Facing debtors’ prison in London, a desperate Karl Marx sails to California in 1849, hoping for gold for himself and The Revolution. In San Francisco he meets the equally desperate Sixto, a plucky teenager raised by padres in a mission, who’s on the run from a crazy shipwrecked sailor. 

These unlikeliest of 49ers pair up for an often comic, sometimes perilous picaresque adventure in the Sierra Nevada. Followed by bungling Prussian agents trying to seize Marx’s Manifesto, the prospecting pair cross paths with trigger-happy Yankees, a naked argonaut, a runaway slave, a mountain man, Josiah Stanford, a gang of roughneck Kentuckian miners, a Miwok Indian tribe, and the legendary bandit Joaquin Murrieta.

How do the greed of gold digging and the communal ways of Miwok Indians spur the Great Socialist to rethink his Manifesto and beget the Emancipated Socialist Republic of Chucklehead?

And can the knocked-around Sixto, the hero and main teller of this tale, find a future and the belonging he yearns for?