And on the Left ...

In an impressive new biography, the historian Jonathan Sperber focuses on Marx as a 19th-century thinker, a man of his time and place; and one of Sperber’s concerns is necessarily Marx’s Jewishness.
Strictly speaking, of course, Marx was not a Jew: His parents were converts to Protestantism, and he declared his atheism from an early age. In the infamous essay he wrote when he was 25, “On the Jewish Question,” Marx declared that society must be freed from Judaism, which he identified with capitalism: a huckstering entrepreneurial worship of the false god, money. At the same time, Marx advocated that Jews be granted civil rights—so that they could then be divested of their Jewishness and become fully assimilated. Marx’s letters are strewn with derogatory references to Jews; though Sperber tries to make the case that Marx “took a certain perverse pride” in his Jewish ancestry, he can’t muster much supporting evidence. What we see instead are a series of slurs that today would certainly be called anti-Semitic.

It would somehow seem internally contradictory for Marx to have collected royalties on Das Kapital but according to this link he not only collected them but expected to be made rich:

He had thought that the writing of Das Kapital might make him rich, but the first volume sold only about 1000 copies. He wittily stated that the royalties from the book did not amount to enough to pay for all the cigars he smoked during its composition.

That sure was a witty statement.  From a man whose ideas were used to develop the greatest kiling machine the world has seen.  Hahaha.