The dumbest part is that even though Marx didn't tour factories himself - his constant collaborator Engels did!
Engels' family owned and operated factories and made him manage them. Plus Engels had an Irish working class lover/life partner who showed him her circles' perspective. AND Engels' original journalistic accounts of working and living conditions in industrial England are some of the best of the time. Together, Marx and Engels understood industrial capitalism so well that they were too ahead of time in their predictions - the same level of development hadn't reached France and Germany when they were commenting on it, much less the rest of Europe. But eventually it did.
The dumbest part is that even though Marx didn't tour factories himself - his constant collaborator Engels did!
Engels' family owned and operated factories and made him manage them. Plus Engels had an Irish working class lover/life partner who showed him her circles' perspective. AND Engels' original journalistic accounts of working and living conditions in industrial England are some of the best of the time. Together, Marx and Engels understood industrial capitalism so well that they were too ahead of time in their predictions - the same level of development hadn't reached France and Germany when they were commenting on it, much less the rest of Europe. But eventually it did.