The Marx Family Saga

He’s writing the new Faust. He’s barely scraping by. He’s looking for an apartment after he and his family were evicted from Dean Street. He discusses with comrades, with the forefather Abraham, as well as with animated images of builders. He indulges in hydrotherapy. He reflects in the windows of porn stores, sweeps Moscow nightclubs, and winks at us from pictures. He is sitting with Jenny in Hampstead watching a live broadcast of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. He’s switching to Dallas. Or another endless series from a new world subject to the laws of the market. He escapes us. Founder of scientific socialism. Philosopher and poet. Prophet and deceiver. Loving father. Sad clown. Devil! Karl Marx. He has influenced our present more fundamentally than any other intellectual of modern times, it is said. He strove for justice and solidarity – and yet we know him above all as the inspirer of cruel dictatorships. What do we really know about him? And why should we still want to know anything about him?

In his ingeniously composed work, the prominent Spanish author Juan Goytisolo (1931-2017) unleashes a crazy game of filters through which we perceive Marx’s elusive and contradictory personality. He takes us on a rollercoaster through space and time, shaking up the image we have made not only of Marx, but of our relationship to the “generation of dead ancestors” in general. And with his gaze fixed on persistent poverty, widening social divides, accelerating planetary devastation, the migration crisis, xenophobia and racism, he asks whether the step forward we celebrated with the fall of communism could not, in a certain sense, also be a leap backwards.