I must confess, I’ve always found Marx’s personal contradictions far more instructive than the reams of dense German prose in Das Kapital. Anyone can theorise about the inevitable triumph of the proletariat; it takes a truly remarkable mind to call for the abolition of the bourgeois family while quietly impregnating the maid and letting your wife pawn the silverware to buy bread.
Jenny von Westphalen, Marx’s wife, was no ordinary spouse. She’d married beneath her social rank for the sake of love – and in return got a husband who refused stable employment on the grounds that thinking was his job, while the gas bill remained resolutely unimpressed by his dialectics. Their home in London was frequently so poor in sanitation that one could almost expect Dickens himself to pop in and take notes.
And then, the affair. Ah, ‘Helene Demuth’ – or ‘Lenchen,’ as she was called – the long-suffering housekeeper. She was the quiet fulcrum on which the Marx household turned: cleaner, cook, nanny, confidante… and, in 1851, quite possibly the mother of Marx’s illegitimate son. Engels gallantly took the public blame, in what must be the most awkward case of ideological solidarity in history. Imagine having your best friend take credit for your own scandal just to keep the dream of proletarian purity alive.
As for money – well, Marx’s most reliable income stream wasn’t the revolution, but Engels’ pocket. Engels’ wealth came from the Manchester cotton industry, an enterprise that employed the very factory workers Marx saw as the oppressed vanguard of history. One could almost picture Marx railing against capitalist exploitation by day and gratefully pocketing its dividends by night.
If literature teaches us anything, it’s that hypocrisy is rarely dull. Marx’s life reads less like the grim inevitabilities of Capital and more like a Balzac novel – overrun with debt, intrigue, the noble poor, and one or two grubby secrets. And like any great tragicomedy, it’s tempting to imagine an alternate ending: one in which Marx, instead of urging the workers of the world to unite, urged himself to find a paying job and a moral compass.
But perhaps that’s the lesson – it’s all very well to plan the liberation of mankind, but if you can’t run a household without borrowing from your ideological enemies and upsetting the domestic order, you’ve rather undermined your own revolution before it’s begun. Marx dreamt of abolishing class; in practice, he simply inverted it – the servant became the mistress, the capitalist became the benefactor, and the proletariat (his wife and children) continued to toil in misery.
If there is a dialectical synthesis to be found here, it is that Marx was, in the end, his own bourgeois antagonist. The revolution may have been global, but the contradictions were deeply, embarrassingly local.
Wording 
I’ve often wondered how modern proponents of communism and marxism align his words with his actions. I know they do, but most of the time they are even more insane than Marx, so their arguments have no meaning. The power of Big Words, and Many of Them 😦
Spot on. Marxists today treat his hypocrisies like holy relics, polishing them up with jargon until they gleam with borrowed virtue. They’ll chant their catechism of ‘equity’ and ‘solidarity’ while living like petty aristocrats and demanding everyone else sacrifice. The whole thing boils down to intellectual cosplay: revolution as performance art, padded out with capital-letter abstractions and, of course, an inexhaustible supply of Big Words, and Many of Them.