Matt Christman made an important point about Marx: he may have frequently asked Engels to act as his sugar daddy but he also willingly regularly did shit that wasn't fun like reading, writing, and studying in order to develop what would become Marxist theory, as part of an effort to actually guide the people doing praxis by organizing in the streets and factories where they could. Some element of discipline went into Marx's work, even if he lived like a lumpen leech otherwise.
The man would have spent countless hours in dim candlelight poring over countless pages of printed spreadsheets and boring-ass economics and philosophy texts trying to figure out the basic philosophical, political, and economic principles we take for granted, with little available to entertain himself during his downtime other than binge drinking and getting sucked into the analog Victorian-era equivalent of pointless and distracting arguments with twitter cranks. All of this with no electricity, no calculator, no computer to make his work more efficient. This is the man who wrote the first volume of Capital, under these relatively miserly conditions.
Most of the shitposters and gamers who think they're like Marx but don't do their homework are delusional posers, stealing valor from the miserable Marxist academics somehow juggling their miserable scholarly work and being members of living, breathing socialist organizations on a meager budget. At least the lumpen armchair Marxists read plenty of theory.
I also think the op view kind of dismisses Jenny Marx and her massive contribution. Engles wasn't always there.
Jenny was, read the stuff Marx couldn't, wrote and edited much of his stuff, hustled up money, raised way too many children, kept correspondence up with revolutionaries around the world, and made sure Marx actually stopped drinking and got the work done. And she was a countess, she could have married and never worked a day of her entire life. Failing that, she could have left Marx and gone to her relatives.
Wow. Way to set the relationship bar almost unattainably high. Thanks a lot, Jenny.
...Fuck, forgot Marx was also a deadbeat dad. Remember folks, he was brilliant and insightful but not a role model.
I wouldn't call Marx a deadbeat. A bit of an insensitive layabout at times, and his pattern of frenzied short term crunching followed by fallow periods seems to indicate some kind of attention disorder. But his children all remembered him fondly, and the poverty was pretty much entirely due to Marx's political views preventing more well-paid work.
Maybe he could have taken a job, brought in more money. But I can hardly blame him for sticking to his principles, and Jenny seems to have supported his decision.
There's also the often repeated possible illegitimate child of his maid that Engels claimed parentage of, though I point out there's literally no evidence of that aside from Marx's wife being away at the time (which would also have been required for Engles to have a relationship) and a bunch of belated gossip. Could have actually been Engles, could have been Marx, could have been a third party.
Matt Christman made an important point
"Marx wasn't a useless failson like Vaush" is important???
It's an important point to make to useless failsons who think they're like Marx but haven't put any actual work in. Which would include a lot of chapo listeners, so Matt was just addressing his audience.
So that makes us Engles? (well, people who listen to the podcast. so not me. or, come to think of it... anyone else on this site for that matter.)
