The play depicts a couple of hours in the life of Karl Marx in March of 1848. Marx, the radical writer, had been kicked out of France in 1848. Now that King Louis Philippe of France has been deposed, Marx has been invited back to Paris by the leaders of the revolution. On this day he returns to the humble lodgings where he and his family are staying to find the German poet Heinrich Heine waiting for him. Heine and Marx had been kicked out of Germany for their subversive writings. Heine and Marx, as fellow German exiles, love each other, but Marx finds Heine hard to take because of his unending irony. Pierre Proudhon and Karl Grun arrive at the rooms with the intention of getting Marx to be more supportive of the revolutionaries’ takeover of Paris. They want him to stop his dogmatizing and his denunciations of other revolutionaries. But Marx takes a hard line. He is convinced that the revolution of 1848 is premature and won’t hold up. The plight of the workers of Paris, France, and elsewhere in Europe is not bad enough to bring about the end of capitalism and rule by the proletariat.