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﻿<title﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, The Second Coming of Marx: Review of Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho: A Play on History - Article﻿</title>﻿
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﻿<b﻿>﻿The Second Coming of Marx
﻿<br﻿>﻿Review of Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho: A Play on History 
﻿<br﻿>﻿(Boston: South End Press, 1999)
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by Dale Shin﻿<br﻿>﻿
﻿<i﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, September - October 1999﻿</i>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿
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What would Karl Marx say if he were alive today? That's the question radical historian Howard Zinn poses, and attempts to answer, in Marx in Soho: A Play on History. From the pen of the acclaimed author of the best-selling A People's History of the United States (famously plugged by Zinn's actor friend Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting), Marx in Soho is an imagined monologue on the life and times of the world's most notorious revolutionary. Through a deal brokered with the bureaucrats upstairs, Marx, so the story goes, has arranged to return to London's Soho district, where he and his family once took up residence. But thanks to an otherworldly clerical error, Marx winds up not in Soho of London in the nineteenth century, but in Soho of New York City today, where he finds the market economy which he had diagnosed as terminally ill more entrenched than ever, his work fallen irretrievably into intellectual disrepute, and the movement bearing his imprint reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. The rest of the play is one long soliloquy by Marx in response to the above developments.
﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿
Don't let the subtitle fool you. Play on history though it may be, Marx in Soho is nonetheless very much a political tract. With the man himself as his mouthpiece, Zinn takes up the cudgels in defense of the former's much maligned ideas, arguing that the analysis of capitalism inaugurated by Marx retains its full force today. Thus, an indignant Marx asks his audience, ironically, "don't you wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?" Weaving together the stridency of a polemic and a flare for the dramatic into a seamless narrative, Zinn has Marx review the basic concepts of historical materialism, from the theory of surplus value to the "dictatorship of the proletariat," and reconsider them in the light of a modern capitalist system which, by his own admission, has proven far more resilient than he had anticipated. Yet it is precisely this point, that capitalism has extended its lease on life and come to maturity even, which Marx turns against his critics in order to refute their claims that he is out of step with the times; indeed, as *the [in italics] critique of capitalism, Marxism is more relevant than ever. Nor is Marx's ire reserved for his naysayers. With equal alacrity, he pours pitiless scorn on the now-defunct Soviet Union and the satellites in its orbit, which mask their repressive rule behind the facade of "communism". "Socialism", Marx intones angrily, "is not supposed to reproduce the stupidities of capitalism!"
﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿
In between his harangues against late bourgeois society, Marx recounts his career as a revolutionary socialist, from his early beginnings as a radical journalist at Der Rheinische Zeitung, to his final years in London, dogged by poverty and illness. And though the play is a one-person act, Marx, through his onstage reminiscences, introduces us to a supporting cast of characters from his inner circle, including: Friedrich Engels, his lifelong collaborator and comrade; his wife, Jenny, a pillar of emotional and moral support throughout his life, and, according to Marx, his most astute critic; and their youngest daughter, Eleanor, a revolutionary in her own right who, even as a child, readily matched wits with her famous father. And for comic relief, there are Marx's recollections of his anarchist arch-nemesis and constant thorn in his side, Mikhail Bakunin.
﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿
Zinn's insightful introductory remarks and a short guide to further readings complete the book. Both an excellent primer on Marx and his ideas for people just coming to socialist convictions, and a breath of fresh air for longtime acquaintances of the Marxist corpus, Marx in Soho is a must-read for all. Free of all sycophancy and demonization, Karl Marx, as reconstructed by Zinn, appears not just as the clinical analyst of capitalism and its structural contradictions, as he is often made out to be by his admirers and detractors alike; but also as an angry, passionate revolutionary, fiercely committed to the struggle for working-class self-emancipation Marx whose legacy socialists today will doubtless have occasion to draw upon in the future.
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