Berlin Film Review: ‘The Young Karl Marx’

FEBRUARY 13, 2017 4:16AM PT

Raoul Peck‘s biopic about the philosopher-muse of Communism is a drama so old school that it tames the radicalism of its subject.

Release Date–Feb. 12, 2017

Official Site: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1699518/

As a director, Raoul Peck is a passionate and protean talent. He has been making films for close to 30 years, and he’s right in the middle of his most seismic moment with “I Am Not Your Negro,” his searching meditation on James Baldwin, which has struck a deeper, wider chord than anyone might have anticipated. In 2000, Peck made a galvanizing drama about Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the Congo, that was the cinema’s most perceptive (and agonizing) study of colonialism: what it is, how it works, why its legacy is so hard to shake off.Now, at the Berlin Film Festival, Peck takes a different leap altogether with “The Young Karl Marx,” a classically conceived and executed biopic that traces how Marx, as a struggling family-man writer in the 1840s, came to create “The Communist Manifesto.” It’s an impeccably crafted and honorable movie — but, I have to say, not a very enthralling one. If you didn’t know Raoul Peck’s name was on it, “The Young Karl Marx” would look like a so-so Merchant Ivory film from 1993. It’s dutiful, but it’s also superficial and polite, and it commits the genteel sin of the old biopics: It turns its hero into a plaster saint.

Is Karl Marx morally responsible for everything in the 20th century that happened in his name? Of course not. Yet if you look at that legacy — mass incarceration and death (in China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia) on a scale comparable, in some cases, to genocide — then you can at least ask the question: Was the madness of 20th-century Communism encoded in the naïveté of Marx’s writings? In “The Young Karl Marx,” he’s played, by the German actor August Diehl, as an eager, bushy-haired (and bushy-tailed) liberal philosopher, fighting for the proletariat even though he’s never been a working man himself.

An opening title provides the context for Marx’s struggle: The Industrial Revolution has arrived, and the old order that ruled Europe — the monarchy, the imperial aristocracy — is getting ready to topple. (It would have happened anyway; Marx gave it a nudge.) In the early scenes, when we meet Karl, all glorified schoolboy fire, and also Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske), the very bourgeois factory owner’s son — he wears a top hat and high collar — who becomes his comrade and writing partner, the movie makes the point that the whole scheme of analysis we think of as “Marxist” was already in place. The perception of the class system, the rage against the capitalist oppressors, the dream of a world in which workers would unite as brothers: Karl Marx didn’t invent any of that.

So what did he do? In “The Young Karl Marx,” he gets into friendly debates with Pierre Proudhon (Olivier Gourmet), the firebrand French anarchist who preaches against the world of assembly-line labor (what he calls “the new machines from hell”), and he speaks, rather defensively, about how he doesn’t want to be “a scribbler urging world revolution.” (Good luck.) Then he meets Engels: The two take the piss out of each other for about five minutes, but after that it’s all high-minded bromance. “You’re the greatest materialist thinker of our times,” says Friedrich. “A genius.” That’s quite a claim, but the film never begins to explain what it means. As presented, Karl’s big insight appears to be that the dissolution of the class system can’t reject materialism — it has to be about the redistribution of it. Yet the movie, oddly, never makes us feel the radicalism of this idea; Karl just presents it as common sense.

August Diehl is a skillful actor, known for his work in films like “Inglourious Basterds,” but he and Konarske are both a little too fetching and caught in their own placid glamour to play these upstart philosophers with the right tone of prickly fanaticism. In “The Young Karl Marx,” they’re like a couple of indie rock stars, grooving on each other’s riffs. Engels, to write his book about the struggle of the worker, has done his research, mostly by romancing the cutest worker (Hannah Steele) in his father’s textile mill. As the two men skip around the continent, going from Germany to Paris to London, nattering on in drawing rooms about the proletariat as if they were collaborating on the world’s most ardent term paper, the one dramatic constant is Marx’s struggle to take care of his family: his radiant and endlessly supportive wife, Jenny (Vicky Krieps), and young daughter. He does a good job of it, and Diehl, in fact, makes Karl so centered and loving that he’s never thrown off balance. I kept wishing for him to have a moodier side — wondering what, say, an actor like Oscar Isaac might have brought to the role. The Karl we see in “The Young Karl Marx” is never more (or less) than the sum of his compassion.

Peck stages the movie with the kind of stodgy middlebrow competence that, after a while, can wear you down; he doesn’t make glaring mistakes, but he never upsets the apple cart. And maybe that’s because he’s lost, in his way, in a view of Marx that’s too automatically romantic. The film is at its best when Karl gets concrete about what his philosophy means — like his crusade against child labor. Yet it buys too easily into Marx’s utopian (and deeply bourgeois) view that the class system is a conceit imposed by the oppressor, and that the attempt to try and equalize everything is simply the higher wisdom.

Near the end, there’s a classic corny biopic moment when Marx and Engels are writing “The Communist Manifesto,” sculpting the sentence that reads “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism…” The weight of the words never feels spontaneous; it comes with a Great Books seal of approval. But then, startlingly, the closing credits play over clips of news footage from the 20th century, with Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” blasting on the soundtrack. That’s certainly the kind of audacity this safe and slightly dull movie could have used more of. Yet if Peck is saying that Marxism is having a moment of comeback, the 20th century (unlike the 19th) isn’t a great advertisement for it. I watched those clips thinking: What would the young Karl Marx have made of what was done in his name?

Berlin Film Review: ‘The Young Karl Marx’

Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival, Feb. 12, 2017. Running time: 112 MIN. (Original title: “Le jeune Karl Marx”)

PRODUCTION: An AGAT Films and Cie, Velvet Film, Rohfilm GmbH, Artémis Productions prod. Producers: Nicolas Blanc, Rémi Greilety, Robert Guédiguian, Raoul Peck.

CREW: Director: Raoul Peck. Screenplay: Peck, Pascal Bonitzer. Camera (color, widescreen): Kolja Brandt. Editor: Frédérique Broos.

WITH: August Diehl, Stefan Konarske, Vicky Krieps, Olivier Gourmet, Michael Brandner, Alexander Scheer, Hannah Steele, Niels Bruno Schmidt. (French, German, English dialogue)

Dr. King on a Future Revolution of Values

It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means, in the final analysis, that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft-misunderstood, this oft-misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man.

From Martin Luther King Jr:s speech “Beyond Vietnam”

The Cosmopolitanism of Martin Luther King, Jr.

That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; That until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.
From a speech by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I before the U.N. General Assembly in 1963, which was later put to music by Bob Marley and the Wailers in the song “War” (1976)

The value of our shared reward will and must be measured by the joyful peace which will triumph, because the common humanity that bonds both black and white into one human race, will have said to each one of us that we shall all live like the children of paradise. Thus shall we live, because we will have created a society which recognises that all people are born equal, with each entitled in equal measure to life, liberty, prosperity, human rights and good governance. Such a society should never allow again that there should be prisoners of conscience nor that any person’s human right should be violated.
From Nelson Mandela’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1993

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.  We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
From Barack Obama’s inaugural speech, January 21 2009


The word ‘cosmopolitan’, which derives from the Greek word kosmopolitês (‘citizen of the world’), has been used to describe a wide variety of views that share the idea that all human beings do (or at least can) belong to a single community, and that this community should be cultivated. Today cosmopolitanism has become fashionable as a moral and political philosophy. Scholars such as Seyla Benhabib, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Gilroy and Kwame Gyekye have argued fervently for the need to move towards a cosmopolitan conception of the world and our place in it.

Martin Luther King, Jr., being the visionary that he was, urged us all to become cosmopolitans soon half a century ago up until his death in 1968. In the final chapter “World House” of what became his last book, Where Do We Go from Here?: Chaos or Community, King spelled out his vision.

The chapter was an elaboration of his Nobel Peace Prize lecture in 1964. Many of the same ideas are echoed in his “Beyond Vietnam”  speech, which he delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, exactly a year before his assassination on April 4 1968. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War is featured in episode 2 of a documentary, MLK: A Call to Conscience, which just premiered on PBS, March 31 2010.

  1. King writes that there have been two worldwide revolutions so far and that there’s a need for a third revolution. (a) Which are the first two revolutions? Describe them. (b) Which is the third one? Describe it and what its significance is.
  2. Describe Martin Luther King’s vision of our common humanity, what he thinks it means to cultivate it and why he thinks that it is crucial that we do.
  3. Which are the three evils that, according to King, need to be overcome in fulfilling this vision? Describe them and explain why they are the three evils for humanity to overcome.

Black Womanism and White Feminism

In her article Blanche Radford Curry spells out some of the racial ignorance of much white feminism, how black womanism is a response to this and how feminism and womanism could be merged to a third voice womanism/feminism.

The African-American writer Alice Walker coined the term “womanism”. You can see her recite the famous speech, “Ain’t I a woman”, by the grand-old womanist Sojourner Truth here.

  1. Blanche Radford Curry gives several examples of how the feminism of white women all too often have been racist and exclusionary. Describe some of these examples. (pp. 246-248)
  2. Curry, as so many other black feminists before her, point out that race and gender intersect in the situation of black women in ways that are not addressed by traditional white feminism. Flesh out her reasoning on this. (pp. 248-252)
  3. Curry calls for a third womanist/feminist voice that recognizes both commonalities and differences between the problems that black and white women face as women. How does she envision this third voice? (pp. 255-260)

Paper Topic Suggestions

Here are some paper topic suggestions. Ideally you will not need them and will develop your own topic. Please feel free to set up a meeting to brainstorm about paper topics, where to find relevant research material, how to structure the paper, or any other questions that you may have.

You are free to write either a formal research paper or a less formal essay. A danger, though, with writing a formal research paper is that you merely end up compiling other people’s thoughts, and writing an essay can easily turn into an excuse to be sloppy and spurt out poorly substantiated opinions.

During the course we have covered the origins and workings of modern racism and how it relates to some basic political concepts such as the liberal state, equality, justice, democracy, class, gender and cosmopolitanism. Now it is your job to put what you have learnt to good use!!


Racial Equality

  • What is (Racial) Equality? As you know, the so-called Age of Enlightenment gave birth to the revolutionary and anti-feudal idea that all persons are moral equals and that a state can only be justified so long as it upholds this equality. For Immanuel Kant persons are moral equals since they all have the capacity to act as moral agents, legislating and acting on their own moral principles and reasons, and should therefore be equally treated as moral ends. For John Locke—the “father of liberalism”—in force of a natural law that can easily be comprehended by any (normal) person, all persons have the same basic and equal rights to freedom, life, health and possessions. For a political theorist like Charles Mills, both these conceptions of human equality are racial. Is this fair? If it is, what then would true (racial) equality mean? How could we, in a non-racist way, make sense of the statement that we all deserve equal moral concern and respect? And what would the consequences of such an alternative conception be to our understanding of racial equality in society?
  • Is there (Racial) Equality in America? Some would say that America since the civil rights acts of the 1960s has achieved racial equality? Others, like Glenn Loury, would say that the formal equality of American laws (e.g. criminal laws, voting rights and laws that govern public education) are illusory since they in practice discriminate against non-white people and since they do not rectify racial injustices (that fly in the face of equality). Focus on one or two laws (or other societal phenomena such as wealth disparities) and make an argument.
  • Race and Equality of Opportunity. “Equality of opportunity” is a central and contested concept of liberalism. If all citizens should be treated by the state as moral equals, then the state should guarantee each citizen’s equal right to, say, a fair trial, quality public education or having access to decent housing. Pick an area, such as public education, and put the principle of (racial) equality of opportunity into question.

