Join Haymarket for a discussion celebrating the release of Olivier Besancenot and Michael Löwy’s Marx in Paris, 1871.

This deeply informed, eminently enjoyable work of historical fiction places Karl Marx in the thick of the unprecedented events of the Paris Commune. In disguise, employing imperfect but serviceable French, Karl and his eldest daughter, Jenny, encounter and debate many important figures of the movement, including Léo Frankel, Eugène Varlin, Charles Longuet, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and Louise Michel, eventually returning to England with a profoundly changed sense of political possibility. “This book adds to the tradition evolving since Marx and Lenin.

Remarkably accessible, it refreshes, provokes, and thereby develops that movement still further.” — Richard Wolff

“This fictional account is a remarkable piece of historical criticism and revolutionary imagination.” —Enzo Traverso

Speakers:

Michael Löwy is emeritus research director at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). His books, including On Changing the World and The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development, have been translated into thirty languages.

Natalia Tylim is active in the NYC-DSA labor branch. She’s a restaurant worker, a founding member of DSA’s Restaurant Organizing Project, and a member of the Tempest Collective.

Valerio Arcary is a professor at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology in Brazil.

Todd Chretien (moderator) is an organizer, author, translator, and high school Spanish teacher. He has contributed to several books, including Socialist Strategy and Electoral Politics, and is editor of Eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution.