Not On PBS

'The Young Karl Marx,' film by Raoul Peck, 2018

This film looks like a traditional period drama.  Top hats, warrens of poor people in England, young romance, the working Irish, factory life, garrets, gendarmes and police, heavy drinking, cigars and chess in taverns.  But underneath the conventional British PBS veneer something else is going on.  The film humanizes Marx and Engels and serves as an introduction to their ideas and activities.   Some leftists insist the film should have been some kind of in-depth primer.  Similar complaints were lodged against the film “Reds,” but given this film is being released in the present political climate, it is not surprising.  As it is, it means something just by being released.

Top hats?

The film starts in 1843, 5 years before the 1848 insurrections across Europe and before the publication of the Communist Manifesto.  We meet various famous socialists, anarchists and communists– Proudhon, Bakunin, Weitling, Stirner, Feurbach, Courbet.  In the process, the 2^nd meeting between Marx and Engels in Paris occurs, where they both praise each other’s work.  In a Parisian bar, Engels calls Marx the world’s leading dialectical thinker after writing Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, while Marx praises Engels for his study, The Condition of the Working Class in England.  On this and too much booze, they bond.  Some have called this film a ‘bromance’ but that word is actually loaded with reactionary connotations.

Engels encourages Marx to read the British economists like Ricardo.  We get snippets of their thoughts – how gathering dead wood in the forests became criminalized as part of the ‘enclosure of the commons.’  How labor is a commodity, like any other thing, to be bought and sold, just as are the people who labor.  Karl and his wife Jenny poke fun at Proudhon’s phrase ‘property is theft’ as an image, and not actually accurate.  Jenny pokes fun at the overuse of the word ‘critique’ by Karl.  We see Marx’s drunken realization that real philosophy should lead to action.  The labor theory of value, borrowed from those English economists, makes an appearance, along with Marx and Engel's atheism and irritation with political conciliators and clichéd sloganeers.

The film shows the cruelty of the governments and police in enforcing private property and propping up the aristocracy, through killings, beatings, arrests, firings and deportations of workers and leftists. It tries to depict the convoluted relationship between Friedrich and his factory-owning father.  Marx, Jenny and their children are first thrown out of Germany, then France, then Belgium for political dissent and ultimately settle in London.  Engels marries a working class Irish woman, Mary Burns.  Marx is broke, having 2 children, a wife and a maid to support.  The wives are not the focus of the film, but they are shown as political actors in themselves.  Burns herself is even more personally liberated than Jenny.  These personal issues dominate a good chunk of the film, as is standard in most films about intellectual or theoretical conflicts in the present conservative cultural context.

The film features verbal confrontations with capitalists and vague or intellectually undisciplined socialists and anarchists.  The issues between leftists are unfortunately not clear in the film.  This included the young Marx’s differences with the old man Proudhon, the leading anti-capitalist of the time.  Marx writes The Poverty of Philosophy against Proudon, which the film shows as a very muddy inter-party debate.  Conflicts in the film centered around the role of intellectuals and theory in the workers’ movement and over vague terms like ‘kindness’ or ‘brotherhood’ versus a thoroughgoing and scientific understanding of class society and economics.  Marx was caustic in his debates, sometimes on purpose.  Oddly, personal insults seem to be a common currency, but it is not clear if this is a filmic inventions or quotes.

During this period, the underground ‘League of the Just’ becomes the public ‘Communist League,’ though as depicted in the film it is some kind of vague debate.  Splits in the League were actually caused by the differences over the competing strategy of organizing an ultra-leftist and secretive uprising versus a public mass movement for communism, the latter supported by Marx and Engels.

E0.00 Euro Note

As members of the League, Marx and Engels are commissioned to write a programme.  This becomes The Manifesto of the Communist League, otherwise known as The Communist Manifesto.  It is one of the greatest works of political writing in history, if not the greatest.  Part of its greatness is that it has stood the test of time as any reading will tell you. It came out right before and during the 1848 popular working-class  insurrections all over Europe – in France, in Hungary, in Germany, in Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Sicily.  The ferment extended beyond the League to millions of proletarians across Europe, something not really shown in the film.

If the film makes a few more people take Marx and Engels seriously, then it has served its purpose.  The fact that is has come out now is significant, as it is no secret that capitalism’s present future is cloudy at best.  Given Marx and Engels began the most through-going analysis of capitalism, one that stands to this day, they are anything but outdated.  And that is what really haunts even the present.  The cultural climate is shifting under the bourgeoisie’s feet, whether they recognize it or not.

Red Frog

April 21, 2018