Led by Karl Marx's texts, they travel to remote villages and factories in hopes of inspiring a revolution among the locals, who show disinterest in their ideas.

"Žilnik found inspiration the previous year in the stormy worldwide student demonstrations that had their reflection in Yugoslavia at the time, as well as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the suppression of the Prague Spring, which prompted him to seriously question the gap between the high ideals of the official Marxist ideology and its application in practice.

The title was chosen ironically[3] as a comment on the discrepancy between the theory, as expressed by Marx and Engels in their work, and practice, as implemented by the Soviet Union and other countries of real socialism.

Žilnik originally planned to direct a sequel entitled Capital, which was supposed to be inspired by Marx's work of the same name, but instead became the subject of official condemnations, and was expelled from the Party and forced to live as an émigré in West Germany for a while.

Despite this, a few months later it was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, where it triumphed and won the Golden Bear, thus achieving one of the highest honors in the history of Yugoslav cinema.