“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

Karl is 26 years old, married to Jenny, and living his youth in a time of political and social upheaval.

In Germany, a very active intellectual opposition is being strongly repressed, in France the workers of Faubourg Saint Antoine have taken to the streets, and in England, the people are marching.

The signs of 1848 are materializing, and with them, the young Marx and his fraternal friend Friedrich Engels give birth to a movement aimed at rallying and raising awareness among oppressed workers worldwide, with the motto:

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

From 1844 to 1848, Karl will experience expulsion from France, extreme financial difficulties, relationships with Proudhon, polemics, and the transformation of the League of the Just.

Letters between Marx and Engels accompany the narrative, with interventions from liberal Hegelian voices like Bruno Bauer, the revolutionary German communist theorist Wilhelm Weitling, the Russian anarchist revolutionary Bakunin, and the founder of the German Annals, Arnold Ruge. Among all this, Jenny, Karl's wife, stands out in her radical extraordinariness.

Baroness Johanna Bertha Julie Freiin von Westphalen (1814-1881), known familiarly as Jenny, grew up in comfort if not in actual wealth, was the sister of a Prussian minister, and was very beautiful and highly courted in good salons. She finds herself living with Karl, their children, and a devoted governess in two miserable rooms. Besides doing domestic work, she serves as a fundamental collaborator for her husband, deciphering his illegible handwriting and even writing her own articles.

Fighting with creditors who besiege her even for primary needs, she manages to adapt perfectly to the situation despite her aristocratic background, certainly comforted by the love and genius of her husband, with whom she shares the revolutionary project, contributing to its realization.

Another prominent female figure in the narrative is Mary Burns, an Irish working-class woman and lifelong companion of Friedrich Engels, whom she met in Manchester and guided through the region, visiting the worst quarters of the county to complete his research.

Friedrich, who had already written a book on the conditions of the working class under a pseudonym, was the eldest of nine children of a strict pietist, one of the most important cotton mill owners in Barmen.

Friedrich and Mary stayed together all their lives, politically opposed to the bourgeois institution of marriage, and she chose not to have children to be free to pursue her political and social struggles.

The historical materialism that Marx was theorizing was addressed “to the minds that really think and to free spirits,” and the film does not hesitate to quote his most famous assertions like "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it" and "A man who has nothing is NOTHING."

Marx's fight against abstract categories is well highlighted by the narrative, and to fight against the bourgeois idea that endorses reality as ineliminable, one must consider that “the driving forces of history are not of a conscious and spiritual nature but of a socio-economic nature,” and the game is not fair if the worker becomes labor-commodity.

Two hundred years after the birth of an immense thinker, a great story of love and friendship is finally told, along with the powerful political passion and revolutionary commitment of a fascinating and controversial genius who has sparked an unexpected, though welcome, resurgence of interest and popularity. Certainly, the succession of unusual economic crises, as director Raoul Peck asserts, has prompted the world's most famous magazines like Time, Newsweek, the Financial Times, and even Der Spiegel to put Marx on their covers. In a BBC poll, the revolutionary communist was even ranked as the greatest thinker of the century, followed by Albert Einstein.

A great merit of this film is that it was shot in the three historically used languages of the characters, namely French, German, and English; therefore, watching it in the original language is essential.

“The revolution is young,” as the film poster states, and as documented by the Communist Manifesto of February 22, 1848, published by Marx and Engels, who were not yet thirty.

But the story cannot end here…. We would like to see how Marx came to identify the formula of the economic cycle peculiar to capitalism, surplus value, the rate of profit, and especially how he managed to foresee the final situation of capitalism in dualistic-dialectical terms.

The prediction of infinite accumulation and unrestrained competition is undeniable, and the key points of Capital should be told. Marx was against bourgeois democracy because he believed it could not go beyond the choices of the most capable technical executors in applying the commands of transnational financial capital, meaning that governments are nothing more than committees of the big bourgeoisie.

In this, he may have been wrong only by underestimation.

But this is the continuation of the story begun with this film, which should be told for completeness, for correctness, to pay homage to someone who had intuited, theorized, and calculated the true cruel face that capitalism would eventually reveal.

And if this is the second part of the story, the more interesting part, we await its telling, at least before the second devastating course of capitalist alienation, provoked by the digital cage that turns us into sand in the gears of techno-corporations, renders us definitively incapable of understanding and willing.

But perhaps it is already too late.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice