Educational Media Reviews Online

After the events of the 20th century, it’s hard to see much of a future for Marx and his ideas. The premise of this film, however, is that the 2007 financial crisis has brought Marx and communism back in vogue.

The film presents quite a diversity of opinion, even including a strong critic of communism, Eamonn Butler, head of the Adam Smith Institute. On the one hand, this is commendable. On the other, this diversity of opinion constitutes the film’s major weakness. Each speaker wants to salvage a different piece of Marx, and jettison the rest. There are several good points made, but the result is incoherence. There is very little holding this together. This film would have been more educational if it had simply explained what Marx believed, rather than speculating how this or that strand of thought might survive into the future. Although the film intends to discuss the relevance of Marx and the resurgence of his thought, the cacophony of opinion presented suggests a philosophy in disarray. The intellectual chaos surveyed by this film serves as a fitting epitaph to ideas that have little hope of influence, in spite of the many evils of capitalism.

The production quality is good. The animations are fun. It was sometimes unclear whether the narrator was simply narrating, or quoting a passage from Marx.