of trousers.... Such is a faithful picture of the family life of the Communist chief, Marx.... Money was always short. Little Franziska died before her first birthday. There was no money for the funeral. A pittance was obtained from a neighbor which, as Jenny says, “... paid for the small coffin in which my poor child now sleeps in peace.” Marx sometimes couldn’t go out of the house: his overcoats were pawned. His wife was sick, but he couldn’t call a doctor. There was no money for medicine. “For a week or more I have kept my family alive feeding them bread and potatoes, and it is questionable whether or not I will be able to scare any up today.” Another time he complained, “... the children are without clothes or shoes in which they can leave the house.” But Marx was stubborn. He kept plugging away, writing, reading, denouncing “capitalist” poverty, and letting his family starve. No wonder a remark, attributed to his mother, was made that instead of writing about capital it would have been better if Karl had made some. The main source of help was money from Engels, from a relative, or from writings. The “only piece of good news we have,” Marx wrote to Engels on February 27, 1852, “is from my ministerial sister-in-law [wife of the Minister of Westphalia], namely, the news about the illness of my wife’s indestructible uncle. If the brute dies now, I will be out of this mess.” Marx, in scornfully referring to his wife’s uncle as “indestructible,” meant the fellow simply would not die. On March 2, 1852, Engels replied, “My congratulations on the news of the old ... inheritance-obstructor’s illness and I hope that the catastrophe will finally take place.” If the mind of Marx was perverted and biased, it was at the same time sharp and keen. He was a deep student of history, philosophy, and economics. Sitting in his dingy apartment or in the British Museum, this German-born social theorist surveyed the world. In his arrogant pride he thought he could recast it on his own terms; through his writings and his revolutionary organizations he undertook to do so. “The Moor,” as his children called him because of his coal-black hair and eyes, developed as his first line of attack an atheistic view of the world. He joined two very old ideas: (1) That everything in the universe, whether a blade of grass, a human being, or society itself, is constantly changing and at the same time is in conflict. This is called _dialectics_. (2) That God doesn’t exist and the world is composed only of “living” matter. Hence, man is walking dust, without spark or image of his divine Creator. This idea is called _materialism_; hence, _dialectical materialism_. (For a fuller definition of this and other communist terms, see the Glossary.)