Karl Marx – The Man. You know him as the author of the Manifesto. But behind the manifesto there was a man – an envious, deceitful and lazy one – constitutionally averse to productive work. The theory is just a result of that. It is the man, elevated into a system. Do you recognize any of this in the socialists and communists around you? Read on. 1. His father Heinrich was a hardworking lawyer from Trier who wrote his son letters in the tone of a man watching a slow-motion disaster he cannot stop. Not angry – exhausted. "Is your heart in accord with your head, your talents?" he wrote in 1837. "Is that demon heavenly or Faustian? Will you ever be capable of truly human, domestic happiness?" The tone was like: "My heart often sinks when I think of you and your future." The despairing correspondence of a disciplined, hardworking man who cannot understand what is wrong with his brilliant, promising, and comprehensively useless son. A loving father watching his brilliant son consume money, accumulate debts, drink heavily as a student, produce poetry of remarkable mediocrity, and demonstrate a comprehensive inability to translate intelligence into anything useful. A father asking his clever son whether he is a visionary or a catastrophe. The answer turned out to be both. Heinrich died before seeing the full scope of the disappointment. He was spared the Manifesto. 2. He never worked. The foundational fact about the man who devoted his life to the theory of labor. For most of his adult life he was kept by Friedrich Engels – son of a factory owner, manager of a Manchester textile mill – who spent his days doing the precise capitalist management the theory condemned, so that Marx could theorize about it in comfort. Engels also paid the rent, covered the debts, funded the cigars, and at one point claimed paternity of Marx’s illegitimate child – born to the family’s unpaid servant – to protect his friend’s reputation. The servant was not paid. The child was not acknowledged. The theory of "liberation" was produced in conditions of domestic exploitation that would have embarrassed a Victorian mill owner. If you remember Rousseau you’ll notice a pattern here… 3. Helene Demuth – cooked, cleaned, raised the Marx children, and managed the household through decades of poverty that was chronic not because of capitalism but because Marx could not hold a job and would not try. Her specific working-class life was spent in unpaid service to the man theorizing about her liberation. He did not liberate her. He did not pay her. He fathered her child, denied it, and let Engels take the blame. The secret held until after both men were dead. Engels confessed on his deathbed. 4. The debts are almost comic. In one year at university he spent 700 talers – his father noted with incredulous precision that "the richest spend less than 500." Expelled from Belgium, France, and Prussia. Ended up in London, stateless, in damp apartments, pawning the family silver, writing to Engels for money with the regularity of a man who has made extracting funds from a friend into an art form. Several of his children died young in conditions produced by his inability to earn. Marx noted the deaths in letters and continued the manuscript. 5. The envy is the key to everything. A brilliantly clever man who felt the world had not given him his due – who watched others succeed and experienced their success as an offense requiring theoretical explanation. The result: the most sophisticated intellectual expression of resentment ever produced. A complete systematic account of why the successful are guilty, why their success is stolen, and why the man who has not succeeded is the true repository of value. A theory of envy with footnotes. Nietzsche called this ressentiment. He was describing the same type, from a different angle, at roughly the same time. 6. He died in 1883. Eleven people attended the funeral. Engels compared him to Darwin – generous, since Darwin spent twenty years accumulating evidence before publishing and Marx spent twenty years accumulating debt. His wife had died two years earlier, exhausted. His servant had spent a lifetime unpaid. His illegitimate son grew up unacknowledged. The Manifesto was by then on its way to inspiring experiments that would kill approximately a hundred million people. 7. The Manifesto was not written from the bottom. It was written by a clever man funded by a factory owner’s son, who had never done a day of proletarian labor, who exploited the people closest to him, whose father despaired of him, and whose considerable talents were deployed entirely in explaining why the world owed him more than it had given. Look around you. The envious intellectual who has never built anything but knows exactly what is wrong with everything others have built. The "man of the people" who cannot manage his own affairs. The revolutionary funded by the people he condemns. You have met this person. You may have voted for him.

Pol Pot – What Happens When a True Believer Takes Power. He learned it in Paris. And he thought it was for real – not just the moral posturing of irresponsible French intellectuals in their Parisian cafés. That was the difference. And the difference was two million dead. Most communist leaders were opportunists. They used the ideology to seize power, and once they had it, the ideology bent to serve the power. Stalin was a gangster with a philosophy. Mao was a warlord with a manifesto. They killed millions – but in the service of control, not conviction. Pol Pot was a true believer. And that made him the most dangerous kind. In the early 1950s, as a scholarship student in Paris, he encountered the French Communist Party, the Marxist study circles, the cafés of the Latin Quarter where the ideas circulated among students who would never face the consequences of taking them seriously. The French intellectuals produced these ideas from comfortable apartments – moral posturing, civilizational performance, the gesture of opposition without the risk of implementation. They never intended it to be taken literally. Pol Pot took it literally. He returned to Cambodia with the complete theory in his head and the absolute conviction that it was correct. And when he took power in April 1975, he did not wait. Within days – within days – he ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh. Two million people expelled from the capital on foot, at gunpoint, regardless of age or condition. Hospitals emptied. Patients wheeled out on their beds into the street. Because the city was the problem – the center of capitalism, corruption, bourgeois contamination. An honest communist works in the fields. So everyone would work in the fields. Then he abolished money. Completely. Overnight. The most total implementation of Marxist economics ever attempted – no currency, no markets, no private property, no trade. The economy would be organized by the Angkar – the Organization, which knew what people needed and would provide it. This is what the theory says. He did what it said. Year Zero. The past abolished. The educated eliminated – they carried the old consciousness in their heads. The family destroyed – it created loyalties that competed with the collective. Glasses confiscated – wearing them suggested literacy, which suggested education, which suggested bourgeois contamination. The killing fields were not a deviation from the theory. They were its conclusion, applied by a man who had read the texts carefully and believed them completely. Between 1975 and 1979, approximately two million Cambodians died – a quarter of the entire population. Executed, starved, worked to death. The French intellectuals who produced the ideas that formed him were never held responsible. Sartre continued to write. The cafés continued to operate. In the universities of Paris and Berkeley and Columbia, professors explained that Cambodia was a deviation, an excess, a misapplication. It was not a deviation. It was the experiment. The answer to the question: what happens when you take the theory seriously and have the power to implement it without constraint? The intellectuals who taught him went home for dinner. He went home to Cambodia. That is the difference between posturing and belief. And it is why ideas have consequences – especially the ones that are never meant to be taken seriously.