masses, why didn’t he volunteer his services to help them? What about his wife and children? Just another lazy pissed off leftist with resentment against those who worked hard and achieved.