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Raoul Peck's The Young Karl Marx (2017) spotlights the intellectual rise of Karl Marx and "Fred" Engels in the 1840s. It's a fun, interesting film, perfect for lively and intelligent audiences.
For a brief review of I Am Not Your Negro, Peck's powerful 2016 documentary about James Baldwin, here's a link.
Main characters in The Young Karl Marx include Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Jenny von Westphalen, Mary Burns, Lizzy Burns, Helen "Lenchen" Demeth, Pierre Proudhon and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (the anarchists), Wilhelm Weitling, et alia. The actors are uniformly excellent. The international aspects of the film make clear the cosmopolitan nature and universalist appeal of Marx and Engels' ideas.
"Mary from Tipperary:" her parents emigrated from Tipperary, Ireland, to Manchester (where Mary was born), for work. She becomes Engels' main paramour.
"Happiness requires rebellion." - Jenny Marx.
"Everything is subject to change. Nothing lasts." - Karl Marx.
"All social relations -- slavery, serfdom, salaried work -- are historical and transient. The truth is, current conditions must change."
"Do we not have all history before us?" -- Pierre Proudhon.
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.
James Baldwin's words, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, directed by Raoul Peck and intermixed with intense archival footage, underscore the importance and relevance of I Am Not Your Negro (2016) in the 21st century.
Very little has been resolved since Baldwin (1924-1987) drafted Remember This House (just published in 2017) in the decade prior to his death.
Through consideration of the outstanding lives and violent deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., Baldwin expounds upon race and identity in the United States to great effect.
A couple of snippets, as narrated by Jackson: "In the years
in Paris, I had never
been homesick for anything
American. Neither . . . hot dogs,
baseball, majorettes, [Hollywood] movies, nor the Empire
State Building, nor Coney Island, nor the Statue
of Liberty, nor the daily news, nor Times
Square. All of these
things had passed out
of me. They might
never have existed, and it made
absolutely no difference
to me if I never saw
them again. But I missed
my brothers and sisters,
and my mother. They made a
difference. I wanted to be
able to see them, and to see
their children."
"To look around the United
States today is enough to
make prophets and
angels weep. This is not
the land of the free. It is only
very unwillingly and
sporadically the home of
the brave."
The cadences of Baldwin's sentences stick with me. He is still right: the USA will not be anywhere near true to its ideals until a critical and diverse mass of its people can be honest about race and history.
It's easy to see in other countries -- such as when the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge -- and outright assaults -- anyone who even suggests that previous Turkish governments directed genocide against Turkey's Armenians (1914-1923); while any neutral observer would also see that frank acknowledgement is a surer way forward toward conciliation than denial. Yet as long as a significant subset of white America refuses to accept a fuller history of the United States, screeching the same kind of belligerent denials as come from the Turkish government; and, perhaps, also out of an ugly stubbornness; so long as this contra attitude persists, we shall remain stuck in limbo.
Today's Rune: Protection.
