In the The Young Karl Marx August
Diehl smirks a lot. He displays a smug smile when he meets his future
comrade-in-arms Friedrich Engels. It is there again when he takes on the
apocalyptic- and evangelically-sounding rabble-rouser Wilhelm Weitling. And we
come across Marx’s scornful expression again when he confronts a rich mill
owner, friend of Engels’ father, on child exploitation. That such a
dialogue-rich movie contains such strongly-conveyed facial messages speaks
volumes about the quality of the direction, script and performances.
Whereas in I am Not Your Negro, director
Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated, James Baldwin-inspired documentary, the
film-maker uses the late civil rights movement writer’s unfinished
manuscript Remember This House to put contemporary US society
in the dock, in the The Young Karl Marx, he injects both Marx and
Engels with a dose of much-needed humanity. The script suits Diehl’s bruising
Marx and Konarske’s arrogant Engels, both of whom have plenty of scores to
settle. Rounding up the leading roles are two actresses who rise up to the
challenge posed to them even if their contribution is not as evident as the
men’s. On one side we have Vicky Krieps, who was last seen poisoning Daniel Day
Lewis (admittedly, with his consent in the end) in Phantom Thread,
in the role of Jenny Marx. Although here the Luxembourg-born actress seems to
play second fiddle, there’s still fierceness in her performance as a staunch
defender of her husband’s ideas. On the other side we have Hannah Steele, she
of Wolf Hall fame, as Mary Burns, Engels’ lifelong partner and
a working-class, Irish woman who adopts both Marx and Engels’ ideas as her own.
The elephant in the room is the theory both thinkers
come up with. Whilst Engels acquires first-hand knowledge of the conditions of
the English working-class (chiefly with Mary’s help), Marx is busy polishing up
his ideas on the inner workings of capitalism. Their findings are valid but
their solutions controversial, and sadly history has not been kind to these
men’s communist- or socialist-driven agenda (it is always amusing to find a
group of western intellectuals locked in a verbal brawl over which system is
the better antidote to modern-day capitalism).
In believing that the way to accelerate the demise
of capitalism and usher in a new equalitarian society was by transferring power
from the ruling elite to the working class, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
created unintentionally a virtuous oppressed Other. This oppressed Other was
cast in an angelic and almost-perfect light. Nuance went out of the
window, along with the power of the individual.
To be clear: the underage children slaving away in
coal mines were real, the poor families with barely anything to eat and in
constant fear of eviction were real and the workers deprived of their own
rights and voice were real. It is just that the solution to their plight was
not and should never have been Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Fidel. When these leaders
introduced their own version of socialism, the last thing on their minds was
that oppressed Other. The irony was that they used the nuance-free image
created by the followers of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and manipulated it
for their own power-grabbing purposes. This was not Marx or Engels’ fault, any
more than the writer(s) who cobbled together those first passages of the Old
Testament are to blame for the current situation with abortion in Ireland.
Socialist dictatorships’ first step when they come to power is to wipe away any
kind of joyful expression that does not match the incoming government’s
revolutionary zeal. And if that includes self-satisfying, smug smirking, so be
it.
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| What, smirking again, Herr Marx? |
©
2018
