Currently reading his biography (he's the most famous person of my hometown :), good timing to see an article about him on HN! Since Engels always was "the sec

Currently reading his biography (he's the most famous person of my hometown :), good timing to see an article about him on HN! Since Engels always was "the second Violine" (behind Marx), he could get away with a hedonistic lifestyle without endangering the communistic movement too much. While many may describe him as a typical "Champagnersozialist", IMO in Manchester he realised that the right action of an individual is not enough to introduce a widespread change: The owenism he experienced in Manchester was the proof (a socialist working class movement in England whose founder tried to establish good working conditions in his factories). With this in mind, it was simply more effective for the movement to let Engels finance Marx even by running one of those capitalistic cotton factories they criticized & being financed by his family. (Instead of directly rejecting any participation in the capitalistic lifestyle (including its hedonistic pleasures) and thus having no food on the table, which means that Marx could not have just worked on "Das Kapital"). TL;DR; by doing effective altruism benefitting the communist movement, he meant to help many more workers than by living by example.