This is a striking pattern among many prominent leftist leaders: they were overwhelmingly born into relative privilege. >Engels was born into a wealthy industrialist family >Marx was the son of a prosperous lawyer who enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life >Lenin came from a privileged background and his father held noble status as a high-ranking education official, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy physician who owned multiple estates >Castro was the son of a wealthy Spanish landowner. He grew up on a large sugar plantation and attended elite Jesuit schools >Che had aristocratic ancestry, grew up with servants, and received a privileged education >Pol Pot was raised in a prosperous farming family with ties to the Cambodian royal palace. He attended elite French-influenced schools and later studied in Paris >The same pattern holds for the Fabian socialists in Britain. Figures such as Beatrice Webb, Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw all came from comfortable backgrounds or married into wealth. They were openly described as a clique of bourgeois socialists, and the term “champagne socialists” was originally coined in reference to them Despite the rhetoric, the modern left has never truly been a spontaneous movement of the working class or the poor. It has more often been a movement of the haves against the have-mores. Led by the privileged, funded by the privileged, and aimed at reshaping society to suit their vision.