The director, screenwriter and producer was born in Haiti and raised in Congo, the U.S. Perhaps some long-forgotten items on this theme will yet surface in the cinematography archives of the late socialist countries of the Soviet Bloc, but I suspect that socialist filmmakers were always more concerned about making art that would illuminate current or past class and labor struggles than in delving into the semantics of polemical dialectics from two centuries ago.Įnter the original, pathbreaking filmmaker Raoul Peck, hailed for his 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro about James Baldwin, and for previous films about Patrice Lumumba and other topics. This question is inherently of substantive interest, and one wonders why film has not previously contributed much about the lives of these indispensable historical figures. The film principally revolves around the question, At what point did so-called “scientific” socialism separate out from other strands of political thought, such as anarchism, libertarianism (in its 19th-century definition), cooperativism, universal brotherhood, utopianism, nationalism, nihilism, historical materialism, apocalyptic Christianity and other philosophical currents? No person with any pretense of understanding the modern world can honestly consider themselves educated without some familiarity with this seminal revolutionary text.Ī new film, The Young Karl Marx, explores the world of radical European thinkers and activists in the 1840s, an era of intensified political crisis, as they scuttle back and forth between Germany, France, Belgium, and England in search of safety and livelihood, and as they sharpen their ideological wits. The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the early months of 1848, is among the most read, most widely translated and most highly influential documents in human history. From left, Vicky Krieps as Jenny Marx, August Diehl as Marx, and Stefan Konarske as Engels.

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx