How many times have you read the Communist Manifesto and just thought: “When the heck are they gonna turn this into a web series?!” Well the the land that brought the world Che Guevara has finally stepped up and done it. Marx ha vuelto (Marx is Back) is a fictional mini-series produced by the Institute of Socialist Thought and TvPTS, a leftist TV channel associated with the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas.
Alright, admittedly it doesn’t sound like super entertaining viewing, but Marx ha vuelto has done an admirable job of ditching the boring, didactic format we normally associate with this type of content for something slightly more appealing on the eyes and ears. Broken into four episodes that parallel the chapters of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Marx ha vuelto follows the (not so) fictional story of a group of print shop workers who organize when they’re threatened with layoffs. This is mixed in with scenes of a Marx-like figure dressed in 19th-century garb reciting passages of the Communist Manifesto for his 21st-century buds. Then there are collage-like documentary sequences that attempt to connect these ideas with our present day struggles.
Incredibly, the strongest portion of the series is by far actor Carlos Weber’s recitations of the Communist Manifesto, in which Weber somehow takes Marx’s evocative, stylized prose and turns it into a convincing rant by a slightly kooky old genius. On the other hand, the series’ dramatic storyline features a pretty drawn out take on modern class struggle that could and should constitute one brief episode. Instead, they stretch the whole thing out over four episodes and don’t really leave us with anything in the way of cliffhangers to keep us coming back.
A few months after episode four was released the series’ creators put out a prequel/spin off titled “Comunismo, el encuentro con Trotsky” labeled as episode zero.