As the story opens, famed political philosopher Karl Marx is aboard a ship on his way to the New World. He’s fleeing a crowd of creditors, and he’s hoping for more in America than just an escape: “If the reports about the gold in California are only half true,” he writes in a letter to his wife, “I am confident I will be coming home to you and the girls as a new man, able to pay our debts and erase the shame of poverty.” Marx’s landfall is less pleasant than he had hoped; he gets mocked, tossed overboard, and stuck in deep river mud, and he’s being followed by Prussian agents of King Frederick William IV who are intent upon rifling through his papers in search of his notorious Manifesto and amusingly relay the great man’s misadventures (“We have seen nearly every day,” they breathlessly report, “how Marx drinks the local rotgut whiskey to the point of extreme gesloshment”). Marx is befriended by a teenager named Sixto, another renegade running from his past, and the two commence a series of escapades against the backdrop of 1849 California and the madness of the Gold Rush. “It seemed like half the human race was hellbent on striking it rich,” thinks Sixto, not yet aware of the crushing irony of this observation in the company of the author of The Communist Manifesto. As Carlson expertly guides his narrative to the possibility of a socialist republic in Gold Rush California, he misses no opportunities for sly humor or surprisingly touching scenes between Marx and young Sixto. The book’s irresistible comedy is reinforced by all of the letters Carlson includes from the people who are disappointed in poor, harried Marx, including his partner, Engels, and his wife, Jenny (“Don’t bother to defend the indefensible,” she writes to him. “Our marriage is, as you might put it, a dialectical wreck”).