Racial Justice

  • Race and Poverty. Due mainly to a history of slavery, Jim Crow and discrimination African-Americans are unequally poverty stricken. Should the disproportionate poverty of African-Americans be ameliorated in the name of justice? Should perhaps poverty, regardless of whose poverty it is, be ameliorated in the name of justice?
  • Race and the Criminal Justice System. African-Americans are more likely to be arrested, sentenced and receive harsh penalties than white Americans. For instance, although African-Americans on average neither consume nor sell more drugs than white Americans, they are much more likely to be arrested and sentenced on drug charges. Has the American criminal justice system reinstated a new Jim Crow as Michelle Alexander argues in a recent book? And what should be done? Should, for instance, prisons be abolished as Angela Davis argues?
  • Reparations, Native-Americans and African-Americans. A long-standing debate is whether or not Native Americans and African Americans should receive economic (and/or social) reparations for the American history of slavery, genocide and oppression that have left these communities disadvantaged. What do you think?

White Supremacy

  • Black Bodies, White Norms. How are black bodies judged on the basis of white bodies as an aesthetic (somatic) norm? For instance, skin tone, hair texture, facial features and body shape? And how are these judgments racially loaded? And is a preference for white beauty ideals and a distaste for black beauty ideals—or a reverse preference—an expression of racism/white supremacy or merely a harmless personal preference (like preferring vanilla to chocolate or red hair to blonde hair)? Use examples from media and make an argument.
  • Rap Music against a Background of White Supremacy. Mainstream rap music has stirred a lot of debate over the past decade. Mainstream rap music can in many ways be seen as a response to, some would even say an expression of, white supremacy. On the one hand, it is often said to be an expression of the oppressive conditions black Americans face. On the other hand it is aid to traffic two-dimensional racist stereotypes for a voyeuristic white audience and for the profit of predominantly white shareholders. Some black cultural critics celebrate mainstream rap music as progressive, others criticize it as promoting misogyny, gangsterism, violence and cheap materialism. What is your spin?

Race, Class and Gender

  • Sexism and Racism. African-American womanists and other third-wave feminists have criticized white feminism for not paying attention to how race and gender can intersect as oppressive categories. White feminism have tended to see the oppression and liberation of white women as the model for women regardless of race (or class) and failed to see their own racially loaded complicity with white patriarchy. African-American womanists have also criticized black male civil rights advocates for not acknowledging, and even reinforcing, gender oppression and for failing to see parallels between racism and sexism. What’s your take?
  • Addressing Poverty: Race or Class? Is ameliorating poverty among people of color a social justice issue? And should it be addressed as a racial issue or as a class issue or as both?

Racial Justice II

(i)         Some critics of race-based public policies (such as affirmative action) think that they exacerbate, and even cause, racial divisiveness and excessive racial consciousness. Why does Loury think that such critics get things backwards? (pp. 141-147)

(ii)       Why does Loury think that at the most profound moral level, someone who abhors the consequences of racial stigma has to affirm a kind of moral blindness to the race of agents? (You will have to figure this one out yourself as Loury himself doesn’t explain why!) (p. 148)

(iii)     Loury thinks that there are three domains of public action where the “blindness” of liberal neutrality might be applied. Describe each of these three domains and why, in the name of liberal neutrality, one may argue that they need to be “colorblind”. (This relates to the “profound moral level” of the previous question.) (pp. 148-149)

(iv)     (a) Give examples from each of these three domains of when and why the principle of race-blindness may be questionable. (pp. 149-151) (b) Loury thinks that the race-blindness of the first domain fails because, as he describes it, it is not closed to moral deviation. What does he mean? (p. 151) (c) In regards to the second domain he thinks that it should be race-blind, but not race-indifferent. What does he mean? (pp. 151-152) (d) The only domain where he thinks that some notion of race-blindness should be elevated to the level of fundamental principle is the third domain. Why? (p. 152)

Racial Justice

The Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, Glenn Loury, argues that the liberal ideal of race-blindness in state policies represents a superficial moral stance, and, moreover, that liberal individualism is an insufficient norm in a society sharply stratified along racial lines. “I believe (and believe I can demonstrate),” he writes, “that the manner in which liberal political theory deals with the ethical problems raised by the pronounced and durable social-economic disadvantage of African Americans is troubled, inadequate, superficial, and incomplete.”

The overarching question to keep in mind when answering the questions below is why Loury thinks that racial justice (e.g. mitigating the economic disadvantage of black Americans) falls under the basic responsibilities of the State.

