The ghost of Marx is running rampant in Bíó Paradís

The Socialist Party of Iceland and Bíó Paradís are hosting a screening of The Young Karl Marx (Le jeune Karl Marx) by Haitian director Raoul Peck on Saturday, February 3rd at two o'clock with a discussion and discourse on Karl Marx and his relevance to us today. Before the screening, philosopher Viðar Þorsteinsson will commemorate Marx and highlight the similarities between his struggle for justice for the poor and oppressed and our struggle today. After the screening, three activists will discuss the film and connect it to today's struggles; Ragnar Þór Ingólfsson, chairman of VR, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, poet and former MP for Hreyfingin and Píratar, and Sólveig Anna Jónsdóttir, candidate for chairman of Efling. These three will spark a discussion among guests about Marx and his relevance and what today's activists for the justice of the poor and oppressed can draw from the pioneers.

Raoul Peck directed The Young Karl Marx a year after releasing I Am Not Your Negro, a film based on the letters and accounts of James Baldwin, poet, activist, and visionary. Previously, he had made a feature film about Patrice Lumumba, a freedom hero of Congo who was murdered at the behest of Western imperialists. Peck was born in Haiti, raised in Congo, and educated in New York, France, and Germany. He is therefore a cosmopolitan, living within an ideological world that spans the Third World and the struggle for rights of the oppressed there and in the West. His choice of the younger years of Karl Marx as the subject of his next film after Lumumba and James Baldwin, a narrative of the birth of the labor movement in the early years of the industrial revolution, is therefore no coincidence. Raoul Peck is a revivalist and actively participates in politics and public discourse alongside directing films, he was even, for a time, the Minister of Education back home in Haiti. It is therefore not only that Karl Marx is relevant to us today, but the film is made by people who believe that Marx's message is urgent and burning.

The Facebook event for the screening ishere