Le jeune Karl Marx

Rauol Peck has never shied away from difficult subjects: Lamumba and James Baldwin. Now, he has taken on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 'Young Karl Marx'. This film won't earn him much in the US, a country which has done much to suppress Marx's thoughts and has waged a ferocious campaign to emasculate its own Communist Party and wither on the vine democratic socialism. Marxism is taught drily and negatively on university campuses today, as a failure and a foil to triumphant global capitalism. Peck's film , splendid in the use of the camera, capturing as it does, the ravages of early industrialization in the textile mill the Engels owned in Manchester, the miserable condition of workers, child labor, misery of the cannon fodder that fed what Blake called 'Satanic mills', and the general impoverishment of the laboring class. In Germany, in Prussia, the reign of the feudal king who exercises the rights of a feudal lord with it heavy burden on the peasantry, but in whose university slowly burns revolutionary thought that await the flame to blaze, and in Guizot's France tightly held on a leash any attempt other than fancy theories to arouse the people as they did in 1789. Americans find in general history tiresome, being a society open to the future where the past counts little. They little tolerance for grand theory or discussions, fiery public meetings, respectful exchanges of ideas that command our attention, but mostly in the mouths of demagogues. Like the majority of Americans, they have little tolerance for philosophical discussions, and abstractions bore them no end. The millions that in slavery and wage slavery that built capitalism count for little. So, Peck's 'Young Marx' plunges into the tense, tight theories of Socialist theory of romantics and materialists in the first half of the 19 century, that left its mark even today in the 21 century. Peck's camera and his principal actors August Diehl as the spirited Marx and Stefan Kornaske ass his life long partner and collaborator in struggle as Engels, wage serious battle against Proudhon and Wietling and Bakounin for example, against the Young Hegelians, against Bauer and Feuerbach and Rugge ..names that have some resonance today, and are best read of say in the works of GDH Cole or Wilson's 'To the Finland Station'. Argumentation and debate were fierce, and Marx suffered fools not gladly, nor did Engels who had a smoother manner. Marx and Engels love and turning the other cheek in the fight for the working class whom they saw as the future, and a spearhead of equality that even today's America fear seek through the courts to weaken further so that the the coupon clipeers and the ruling finace capitalists can fully have their way and increase profits and political power and control globally in the full expression of raw exploitation. Marx insisted that 'philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it'; they have put theory on its head, but he and Engels turn it around and put it on its feet. And the fruit of their theoretical struggle and intimate knowledge of the material conditions of the working class came to fruition in the writing (jointly) of the 'Communist Manifesto' that signaled the outbreak of revolution. So on top of the moment were this pair that the Revolutions of 1848 broke only weeks later, sweeping away the vestiges of feudalism in the German Holy Roman Empire, and spurred the national struggle throughout an industrializing Europe. The 'Manifesto' is wonderfully written and still hold water today, despite attacks...even in our age of reaction. 'The Young Marx' is in three languages: German, French and English. Peck has assembled a first rate cast and with flair and much artistry conveyed the passions of the young Marx and Engels. Peck's film hasn't a wide distribution, alas. And yet, in the small art house I saw it, the 100 seats were fully occupied, by people of all ages and 'middle class' conditions. The film reviewers on the whole have sort to express impatience in seeing the 'Young Marx",making large yawns and little effort to understand Peck's cinematic vocation in tackling Marx and Engels' thinking and activism. At the end Peck has footage of how wide and vast Marx's influence is: May 1968 in France, Vietnam War protest in the USA, Lumumba, and Mandela, for example. When Marx died Engels tribute sums his life up: Marx didn't die, he ceased to think.

Six years ago I stumbled upon a Charlie Rose interview with author Mary Gabriel, a 2011 National Book Award finalist for her Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. Intrigued, I ordered Gabriel's book. By the time I finished Love and Capital I was, as the British say, "gob smacked." What puzzled and surprised me, as a filmmaker, was that this turbulent epic, utterly engrossing and deeply romantic, had attracted so little attention. Why had this story not made it to the big screen, or materialized into a blockbuster television series? Is the name Karl Marx still so anathema? Then, last Sunday, a new film titled The Young Karl Marx (Le Jeune Karl Marx) which premiered at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival, suddenly found its way to the Amherst Cinema.

In spite of some tepid reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, curiosity lured me to the screening. I have no regrets: The Young Karl Marx (YKM) is a rare and unusual film—beautifully-acted by a stellar cast, craftily scripted, and heavily focused on political content and character. Here is how Peter Bradshaw reviewed it in the Guardian/UK: "Raoul Peck is the Haitian film-maker who has an Oscar nomination this year with his James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Now he comes to Berlin with this sinewy and intensely focused, uncompromisingly cerebral period drama…about the birth of communism in the mid-19th century. It gives you a real sense of what radical politics was about: talk. There is talk, talk and more talk. It should be dull, but it isn't. Somehow the spectacle of fiercely angry people talking about ideas becomes absorbing and even gripping."

