The Marxist position is not about 'equality' or wealth distribution, and there are at lease two pieces of work by Marx criticizing those concepts explicitly. Ma

The Marxist position is not about 'equality' or wealth distribution, and there are at lease two pieces of work by Marx criticizing those concepts explicitly. Marxist thought is a critique of the production process of capital, and does not concern the wealth of individuals at all - Marx himself went to pains to distance himself from that interpretation of his work. So I'm not sure where the presumption that a socialist must give away his wealth or live modestly comes from. Marx and Engels saw the first step of revolutionary activity being to understand and investigate, bit they were also part of various practical organisations such as the IWA, and the Manifesto was itself an on-the-nose propaganda document. Why doesn't the Queen give away her throne for the good of her country? Because the boost to the economy from the tourism generated around it helps even more. As it turns out, we can imagine that the world would have been very different and the pair of theorists much less consequential had they spent their energies on philanthropy rather than burning the midnight oil at the British Library.