Marx Walking Tour

The Social Justice Academy will take a historical walking tour of Lower Manhattan, exploring the places influenced by Karl Marx and the sites of Leon Trotsky’s visit. We will meet outside the MMC front entrance and take the train downtown.

This tour was created by the Göethe Institute in honor of Karl Marx's 200th birthday.

More from the Göethe Institute:

The traces of history in New York are always present but seldom noticed. As the ceaseless transformations of capital flicker across the landscape–property parceled out, air rights bought and sold – this leading edge leaves remnants in the built environment, sequestered lives, or sometimes only the memory of past events. The flâneur, as Walter Benjamin has suggested, slips through the veil of the crowd into a phantasmagoria of commodities but also dialectical flashes of Jetztzeit, the pregnant constellations of past-in-present that can erupt at any given moment. For a historian schooled in Marx, Benjamin proposed, the class struggle is always present. One finds the “fight for the crude and material things” as well as the refined and spiritual things in class struggle: “confidence, courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude” which, through a “secret heliotropism,” turn like flowers toward the sun in the sky of history.

Karl Marx never set foot in New York. But the traces of his influence remain present in a city and country for which he had hopes of a bright proletarian future. Beginning with his own words, published by his admirers and followers, his ideas have animated the class struggle in America for generations of workers, activists, and artists. The secret heliotropism of their fight and their spirit presents itself to the flâneur who takes the time to notice.

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