The Young Karl Marx

“The Young Karl Marx” Written by Raoul Peck and Pascal Bonitizer, Directed by Raoul Peck. Starring August Diehl, Stefan Konarske, Vicky Krieps, and Hannah Steele. Passion River Studio, DVD - The Orchard. Running Time - 118 minutes.

This ambitious film explores the path taken by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that led them to the publication of The Communist Manifesto. It is a film about thinking and theorizing and the social, political, and economic milieu in Europe in the 1840s. But it is also a movie about the personal lives of Marx and Engels, including how they met and how their collaboration influenced their thinking

The complexity of the topics covered in this movie would lead one to wonder how they could be rendered in an interesting way. Raoul Peck (“Lumumba,” “I Am Not Your Negro”) does a wonderful job of setting the context in which Marx and Engels develop their ideas. Peck also gives the viewer a sense of how the interaction between these two men, and the lives of their families, shaped their contributions to political thought. While it would be helpful for viewers to have a background in the clash of ideas that served as the backdrop to this movie, especially Marx’s battles with the young Hegelians and with Pierre Proudhon, it is not required to appreciate this film.

Peck has taken on a big topic, one that is not easily distilled into a two-hour movie. The film is organized around the struggles of Marx and his family to survive while he is taking on the dominant ideas of the capitalist order and various critics of capitalist society. While engaged in these tasks Marx and his family were kicked out of Germany, and then moved to France where there was considerable political turmoil. They were eventually kicked out of France, and their next stop was Belgium, where Marx had to sign an agreement not to engage in any political activity. Burdened by debt and the birth of another child, Marx and his wife Jenny had difficulty paying the rent and feeding their family. Engels often stepped in to support Marx and his family. Throughout his life Marx was frequently confronted with a choice of writing articles for the New York Tribune or some other publication for money, or working on his own books and articles to expand his understanding of capitalist society.

During his interaction with Engels in France, and later in Belgium, Marx made several breakthroughs in his thinking. These include his studying British political economists like David Riccardo and others and linking philosophy to political praxis. This ultimately led Marx and Engels to be invited to attend a conference of the League of the Just in London where they put forth their ideas and confronted radicals such as Wilhelm Weitling.

Prior to this invitation Marx and Engels cultivated the support of Pierre Proudhon, the French intellectual who confronted the inequality generated by capitalist society in his work The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx and Engels, while disagreeing with Proudhon, also used their friendship with him to promote their ideas to workers in France, Belgium, and England. Marx admired Proudhon’s work, especially his confrontation with German idealists, but he also subjected Proudhon to withering criticism in his book The Poverty of Philosophy by demonstrating that Proudhon’s theories could not provide a foundation for political opposition to capitalism.

While it is not easy to render these debates in a film, Peck succeeds by carefully exposing the viewer to a series of vignettes which capture Marx and Engels’ interaction with Proudhon, as well as providing glimpses of how workers in France used Proudhon’s ideas to support their struggle against the wretched inequality produced by industrial capitalism. It was not easy going for Marx and Engels as they fought for their ideas and as they tried to overcome the reformist inclinations of many in the opposition movement.

It is particularly through Marx and Engels’ interaction with the workers in various countries and with Proudhon’s attempts to explain the world to workers that Marx comes to realize that philosophers have only interpreted the world, and have done nothing to transform it. And so the link between philosophy, political economy, and political praxis was forged. It is also important to note that Marx and Engels understood very clearly that abstract theorizing would not move workers to action, and the contradictions of capitalism had to be explained in a clear and direct manner and connected to the concrete experience of workers and families. Here Mary Burns, who was an Irish worker and eventually the wife of Engels, provided an important link to factory workers in England and ultimately would be very influential in setting up a meeting of Marx and Engels with the League of the Just.

Without dramatic action sequences to carry the movie forward, Peck nevertheless builds on the larger story of how this hugely influential document – The Communist Manifesto – came out of the political, personal, and historical circumstances of the mid-1840s. Some critics have argued that Peck’s movie is uneven and the story is not well told, but I found his approach to be illuminating and relatively easy to follow.

Moreover, who else has put the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the big screen and tried to explain the personalities, historical era, and politics of the struggle against capitalism? Peck humanizes Marx and Engels, and in doing so depicts very well what motivated them, how they got to the point of opposing capitalism and proposing revolution, and what sacrifices they and their families had to endure to live their politics. While there are gaps in the movie, especially relating to the women who loved and supported Marx and Engels, the movie does an effective job of slaying some of the falsehoods that have been promoted by modern-day antagonists of Marx and Engels. To that end, Peck helps even the uninitiated to see Marx and Engels as being devoted to the struggle of creating a just society and a new social order. As an antidote to capitalist critiques of Marx and Engels this movie succeeds in creating an intriguing portrait of the duo.

The film moves the story forward when Marx and Engels are invited to address the League of the Just in London in 1846. In terms of dramatic moments this overview of the meeting is preceded by a wonderful vignette where Marx and Engels, trying to escape the rain, go to a club that Engels is familiar with. Engels meets a friend of his father, a fellow capitalist, who engages Marx and Engels in a conversation about profits and labor. The conversation becomes especially tense when Marx tells the businessman that he considers profit to be exploitation. This exchange signals that Marx and Engels are now ready to articulate a full-blown critique of capitalism.

At the meeting of the League of the Just, Marx and Engels are confronted by skeptics and by those who adhere to mildly reformist ideas. They are told that the League “does not need eggheads.” It appears that Marx and Engels will be summarily dismissed as being too radical for the organization, but Marx pleads successfully to let them present their ideas. The League eventually asks Marx and Engels to join the League and draft a program for action.

At the autumn meeting Marx and Engels clash with those who are critical of their work and who try to deny Engels his credentials to be a delegate to the conference. Engels eventually wins a vote and begins to present their ideas and argues for the inevitable opposition of the bourgeoisie and the workers calling the proletariat a “modern slave.” He also introduces the slogan “Workers of all countries unite.” A vote is taken on the program presented by Engels and the League of the Just becomes the Communist League. It was a major victory for Marx and Engels and they were asked to draft a program for the organization which would become The Communist Manifesto.

As so often was the case, Marx was running behind and had not drafted the program as of January 1848. He and Engels were given until February of that year for a delivery date. 1848 is sometimes described as “the springtime of the people,” as revolution was in the air.

Peck depicts the collaborative effort by Marx, Engels, and their wives to produce a clear statement of their political program. The Manifesto was published in 1848 and a few months later revolution broke out in Europe. Unfortunately, these revolutions failed and Marx would remain exiled in England for the rest of his life where he would write Capital and other key works.

In “The Young Karl Marx” Raoul Peck introduces these struggles to a wider audience. We should be grateful to him for making this history come alive.

Peter Seybold
Department of Sociology
Indiana University/Purdue University – Indianapolis
pseybold@iupui.edu