Hey! Thanks for the comment and call for introspection! I'm sure Marx would be overjoyed that people, nearly 200 years after his death, would still find his words so evocative.
However, I'd like to highlight what in your comment can be verified historically as true and what is a matter of conjecture or opinion; all in the Spirit of Marx's rigorous philosophical project!
What most unnerves me is this common belief that Marx never worked a day in his life. Simply untrue.
Marx did receive considerable patronage through his lifetime from his dear friend, Friedrich Engels, who inherited his father's textile industry. However, Marx was not without his own skills: he studied under GWF Hegel and received his PhD as well as his JD granting him the right to practice law as his father did; Marx, also, worked extensively as a journalist in his younger years, covering the politics of Europe and North Africa. Karl received the most financial assistance from Engels in his later years, when his health was steadily in decline and he had been blackballed in many job markets because of his politics.
Engels understood that Marx could contribute more to the world by focusing on completing his final work, Das Kapital, of which Engels completed the publication after Marx's death.
These questions of "unions" and "100s trillion dead" are still being determined and are still widely disputed among historians and the people who lived under regimes which called themselves "communist" or "socialist," as much as the same questions about the work of Adam Smith and Western Empire are, at present, hotly debated in our everyday life.
In the end, Truth will be exalted by the unending revolution of History. Men will live and work and die, and there will be still more men to be born, tear down what was built to start anew, and die themselves.
Thank you, again, for your comment. Keep thinking, keep doubting! And, in the spirit of the brotherhood of man, hope we can meet one day, whether in the fields or in the streets, to talk about how to improve what Marx said.
