I know these kinds of hypothetical questions are kind of boring, but I was curious what you guys that about this.
The situation is: I am a relatively wealthy person, with enough investment properties to rent out for income and live off. I decide to rent at a price below the market value and attempt to get tenants who are trying to live in the area but are not financially stable, so I can provide some sort of assistance by giving to them cheaper than they can get elsewhere.
I now don't have to work a single hour a day.
I use a full-time work schedule to do all of the following tasks (aside from other things like cooking, cleaning, exercise) (in no particular order):
- Manage the properties I own
- Study theory
- Attempt various worker organisation activities/union activities
- Participate in Communist Party meetings
- Partake in Communist Party activities
- Volunteer for numerous mutual aid groups
- Protest
- Write (online articles) and all the other sorts of activities. In other words, attempt to be a "professional revolutionary" as I believe Lenin put it.
Would this be a moral course of action? Or does living purely off the rent of workers outweigh dedicating basically my whole spare time to my nation's socialist movement?
Edit: Just for context I'm not actually in this position lol.
I am specifically saying it is the opposite.
You are right, there might have been better forms of communisms to evolve had marx not have been there at the start to get popular. However it is also likely that another lesser ideology would have risen up. Look at Germany, and how that experiment went.
Most importantly it isn't a great man case. Engles was not a man as such, he had the generational wealth and resources to make him the embodiment of a great deal of workers. Anyone of the thousand other people in his shoes could have done the same but they didn't.
We can't assume that history is so predetermined that people doing things is unimportant.