In reality, the founders, leaders, and key figures in communism did not work strenuously in factories or on farms. They inhabited the comfortable libraries and homes of the upper middle class.
Karl Marx was born to a wealthy business class family in 1818. His chief confederate was Friedrich Engels, who was born in 1820 to an even wealthier family, and whose inherited wealth ensured that neither he nor Marx would ever need to labor to earn their bread.
Another communist leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, was born 1870 to middle class family. His father was a school administrator. Lenin studied Greek and Latin, and attended the university after completing high school. Many other communist leaders had similar backgrounds: claiming to fight for the lower classes, they actually emerged from comfortable middle class or even upper class settings. As historian John Stormer writes,
The story of communism is a story of contradictions. Despite Marx’s call for the workers of the world to unite, communism has never been a working class movement. Its strength is in the intellectual and thought centers of the world.
Both Joseph Stalin in Russia and Fidel Castro in Cuba, between them responsible for mass executions and torture, never worked at manual labor.
Modern political communism, unlike its ancient nonstate forms, claims to be an uprising of the blue-collar factory or agricultural class, but is in reality an exercise in social engineering carried out by university-educated sociopaths.