(Glenn Loury is a frequent blogger at Bloggingheads.tv. You can check him out here.)

(i)        According to Loury, two distinct moral desiderata animate the discourse about race and social justice in America. Describe them. (pp. 112-113)

(ii)      Although Loury is sympathetic to Charles Mills’ criticism of color-blind liberalism and his characterization of the American state as a racial contract, he is also critical of what he takes to be Mills’ wholesale dismissal of liberal universalism. Why? (And is his criticism fair?) (pp. 118-121)

(iii)     What is Loury’s criticism of the “liberal self” (i.e. the idea of the self underlying liberal individualism)? (His criticism is very similar to Yancy’s!) (pp. 121-122)

(iv)     Loury thinks that “past racial injustice is relevant in establishing a general presumption against indifference to present racial inequality”. (a) What does he mean? (pp. 125-126) He also thinks that there are two categorically different responses to the problem of a morally problematic racial history. (b) Describe them. (pp. 126-127)

(v)      Loury’s argument for racial justice is essentially as argument for equality of opportunity. How? Try to give a brief outline of the argument. (pp. 129-141)

To be continued…

Whose Democracy?

When most of us think of democracy and what it is, we are perhaps most likely to think of it as a political institution with a set of procedures. In his article, “Whose Democracy?” George Yancy questions this descriptive view of democracy—which he calls a “minimalist” view—as insufficient in capturing the moral imperative of democracy.

(i)        How is a maximalist conception of democracy, related to equality as a basic moral and democratic principle?

(ii)      Yancy is doubtful that the U.S. can properly be described as a democracy on a maximalist conception of democracy. Why?

(iii)      He is also critical of applying liberal individualism to the situation of the poor. (a) Why? (b) And what does this criticism have to do with democracy?

(iv)     Yancy thinks that Western countries’ push for democracy in African countries often is undemocratic. Why?

(v)      And on what basis does Yancy claim (in the last sentence of the article) that true democracy should be “invested in the authority of the people (and not the authority of the wealthy), the poor, the wretched, the downtrodden, the faceless, and the structurally ‘permanent’ underclass”?

Does (Liberal) Democracy Make Us Equal?

As political theorist Robert Dahl points out, liberal democracy presupposes that citizens ought to be treated as political equals when they participate in governing. But, according to Dahl, if we ask ourselves why democratic rights should be extended equally to citizens we will find that the answer is far from obvious.

In answering the questions below, please try to get a handle on some connections between the principle of political equality and the modern liberal state, liberal democracy, modern political ideologies (e.g. socialism and neo-liberalism), social contract theory (including Mills description of the “social contract” as a “racial contract”), modern notions of personhood and race.

  1. Why does Dahl think that for most Americans it is not, and never was, self-evident that all men and women are created equal? (pp. 62-63)
  2. How is the principle of political equality a moral, and not factual, judgment? (pp. 64-65)
  3. What are the four reasons why Dahl thinks that the principle of political equality is reasonable? (pp. 66-67)
  4. What are the fundamental rights necessary to democracy itself, according to Dahl, and why are they necessary? (pp. 16-17)
  5. And what does Dahl have to say about his own question as to whether or not political equality is a feasible goal? (pp. 18-20)

Study question for “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory”

Robert Young’s, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory” argues that “the recent work by African-American humanists, or discourse theorists, or even left-liberal intellectuals, these various groups—despite their intellectual differences—form a ruling coalition and one thing is clear: capitalism set the limit for political change, as there is no alternative to the rule of capital. In contrast to much of contemporary race theory, a transformative theory of race highlights the political economy of race in the interests of an emancipatory political project.” Explain his argument and flesh out his critiques of Asante, Mills, Goldberg, Collins, et al. Put in your own words what his theory of race entails and how it leads to a different kind of political work.

See also his “Postpositivist Realism and the return of the Same: The Rational Subject and the Post(post)modern Liberalism.” Cultural Logic (2002): 39 pars. 15 November 2002.

Dr. Robert M. Young, professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama, passed away Sunday, Jan. 31, 2010, after a four year battle with cancer.