Did you actually read Engels' answer? He sure wasn't pointing a mineworker to "the guy up the hill" with "gold bathroom fixtures." He was actually talking about the "dispersion of [economic] power." I don't know how you manage to get from what Engels actually wrote -- "anarchy reigns in socialized production," "the product governs the producer," etc. -- to your image of the simple-minded Engels. _No one_ (no individual capitalists, no shareholders of joint-stock companies, no power elite, no "ruling class," no class alliance) "controls the system," today or in the 19th century, as far as the capitalist mode of production is concerned.
BTW, try and see the world of 19th-century societies from the imagined points of view of 19th-century individuals in far-flung locations, especially in hinterlands. What did the world look like in their eyes (if they could imagine "the world" at all)? I'd think that the world in the 19th century was far more complex than the world in which we live. Recall that in the 19th century many parts of the world had yet to be subsumed under capitalism: chattel slavery (non-capitalist social relations incorporated into the nascent capitalist world market) still existed; pre-capitalist modes of production dominated in a number of areas; and production had just begun to be socialized where capitalism did dominate. The "scramble for Africa" came after the Communist Manifesto. Japan didn't begin to become (officially) a modern society until 1867 (the Meiji "Restoration") at least, the same year when the first German edition of Volume One of _Capital_ was published. Today, the world has already been remade in the image of capital, with few (if any) enclaves of non-capitalist modes of production left. M-C-M' is the rule of the game everywhere, production is ever more socialized (even in underdeveloped nations), much of the world population have become proletarianized and urbanized, consumption patterns are increasingly homogenous (though gaps are frightfully widening within and between nations at the same time), and so on, and so forth.
Marx and Engels' theoretical works in fact fit the real world much better today than they did in the 19th century (when the "world economy" had yet to encompass the whole earth). -- Yoshie
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