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originally published in the declaration, april 8, 2004.

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And now, an excerpt from Karl Marx's unpublished personal journal:

[Editor's note: We have tried our best to translate Marx's ramblings into English verbatim, in order to render comprehension of the passage as difficult as possible.]

[Editor's note: To be read as a heavily German-accented interior monologue.]

March 15th, 1844 --Paris, France

I thought that with my wife at home, tending to our first child, who has fallen ill, I could finally delve into the flaws of the capitalist economy, exposing the very roots of society's oppression and violence, providing a theory for the proletariat that will carry them through a socialist revolution into a communist utopia.
Instead, Engels has moved into my living room. I told him he could sleep on my chaise lounge because his wife kicked him out of their flat after she found him smoking opium with two street urchins he befriended during an extended absinthe hallucination.1

I asked him why he would not simply travel to one of his several estates to weather the proverbial storm, and all he gave by way of explanation was that he "didn't want to be alone."

April 5th, 1844 -- Paris, France

It has been nearly three weeks since Engels moved in. He has proved himself a constant hindrance to my work [Arbeit] and, consequently, to the advancement and enlightenment of mankind. His utter inanity almost makes me question the ability of the proletariat to ever liberate itself.

Just yesterday I was totally in the zone, critiquing the hell out of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, when he yells from the bathroom:

"Hey Karl, come check out this dump."

So I said, "Sure thing, Fred, just let me finish the most exhausting and insightful work in the history of political and social theory, then I'll come 'check it out.' On second thought, why don't you take a tintype, it'll last longer. Maybe it'll wind up in the Marx-Engels museum." He just laughed and flushed the toilet.2

I knew it would only be a matter of time before he showed his true bourgeois colors.

Earlier tonight, I'd just returned from giving a four-hour lecture on Proudhon at la Sorbonne,3 and all I wanted was a nice sandwich and a glass of milk before I retired for the evening. I was drifting into the loveliest dream, in which I was eating the entire Black Forest because it was no longer private property—and it was made out of cake—when I was wrenched from my slumber, and the following exchange took place:

"Karl, you ate all the peanut butter, you a-hole."

"Fred, it's not your peanut butter, dammit."

"Yes it is, I wrote my name on it, see: 'Fred's peanut butter'."

"Well that's fantastic, looks like I was wrong when I thought we were on the same page about sharing everything. Remember communism?"

"Don't be a jerk, Karl. I appreciate you letting me crash here and everything, but I don't take your food without at least asking, first."

"Don't you see, Fred—that's what's holding us back. If I must ask your permission before I can eat your peanutbutter, I'd have had to wait around until you got back from wherever the hell you were—and I'm not even going to get into that4—or else I would have gone to bed hungry. It's not like I wasn't going to tell you and buy you some more tomorrow."

"Well then why did you only eat out of the middle so it looked like it was still full? Tell you what, let's just ignore that for a moment.5 I think that if we just stick to a few simple rules, it'll make things a lot easier."

"Listen to me, it's not just about the peanut butter . . . "

"You're damn right it's not just about the peanut butter. That was my milk, too."

"Will you just listen to me for a minute? We need to transcend [aufhebung] the entire idea of your peanut butter and my peanut butter.6 There should simply be peanut butter that is there to satisfy our needs."

"Tell you what, Karl. Why don't I transcend [aufhebung] my peanut butter and then you can eat my shit [meine Scheiße essen]."

Fearing violence,7 I agreed to replace "his" peanut butter and promised to ask him the next time I wanted some of his food.
I really hope that bitch8 takes him back soon.

May 10th, 1844 -- Juan-les-Pins, France

I have been forced to take a vacation from what was supposed to be my sabbatical. Engels has made it nearly impossible for me to do any work at all. He remains encamped in my foyer and has long overstayed his welcome and my generous invitation; meanwhile, he continues to contribute nothing to the maintenance of our environment. The dustbin is overflowing, there are no clean dishes, and we're out of toilet paper. What's worse, he doesn't even lift the toilet seat to pee, leaving little drops of dried urine all over it. Why can he not simply do his fair share of the work?9

May 17th, 1844 -- Paris, France

I was dumbstruck upon my return home. From what I could reconstruct, Engels had invited Rousseau over, for I found him unconscious, with a dunce cap made from the phonograph's cone placed on his head.

However innocently it may have begun (discourse concerning the place of art as universal communication, a means for social change, etc.), it evidently ended with thirty-seven bottles of wine, a wheelbarrow full of cheese,10 three prostitutes, two buckets full of vomit and a mural of a pan-like creature in mid-coitus with what appears to be some sort of pudendal steam engine.

This is the last straw. It is time for me to break the ties that have bound me to this unbearable obligation. First thing tomorrow, I'm going to march straight into his room and leave a sternly worded and scathingly brilliant letter for him to read while I'm at the market [Markt].

May 23rd, 1844 -- Paris, France

Life has returned to relative normality now that Freddy is gone. I get up, I clean, I find the inherent contradiction in the existing order so as to synthesize the objective and subjective, thereby ending man's alienation from his full species-potential. And yet, I find myself spending nearly as much time thinking about all the fun we had as the hours I wasted fighting with him while we cohabitated. There were good times, there were bad times, but as much as he made the good times bad, he made the bad times equally good.

(Footnotes)
1 This was the same trip during which he tried to trade his copy of the Communist Manifesto for a knockwurst sandwich.
2 I don't think he even comprehended my sarcasm.
3 En français, bien sûr.
4 It turns out that he was back at his house, doing laundry and banging the housemaid. He'd been wearing my undergarments for the past week.
[Note in margin:] I hope he washed my banged-in underpants [Shtuptrausers].
5 I only did this because I have a weird thing [Ding] about not eating the food that touches the inside of the jar, but I didn't have time to explain myself; Fred was getting really angry.
6 By this point I had said the word "peanut butter" so many times that it had lost all meaning, but I pressed on in my argument.
7 Engels had played four years of A-side rugby at university.
8 Here, I use the word "bitch" because she always tells women about my wife when I'm alone at parties, even though I'm wearing my ring and am obviously merely engaged in superficial conversation therewith.
9 If I do it for him, he will never learn how to a) take care of himself and b) be a good roommate.
10 Although this is a contemporary German idiom, we see it used here in its original form, when—in the latter half of the nineteenth century—it was common for cheese to be delivered in a wheelbarrow.
Fred Smalkin is a fourth-year economics major who hopes Allan Megill will give him an A on his Marxism paper, seeing as he wrote this article instead.
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