Champagne Communist, a toast to Engels. Carl

Karl Marx is the father of communism. Most people would agree to this statement. However there might be more to the story than first meets the eye: Marx didn’t write “Das Kapital” all on his own, neither applies to “The Communist Manifesto”. Ever at his side was Friedrich Engels, his lifelong friend and brother in spirit and frankly the latter is far more interesting than the former.
Our story begins in the 19th century Hanseatic city of Bremen: There is a strained atmosphere in cotton merchant Friedrich Engels senior’s abode, as he is having one of his regular rows with his son, Friedrich junior. It is the major disagreement about piety and morals between the two men, which triggers these conflicts. But this time is just one time too many and the father has had enough. Without prior notice, he withdraws his adolescent offspring from school and sends him to the factory for traineeship.
Later this will prove to have been the booster detonation for Friedrich Engels’ career and his influence on the course of human events. He neither had an academic education in philosophy nor in economics, yet he knew precisely what he was talking about, when discussing capitalism: after having been forced into the company by his father at age 18 in 1838, young Engels developed a keen interest in the market forces and began to read the works of Adam Smith. Overtaking the company management from his father simply wasn’t enough for him and thus he began to speculate on the stock market in 1870. As a self-made and self-sufficient bond broker living in London he used the money he had gained from selling his share of the company (12,500 Pounds, about 1,300,000 Pounds today) to buy various blocks of shares “for pleasure”. Yet he also needed the profit in order to finance his quite luxurious lifestyle: lobster salad, champagne and fox hunting are only a few of the pleasures he relished. When he died in 1895, he left a heritage of 22,600 Pounds (2,300,000 Pounds today), railway-shares and approximately 1000 bottles of assorted wines and champagnes. Surely if you were to give this character description to a member of the American Tea Party, none of them would allocate it to the “Father of Communism”.
Marxists and anti-Marxists alike always pay more, if not all, attention to Karl Marx.
However, when reading “The Communist Manifesto” one should realise that the detailed description of the bourgeois mercantilism most certainly could not have been provided by the left-wing philosopher Marx. Furthermore, the latter could not have survived without his friend: as Karl for one thing didn’t have a permanent job and for the other didn’t exactly have a knack for money, Engels had to finance Marx’s likewise excessively loose living with about half of his annual income. It is high time to clear Friedrich Engels’ name and finally acknowledge him. We don’t know whether he was the schizophrenic “Mr.Communist” and “Dr.Broker” or could agree the two. What we do know is that he not only finished most of “Das Kapital” after Marx’s death in 1883, but also provided the economic empiric knowledge for their theories that changed the world sustainably.