As is my habit at the gym, I grab whatever random magazine catches my eye before I start my 30-minute ordeal on the exercise bike. A couple of day ago, that random magazine was the Aug. 15, 2009 issue of The Economist, in which I found a book review of “Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels.” Of the two men (the other, of course, was Karl Marx), Engels was the one who actually knew something about business, being the son of a cotton-mill owner whose holdings included a factory in Manchester, England, where Engels was sent to work as a young man.

Two passages in the review caught my eye. Here’s the first:

Engels left Manchester to work with Marx on the “Communist Manifesto” and the two of them spent the late 1840s criss-crossing Europe to chase the continental revolutions of the time, ending up in England. Marx had started work on “Das Kapital,” but there was a problem. He had by then acquired an aristocratic German wife, a clutch of small children, and aspirations for a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, but no means of support.

Engels … offered an astoundingly big-hearted solution: He would go back to Manchester to resume life in the detested family cotton business and provide Marx with the money he needed to write his world-changing treatise. For the next 20 years Engels worked grumpily away, handing over half his generous income to an ever more demanding Marx.

And here’s the second:

Tall and handsome, Engels had a taste not just for ideas but for the good life — wine, women, riding with the Cheshire hunt — and seems to have felt little sense of irony that all these things were paid for by the proletariat’s back-breaking labour.

Boy, sometimes the punch line just writes itself, doesn’t it?

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