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.
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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