At the film's center is its title character, played brilliantly by August Diehl. Bradshaw describes Diehl's Marx as "ragged, fierce with indignation and poverty, addicted to cheap cigars, spoiling for an argument and a fight." This is the notoriously nasty side of the Marx persona. But as Gabriel's book, and many other biographies reveal, Marx's character is fascinatingly complex. I have often tried to imagine what Marx must have been like, but been unable to wrap my brain around his multi-sided character. Exploring the complexities of Marx, the man, is perhaps the film's greatest strength.

For starters, Marx was viewed by his contemporaries as smart as a whip. Moses Hess, a socialist and early Zionist, provides this over-the- top description to his friends of 24-year old Marx: "…you can look forward to meeting the greatest, perhaps the only real philosopher now living. …He combines a biting wit with deeply serious philosophical thinking. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel united in one person, I say united, not lumped together — and you have Dr. Marx." Edmund Wilson described Marx as the greatest satirist since Jonathan Swift.

But he was also a pussy cat: Wilhelm Liebknecht, who was constantly in the household during the 1850s, remembered Marx as "the most tender father: one must have seen Marx with his children to obtain a complete notion of the depths of sentiment and the childlike nature of this hero of Wissenschaft (academic pursuit). In his free minutes, or while strolling, he brought them along, played the wildest and most lively games with them— in short he was a child among children. "Children should educate their parents," said Marx, and lived up to the dictum by keeping in step with the reading, entering the fantasy life and adjusting his views to meet the religious scruples of his engaging youngest daughter, Tussy. Marx tells her the story of the Passion —"the carpenter whom the rich men killed," adding that much can be forgiven Christianity because it has taught the adoration of the child.

Because YKM dramatizes only a short five year period in Marx's life (1842 to 1847) a great deal of the Marx family saga remains untold: childhood and family life in Trier; Marx's scorching love affair with the baron's daughter, Jenny von Westphalen; the crucial role of his wife and three daughters in aiding and abetting him at every turn; Karl's betrayal of Jenny goes public when Lenchen, the family housekeeper, gives birth to Karl's illegitimate son Freddy, leaving it to Engels to save Marx's bacon by falsely claiming paternity of the boy, thereby rescuing Karl and Jenny's marriage. Perhaps these fascinating omissions will be addressed when the Marx family saga finally becomes a long-running television series--whenever that may come to pass. While we wait, Le Jeune Karl Marx is well worth the price of admission.

When an honest film like this gets 6.5 stars on IMDB and The Avengers: Infinity Wars get 9.1, it shows that there is something terribly wrong with the ranking system on this site. A thinking film that captures the emotional, social and political complexity of mid-nineteenth industrial European radicalism is something to be truly cherished in this age of the vomit and mind numbing putridity coming from the nightmare factory of popular culture. That's all I need to say. Just watch this film.

Peck's film follows appealingly prickly young Marx and Engels from their early insistence on the hard truths of class-conflict against the utopian socialists of their day, to the founding of the first workers' international with a program of anti-capitalist struggle, the Communist Manifesto. Only a profit-system triumphalist would resist cheering them on along with the galvanized, wretched workers of 1848. The contrasting constraints on their activist mates, the high-born Jenny Marx and worker Mary Burns, raise still-pressing issues, and the situation of Engels, the revolutionary intellectual who must finance the cause by working for the enemy, may resonate with professionals today.

But the movie, concluding with a montage of wars and protests churned up by the profit system in the present, feels frustrating and incomplete - inevitably so. It doesn't show the collective hero of Marx and Engels' vision, the world working class. This class, that produces all, is now ever more interlinked and technically advanced. But its political development hasn't caught up with material conditions that never existed in previous challenges to capitalism. The decisive fight against the old system for humanity's future has yet to be waged, its film still to be made. R. Freed

Le jeune Karl Marx (2017) was shown in the United States with the translated title The Young Karl Marx. The movie was co-written and directed by Raoul Peck.

I found this biography of Marx to be interesting. As the person introducing the film noted, most of us think of a mature Karl Marx sitting in the British Library and writing "Das Kapital." However, in this movie, we see Karl Marx (August Diehl ) in his 20's, beginning his friendship with Friedrich Engels, and proving to other socialists and communists that his thoughts were important.

Diehl is excellent, as is Stefan Konarske, who portrays Engels. Vicky Krieps does well in the role of Jenny von Westphalen-Marx, as does Hannah Steele as Mary Burns. (In the movie, for whatever reason, Mary Burns is portrayed as Engels' wife. They were lifelong partners, but never married.)

The movie is packed with data. I believe some of it could have been left out, which would made the movie shorter and tighter. For example, much is made of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who is considered the founder of anarchism. Proudhon and Marx did, indeed, influence each other. However, how many of us know that? We could certainly enjoy the movie without knowing it.

We saw this film at Rochester's excellent Dryden Theatre, at the George Eastman Museum. It was the opening film of the always-impressive Rochester Labor Film Series. It will work well on the small screen.