Marx in Soho: A Play on History - Softcover

Zinn, Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0896085937 ISBN 13: 9780896085930

Publisher: South End Press, 1999

Synopsis

Don't you ever wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?

The premise of this witty and insightful "play on history" is that Karl Marx has agitated with the authorities of the afterlife for a chance to clear his name. Through a bureaucratic error, though, Marx is sent to Soho in New York, rather than his old stomping ground in London, to make his case.

Zinn introduces us to Marx's wife, Jenny, his children, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and a host of other characters.

Marx in Soho is a brilliant introduction to Marx's life, his analysis of society, and his passion for radical change. Zinn also shows how relevant Marx's ideas are for today's world.

Historian and activist Howard Zinn is the author of the bestselling A People's History of the United States and numerous other writings. He recently received the Eugene V. Debs and Lannan Foundation awards for his writing and political activism. He is also the author of Emma, a play about Emma Goldman, in the anthology Playbook (South End Press).

Praise for Marx in Soho:

"An imaginative critique of our society's hypocrisies and injustices, and an entertaining, vivid portrait of Karl Marx as a voice of humanitarian justice - which is perhaps the best way to remember him."-Kirkus Reviews

"A cleverly imagined call to reconsider socialist theory... Zinn's point is well made; his passion for history melds with his political vigor to make this a memorable effort and a lucid primer for readers desiring a succinct, dramatized review of Marxism."-Publishers Weekly

"Even in heaven it seems, Karl Marx is a troublemaker. But in the deft and loving hands of activist/author/historian Howard Zinn, the historical figure... is also a father, a husband and a futurist possessing a grand sense of humor."-ForeWord

"A witty delight that will engage both new and old acquaintances of the Marxian corpus.... Even conservatives will find Zinn's [book]... an intelligent and diverting read. Recommended for academic and public libraries alike."-Library Journal

About this title

About the Author

Howard Zinn is professor emeritus at Boston University.

Reviews

Marx's reputation may be in far more robust health academically than practically, but even among campus intellectuals his image has gotten a whipping. With Freud, Marx is one of the two 19th-century men who dominatedAeven createdAthe social sciences and critical thinking of this century. With psychoanalysis, Marxism has fallen hard; socialism, history as class struggle, and the idea that pervasive commodification is a bad thing are conceptual victims, both of apparent market prosperity in the West and the moral and fiscal bankruptcy of the governments established under the Communist rubric. Zinn, the eminent Left historian (A People's History of the United States, Borgo, 1994), suddenly "hot" thanks to buzz spread by his young family friend, actor Matt Damon, believes that Marx will have deep relevance in the next century, too. This one-man play, an imagined monolog that Marx delivers after being wrongly returned from death but with a glitch, is a witty delight that will engage both new and old acquaintances of the Marxian corpus. Though its brevity and entertainment-first intent depart radically from the density of Marx's actual written polemics, even conservatives will find Zinn's Marx-for-bright-funseekers an intelligent and diverting read. Recommended for academic and public libraries alike.AScott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib.,
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I first read the Communist Manifesto - given to me, I am sure, by young Communists who lived in my working-class neighborhood - when I was about seventeen. It had a profound effect on me, because everything I saw in my own life, the life of my parents, and the conditions in the United States in 1939 seemed to be explained, put into a historical context, and placed under a powerful analytical light.

I could see that my father, a Jewish immigrant from Austria, with but a fourth-grade education, worked very very hard, yet could barely support his wife and four sons. I could see that my mother worked day and night to make sure we were fed, clothed, and taken care of when we were sick. Their lives were an unending struggle for survival. I knew too that there were people in the nation who possessed astonishing wealth, and who certainly did not work as hard as my parents. The system was not fair.

All around me in that time of depression were families in desperate need through no fault of their own; unable to pay the rent, their belongings were thrown out on the street by the landlord, backed by the law. I knew from the newspapers that this was true all over the country.

I was a reader. I had read many of Dickens' novels since I was thirteen, and they had awakened within me an indignation against injustice, a compassion for people treated cruelly by their employers, by the legal system. Now, in 1939, I read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and that indignation returned, this time directed at the rich and powerful in this country.

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels (Marx was thirty, Engels twenty-eight, and Engels said later that Marx was the principal writer) described what I was experiencing, what I was reading about, which, I now saw, was not an aberration of nineteenth-century England or depression-era America, but a fundamental truth about the capitalist system. And this system, deeply entrenched as it was in the modern world, was not eternal - it had come into being at a certain stage of history, and one day it would depart the scene, replaced by a socialist system. That was an inspiring thought.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," they proclaimed in the opening pages of the Manifesto. So, the rich and the poor did not face each other as individuals, but as classes. This made the conflict between them something monumental. And it suggested that working people, poor people, had something to bind them together in their quest for justice - their common membership in the working class. And what of the role of the government in that struggle of the classes? "Equal justice for all" was carved on the facade of public buildings. But in the Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." They presented a startling idea: that the machinery of government was not neutral, that, despite its pretensions, it served the capitalist class.

At the age of seventeen, I suddenly saw this idea dramatized. My Communist friends brought me along with them to a demonstration in Times Square. Hundreds of people unfurled banners proclaiming opposition to war, opposition to Fascism, and marched along the street. I heard sirens. Mounted police charged the crowd. I was knocked unconscious by a plainclothes policeman. When I came to, as my head was clearing, I could only think one troubling thought: the police, the state, did the bidding of the holders of great wealth. How much freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you had depended on what class you were in.

When, at the age of eighteen, I went to work in a shipyard in Brooklyn as an apprentice shipfitter (our job was to fit together, with rivets, with welding, the steel plates of the hulls of battleships), I was already "class-conscious." In the shipyard, I found three other young workers like myself, and the four of us undertook to organize our fellow apprentices, who were excluded from the craft unions. We also agreed to meet weekly and read the works of Marx and Engels. Thus I read Engels' exposition of Marxist philosophy in his book Anti-Dhring (a polemic against a writer named Dhring) and made my way laboriously through the first volume of Das Kapital. The system, I saw, with some excitement, was now laid bare. Behind all the complications of economic transactions, there were certain core truths: labor was the source of all value; labor produced a value beyond its meager wages; and that surplus value went into the pockets of the capitalist class. Capitalists needed unemployment - a "reserve army of labor" - to keep wages down. The system cherished things, especially money, more than people ("commodity fetishism"), so that everything good in life was measured by its exchange value.

Marxist theory explained that exploitation and class struggle were not new phenomena in world history, but that capitalism brought them to their sharpest point, and on a world scale. Capitalism was a progressive force in history at a certain stage of human development. "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part," they wrote in the Manifesto. It has enabled enormous technological and scientific progress, created huge wealth. But this became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. There was a fundamental conflict between the increasingly organized forces of production and the anarchy of the market system. At some point, the exploited proletariat would organize, rebel, take power, and use the advanced technology for human need, not for the enrichment of the capitalist class.

Edition details

• Publisher: South End Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0896085937
• ISBN 13: 9780896085930
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 55