Karl Marx is credited with advancing communist ideas and developing a framework for society, detailing everyone’s role in the bigger picture. He’s thought of as a ‘high thinker’ and an intellectual. On the contrary, he spent much of his college days on drinking binges or brawling. If you’ve watched the rioting in Portland and elsewhere, you may have seen a modern-day Karl Marx in the crowd.

Marx was lazy in his studies and missed submitting his dissertation deadline for his Doctorate degree. He applied for his Doctorate at the University of Jena. At the time, it was considered so lacking in standards that anyone could graduate, which he did. Not a fan of work, he lived, largely through an allowance by his mother.

He married at the age of 25 to a woman four years his senior (an oddity for the times), and whose family provide the couple with a significant dowry. Even in marriage, his mother helped with the finances, but to make ends meet, Marx sells off the items from the dowry.  Unable to provide for his family, they move to a furnished apartment. Despite the fact that his family lived in squalor (a characterization by his neighbors), he insisted on retaining a maid, who he later fathered a child with. This was a tightly-held secret, and Marx’s partner, Freidrich Engels, claimed to be the child’s father in order to save Marx’s marriage.

Marx never received the high stature he felt deserving of his brilliance, and upon his death, less than a dozen people attended his funeral. If we were to characterize Marx today, you might think of him as the know-it-all loudmouth in the office down the hall, who never finishes their work but could tell you how to do yours.

Here’s the man held high for the thinking that led to the former Soviet Union and whose “gifts to society” are leading movements today. But there’s more to Karl Marx, so much more.