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What Engels’ (Least) Favorite Color Teaches about Capitalism

Blog Post | Manufacturing

What Engels’ (Least) Favorite Color Teaches about Capitalism

"Any one not Aniline"

Did you ever receive one of those 90s chain emails in your inbox? You know, the kind where you fill in your favorite band/animal/team/color/etc. and then send it to ten friends or else you’d have bad luck for the week?

I recently stumbled across a 19th century version, a “confession” filled out by Friedrich Engels, the original champagne socialist who is now best known for popularizing Karl Marx’s ideas.

Frederick Engels "Confession"

Little on the list is truly surprising. Engels wouldn’t be the first notorious womanizer (and accused rapist) to declare his love for women even while evincing a base misogyny.

But the answer that immediately caught my eye was Engels’ favorite color: “Any one not Aniline.” Now, if you’re an ordinary, well-adjusted denizen of the 21st century, odds are that you immediately considered opening a new tab to ask Google, “What color is aniline?”

There’s no need to click away. Aniline was mauve. And it is hard to overstate the extent to which various shades of the new purple swept the world of fashion in the 1850s and 1860s.

A mauve piece of silk dyed by Sir William Henry Perkin

That’s because aniline was the first commercially-scalable synthetic dye, invented at a time when chemists were unlocking the secrets of the universe by distilling, vaporizing, and generally futzing with every substance they could get their hands on.

Aniline was actually the product of a failed British attempt in 1856 to synthesize quinine in hopes of making anti-malarial treatments cheaper and easier to produce than the old way of grinding up the bark of a hard to acquire Amazonian tree. The result wouldn’t especially help imperialists expand their empires over mosquito-infested jungles, but it did produce a particularly vivid shade of purple.

The researcher, an eighteen year old college student named William Perkin, was also an amateur painter, and immediately saw the value of a cheap, easy to produce dye that was more durable than existing alternatives. Seeking capital investment, Perkin partnered with Robert Pullar, a Scottish dye entrepreneur who would later become a radical pro-free trade member of Parliament. By the end of the century, Perkin and Pullar owned a global network of synthetic dye factories that brought color to the masses.

This meant that purplish, pinkish, and reddish dyes were suddenly this cheap and widely available for the first time in human history. Tweaking the distillation process could produce mauveine, fuchsin, and safranin, which are the synthetic forerunners of the colors we call mauve, fuchsia/magenta, and saffron today. It may have been the single most significant moment in modern fashion history.

Prior to this, many of the dyes used for clothing and paint had to be ground up from natural ingredients. For instance, if you lived in 4th century Rome and wanted to wear purple clothing, you needed someone to find and grind up twelve thousand snails of a particular species that lived mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Doing so would yield 1.4 grams of dye, which was barely enough to color the trim of a single piece of clothing. The cost of purple was thus astronomical; pound for pound, “Tyrian purple” was worth three times as much as pure gold! And purple dye was so hard to acquire, at any price, that sumptuary laws often prohibited anyone except royalty from wearing purple clothing.

But after 1856, the ability to synthesize aniline meant that purple hues were suddenly everywhere. What had once cost pounds of gold now cost mere pennies. Mauve was all the rage — people were contracting “mauve measles,” as British wags put it — a fact that would not have been lost on Engels’ when he wrote out his list in 1868 since his family fortune was tied up in textiles. (He properly capitalized “Aniline” since it was then still a proprietary product.)

When you see televised depictions of Victorian era fashion, like middle class women wearing acres of brightly-colored fabric, you are looking at a byproduct of the synthetic dyes revolution.

Purple Victorian era dress

And that wave of color cascaded step-by-step, class-by-class, down throughout society. Cheaper, more durable, and more vivid products abounded, from housepaints to wallpapers. Today, we take for granted the idea that color is near costless. It would strike a 21st century consumer as bizarre if they were told that a bright purple dress or mauve house paint would cost 10x (or 1000x) the price of one that was white.

Even so, the rise of synthetic purple sparked a sartorial reaction. Purple, as long as it was rare and inaccessible to the plebeians, was considered dignified, elegant, and noble. But once purple became commonplace, it was gauche and uncouth. A century later when cultural critic Paul Fussell summarized the ways that dress signified class status, he lumped purple in with polyester fibers and sports jerseys as markers of belonging to the grubby “proles.”

