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Vol. 81/No. 44 November 27, 2017
(In Review)
‘Young Karl Marx’ portrays birth of
communist movement
The Young Karl Marx, 2017 film, directed by Raoul Peck.
BY JOHN STEELE
Acclaimed Haitian director Raoul Peck’s new film, “The Young Karl Marx,”
is an inspiring and historically accurate portrayal of the 1847
formation of the first international revolutionary working-class party —
the Communist League. Peck has also directed the films “Lumumba” and “I
Am Not Your Negro.”
The League`s goal was to win workers to its program, the Communist
Manifesto, drafted by two young fighters, Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels, and published the following year. The two revolutionaries were
29 and 27 years old at the time.
The film — based on correspondence between Marx and Engels, with
free-flowing English, French and German dialogue and distributed with
subtitles in 20 languages — vividly transports viewers back to this
turning point in history. The 1848 bourgeois revolutions in Europe would
break out shortly, with the rising industrial bourgeoisie struggling for
political supremacy against the declining feudal landowners and their
monarchies, but at the same time more and more fearful of the growing
industrial working class.
These momentous changes in social and economic relations were reflected
in radical challenges to traditional philosophical and political thought
in the halls of academia in Germany and elsewhere, and among a vanguard
layer of revolutionary factory workers and artisans in cities like
Paris; London; Manchester, England; and Cologne, Germany.
Harassed by the Prussian police for writing newspaper articles
criticizing the rulers’ treatment of workers and peasants and
challenging the philosophical justifications for the established order,
Marx and his aristocratically born but highly political wife Jenny Marx
and their children are forced to flee to Paris.
Here, the film shows how Marx met Engels in 1844. Engels was born into
wealth, unlike Marx who lives in poverty. His father is a German
industrial capitalist and co-owner of a cotton spinning mill in
Manchester. Engels works there as a skilled clerk in the office with a
bird’s-eye view of the class struggle on the factory floor,
realistically presented by Peck. Mary Burns, a militant mill worker in
the plant, becomes Engels’ wife and introduces him to the conditions
faced by Irish workers in England.
Marx and Engels find they’re on the same political wavelength. The
meeting is the beginning of a lifelong political collaboration between
the two.
We are with them as they begin to wage a struggle against their
political opponents and clarify their own ideas in the debate. They
explain the capitalists are class enemies and that the working class is
destined to lead a revolutionary movement to abolish the capitalist
system. Polemics they wrote that helped shape revolutionary Marxism come
to life as we see them take on Pierre Proudhon, known as the founder of
anarchism, and others.
Over the course of the film, as they did in life, Marx and Engels are
increasingly attracted to a group of workers organized in the League of
the Just as they seek to convince them of their materialist and
scientific views. This culminates in a dramatic scene where Marx and
Engels are accepted into the organization by the group’s leaders in
London, who ask them to help draft a new program and organizational
structure to present to the next congress of the League.
Communist League founded
In a rousing scene at the congress, Engels makes a speech explaining
that all men are in fact not brothers. Capitalist factory owners are
enemies of the working class. Finally a programmatic document prepared
by Marx and Engels is adopted by majority vote with much cheering and
shouting. The old League slogan “All men are brothers” is transformed
into “Workingmen of all countries unite!” The name of the organization
becomes the Communist League, a public organization proudly proclaiming
its revolutionary program.
The film concludes with Marx and Engels drafting the Communist
Manifesto, reading aloud as they write.
Just before the credits roll Peck presents a striking photomontage of
world events today. It is effective in getting across the idea, which
Peck expressed in a question and answer session I participated in
following the screening of the film in Montreal, that the Communist
Manifesto is as relevant today as it was when it was published by the
League 169 years ago.
I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Peck’s minor conflations in the story —
like his decision, for time reasons, to present the League’s first two
congresses with Marx and Engels participating as one — don’t weaken the
credibility or impact of the film.
Those looking for a way out of the deepening, economic, social,
political, and moral crisis of the capitalist system should see this
film. It shows the birth of the movement that the Socialist Workers
Party and Communist Leagues in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the
U.K. trace their continuity to.
I recommend you contact these parties to learn what you can do today to
advance the fight to overthrow capitalist rule and open the door to the
construction of a socialist world.
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