Film: Raoul Peck: The Young Karl Marx

Co-presented with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

1844. Karl Marx is 26 years old and exiled in Paris with his wife Jenny. He is in debt and plagued by existential anxieties. When he first meets the slightly younger factory owner’s son Friedrich Engels, he dismisses him as a dandy. But Engels, who has just published a study on the impoverishment of the English proletariat, has long begun to distance himself from his own class. The two like-minded men become friends and soon inspire each other to write texts in which they seek to provide a theoretical foundation for the revolution they believe must come. Their goal is no longer to merely interpret the world, but to change it. Fundamentally. Resistance from conservative forces and internal power struggles within the political Left only serve to spur them on.

Acclaimed Haitian director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, 2016) describes the origins of the international Socialist movement and the emergence of the Communist League and of its founding document, the Manifesto of the Communist Party. At the same time, the film paints a portrait of two impetuous young men who passionately believe in their vision of a humane society and in the revolutionary power of the abused and oppressed.

The film screening will be followed by a Q&A session with BISR faculty.

Le Jeune Karl Marx
France/Germany/Belgium, 2017, 118 min
Directed by Raoul Peck. With August Diehl, Stefan Konarske, Vicky Krieps

A release by The Orchard

The Young Karl Marx is part of Marx Now, a three-week series of events organized by the Goethe-Institut New York in partnership with Anthology Film Archives and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. For a full calendar of events, please click here.