And that brings us back to Engels’ sneering response, “Any one but Aniline.” On the one hand, it’s not surprising that a textile manufacturer might be annoyed at the disruption to his existing (and profitable) supply chain. Engels was also a product of inherited wealth, and making fun of Aniline was common sport for his class at the time. A satirical Punch cartoon of 1877 featured a dilettante sniveling about a debutante, “She affects Aniline dyes, don’t you know! I weally couldn’t go down to suppah with a young Lady who wears Mauve twimmings in her skirt, and magenta wibbons in her hair!”

Pecuniary self-interest and class snobbery aside, Engels wouldn’t be the first socialist guilty of reflexive suspicion towards technological innovation and the capitalists that had made it possible. The Luddites you will always have with you.

For whatever reason, Engels failed to see how the invention of synthetic dyes was a boon to workers and society as a whole, a future in which the rare colors of kings would become the ordinaries of proles. Capitalist incentives had once again commissioned a technological innovation that could push back against harsh, natural scarcity. Life would become a little bit brighter and bolder because of it.

Every one Aniline.

This article was published at Matzko Minute on 8/28/2023.

Bloomberg | Science & Technology

The Robot Sculptors of Italy

“As a segment of the marble business, sculpture is dwarfed by the industrial side, which slices slabs by the millions of tons each year. Robots help these companies mill countertops and shower stalls for markets around the world. But fine art sculpture is big business too, worth billions of dollars a year.

The first robot sculptor appeared in Carrara in 2005. Now there are about 30, and the total worldwide is around 100. Two men play outsize roles in this rapidly evolving business. One is Massari, the more evangelistic of the two. His corporate mothership, publicly traded Litix SpA, trumpets Massari’s vision of the future on the first page of a slick marketing brochure. ‘We Don’t Need Another Michelangelo: In Italy, It’s Robots’ Turn to Sculpt,’ proclaims the newspaper headline he reproduced from a New York Times piece on his company.

The other man is a bluff Midwesterner named Jim Durham… He was the biggest producer of fine art stone sculpture in America, and now, with his Franco Cervietti purchase, the world.”

From Bloomberg.

The Guardian | Leisure

Paris Reopens Seine River After Century-Long Swimming Ban

“Parisians and tourists flocked to take a dip in the Seine River this weekend after city authorities gave the green light for it to be used for public swimming for the first time in more than a century.

The opening followed a comprehensive clean-up programme sped up by its use as a venue in last year’s Paris Olympics after people who regularly swam in it illegally, lobbied for its transformation.

The outgoing mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, also helped to champion the plans, jumping in the river herself before the Olympics.

About 1,000 swimmers a day will be allowed access to three bathing sites on the banks of the Seine for free, until the end of August.”

From The Guardian.

Times of Central Asia | Human Freedom

Reactions to Provocative Social Posts Decriminalized in Tajikistan

“Tajik citizens need no longer fear that they will be imprisoned for clicking ‘like’ on social media posts that the Tajik authorities do not like.

Among several laws that Tajik President Emomali Rahmon signed on May 14 was one that decriminalized liking posts on social networks that originate from individuals or organizations the Tajik government considers extremist.”

From Times of Central Asia.

Blog Post | Culture & Tolerance

The Ancient Roots of Western Self-Criticism

The West’s enduring success is rooted in its awareness of its own faults and constant striving to be better. Far from being a modern phenomenon, the tradition of Western self-criticism began with Homer.

Summary: Western civilization is now often criticized from within for its imperialism, decadence, and moral failings. But the tradition of Western self-criticism is not a modern weakness; it is an ancient strength. The Greeks and Romans consistently questioned their own actions, empathized with their enemies, and questioned their societal norms. This deep-rooted capacity for introspection helped build the resilient, self-correcting culture whose contributions to human flourishing have shaped the world of today.


At a time when Western histories and societies face relentless internal scrutiny—accused of imperialism, cultural arrogance, decadence, and other failings—it is tempting to view this self-criticism as a modern malaise, a sign of weakness. Yet even a cursory look at the literature of ancient Greece and Rome reveals a different story: the West’s tendency to question itself, empathise with its enemies, and confront its own imperfections is not a recent phenomenon. It is age-old and unique. It may even be one of the main sources of Western strength. Far from undermining Western civilisation, this introspective tradition—evident in the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Tacitus, and others—has catalysed its resilience and moral progress. By holding a mirror to their own flaws and extending sympathy to adversaries, the ancients laid the groundwork for a culture built on self-correction and the pursuit of betterment—traits that continue to define the West’s success.

The ancient Greeks, whose city-states birthed and gave name to democracy, logic, ethics, geography, biology, aesthetics, economics, mathematics, astronomy, physics, history, politics, and philosophy, were no strangers to self-examination, even in times of war. Homer’s Iliad—a foundational text of the Western literary canon, composed in the late eighth century BC—is a masterclass in humanising the enemy. While celebrating Greek heroism, Homer does not vilify the Trojans. Instead, he paints Hector, Troy’s greatest but ultimately doomed warrior, as a devoted husband and father whose heartbreaking farewell to his wife, Andromache, moves readers nearly 3,000 years later. Later, Achilles, the Greek champion, shares a moment of profound empathy with Priam, the Trojan king, as they weep together over their respective losses. This is not mere storytelling; it is a moral stance, urging Greeks to see their enemies as mirrors of themselves, subject to the same cruel fate. Such understanding reflects a culture unafraid to question the glorification of conquest and to seek understanding across battle lines.

This introspective spirit shines even brighter in Greek tragedy. Its best-known playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—are generally rated, along with Shakespeare, as the greatest tragedians of all time; they used the stage to probe their society’s values. In fifth-century BC Athens, tragedies were performed before a mass audience in an open-air theatre at the annual festival of Dionysus, god of wine and fertility. When people today think of plays, they imagine small theatres with audiences whose average level of education and intelligence is much higher than that of the general population. Given the composition of Greek audiences, therefore, the adversarial nature of Attic tragedies—built around the agōn, a formal clash of characters and ideals that let spectators see moral and political questions tested through direct confrontation—is even more remarkable. Let us look at a few examples.

In 472 BC, just eight years after the Greeks repulsed the Persian invasion at Salamis, Aeschylus, reportedly a veteran of the Battle of Marathon, presided over the performance of his play The Persians. It is an extraordinary example of cultural humility. Rather than gloating over a defeated foe, Aeschylus sets his drama in the Persian court, giving voice to Queen Atossa’s grief and Xerxes’ humiliation. The chorus of Persian elders laments the loss of their youth—a universal cry that would resonate with any Athenian who had lost a son in battle. Aeschylus could have written a jingoistic paean to Greek superiority; instead, he penned a tragedy that invited his audience to mourn with their enemies, acknowledging the hubris that threatens all nations.

Sophocles, too, contributes to this tradition in Antigone (c. 441 BC), where the adolescent heroine’s defiance of King Creon’s edict to leave her brother Polynices unburied pits individual conscience against state authority. Polynices, branded a traitor, is the “enemy,” yet Antigone’s loyalty to him is portrayed as noble, and Creon’s eventual regret reveals the folly of his rigid rule. The play’s sympathy for those who challenge the state reflects a Greek willingness to question authority and empathise with outcasts—a precursor to modern debates about justice and dissent.

Finally, we come to the truly remarkable case of Euripides. In Hecuba (424 BC), Trojan Women (415 BC), and Andromache (date disputed), the playwright portrays the savage cruelty inflicted by victorious Greeks on the Trojan women they enslaved. In front of a mass audience—a significant share of which consisted of highly patriarchal Greek men—Euripides bemoans the horrific fate of enemy slave women at the hands of Greek men. By giving voice to the defeated, he challenges the moral certainty of conquest, urging his audience to see their enemies as victims of the same forces that could one day destroy Athens. These plays are not just art; they are acts of cultural self-criticism, exposing the flaws of Greek society—xenophobia, misogyny, hubris, cruelty—while affirming the humanity of those it deemed enemies. How modern.

The Romans were great innovators in jurisprudence, administration, engineering, logistics, urban planning, and politics, bequeathing to the world such words as republicliberty, and legal—concepts they valued highly. Culturally, however, they were greatly beholden to the Greeks. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BC) is both a national epic and, by consensus, the greatest work of Latin literature. It narrates how, after the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Aeneas led the remnants of his people to Latium, where they intermarried with the native Italians to become the ancestors of the Romans. The epic’s high point is Aeneas’ interaction with Dido, queen of Rome’s archenemy Carthage. They have an affair, he leaves, and she commits suicide. Her curse on the departing Aeneas foreshadows Carthage’s enmity, yet Virgil portrays her as a noble, broken figure—not a villain. In fact, Virgil focused readers’ attention on Dido so completely that she became the heroine of the Aeneid. In the early fifth century AD, Macrobius, a Roman provincial author, observed, “The story of Dido in love … flies through the attention of everyone to such an extent that painters, sculptors, and embroiderers use this subject as if there were no other … that she committed suicide in order not to endure dishonour.” Virgil’s Carthaginian queen remained the heroine of poetry (Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women), tragedy (Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage), and opera (Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas).

Tacitus, the greatest Roman historian, was also a senator, praetor, suffect consul, and proconsular governor of the province of Asia. In other words, he was at the very centre of the imperial establishment. Tacitus wrote Agricola (c. AD 98) to honour his eponymous father-in-law by recounting how the latter solidified Roman control over what is now England and Wales. Nevertheless, Tacitus attributes to Agricola’s enemy, the British chieftain Calgacus, a powerful denunciation of the Roman Empire: “Plunder, slaughter, rapine they call by the false name of empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” With that almost certainly invented statement, Tacitus undermined the proudest Roman boast—that empire brought peace (see Aeneid 6.852–53; the Pax Romana; and the Emperor Augustus’ Altar of Peace). Similarly, in Germania (c. AD 98), Tacitus idealises the Germanic tribes’ simplicity and courage, contrasting them with Rome’s supposed decadence. By praising Rome’s enemies, he holds a mirror to what he sees as his own society’s moral decline.

Finally, Lucan’s Pharsalia (c. AD 61–65), an epic of Rome’s civil war, mourns Pompey Magnus, Caesar’s rival, as a tragic figure fighting for the Republic’s lost ideals. His murder in Egypt, lamented by Lucan, evokes sympathy for a defeated enemy whose loss marks Rome’s slide into autocracy. Writing under Emperor Nero, Lucan uses Pompey’s fate to critique tyranny, showing how sympathy for an enemy can serve as a veiled rebuke of one’s own rulers.

The ancient Greeks and Romans waged wars, built empires, and committed atrocities. Yet their literature reveals a unique capacity to question those actions, to see the humanity in their adversaries, and to strive for moral improvement. This mindset formed a cornerstone of Western resilience—a culture that thrives on self-criticism, not self-congratulation, a culture that is alert to its faults and resolute in correcting them. To quote Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America: “No doubt Europe has done terrible things, not least to itself. But what culture has not? … There remains a crucial difference between the Western tradition and the others. The crimes of the West have produced their own antibodies. They have provoked great movements to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry.”

Western self-criticism, then, is not new. What is new is the apparent imbalance between recognising Western shortcomings on the one hand and appreciating the West’s magnificent bequests to humanity on the other. That should not be surprising, given that the commanding heights of Western culture—universities, museums, galleries, and theatres—have become dominated by a motley crew of Marxists, Frankfurt-schoolers, post-structuralists, deconstructionists, postcolonialists, de-colonialists and critical race theorists. Despondency over the future of the West, however, would be an over-reaction.

In 184 BC, amidst worry about Rome’s decline, Cato the Elder won the election as Censor on a platform of a “great purification,” in which he aimed to “cut and sear … the hydra-like luxury and effeminacy of the time.” At that point, Rome controlled Italy, Corsica, southern Spain, and small parts of the Dalmatian Coast. Yet, Rome proceeded to grow and would not reach its maximum territorial extent as well as the period of its greatest prosperity and tranquility until three centuries later, under the Nerva-Antonine Dynasty. It would take another three and a half centuries before the Western Empire disintegrated in AD 476.

Its eastern half survived under the leadership of rulers whose title was “Basileus ton Romaion” (King of the Romans) until the sack of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453—some 1,600 years after Cato expressed his concern over Rome’s future. Paying homage to the Byzantine custom, Sultan Mehmed II declared himself “Kayser-i Rum” (Caesar of the Romans). By that time, Western Europe was on the mend. The Renaissance was in full swing, and in 1492, Columbus sailed for the New World. The stage was set for the Scientific Revolution, followed by the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and a half-millennium-long Western preeminence that transformed the globe—largely for the better. The revolutions that originated in Europe brought to all the peoples of the world greater knowledge, prosperity, and control over nature than anyone could previously have imagined possible. Let us, by all means, continue the tradition of self-doubt and self-criticism that have characterised Western civilisation from its beginning. However, now that the West has come under sustained and vitriolic attack from without and within, perhaps we should balance that self-criticism with recognition of Western civilisation’s unmatched contributions to human wellbeing and progress. 

This article was published by Quillette on 7/4/2025.