The Sunday Tribune

A playful reinvention
Shelley Walia

Marx in Soho
by Howard Zinn.
South End Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Pages 77. $ 12.

It is the second coming. If Christ could not make it, Marx has, and he is back in Soho, not of London, but of New York. The spectre of Marx haunts us again in the play by historian/activist Howard Zinn. Marx is resurrected so that he can speak to the contemporary audience in Soho, urging them "to get off their asses" and remember that to be radical is to "simply grasp the root of the problem and the problem is us." His suggestion at the end of the play is: "Pretend you have boils (remember Marx had boils from which he suffered till the end). Pretend that sitting on your ass gives you enormous pain, so you must stand up. You must move, you must act."

Going beyond socialism or capitalism, he wants people to have food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, and "some hours of work, more hours of leisure." And if Christ could not give them all this, he has come to spur them on to realise the incredible wealth of this earth which every human being deserves. And as far as wars go, workers of all countries must unite against the criminal foreign policies which squander people’s blood and wealth and vindicate the laws of morals and justice in international affairs.

Marx in Soho is a humorous and hard-hitting comment on the life of Marx and the relevance of his ideas today. It dexterously combines insightful information with sharp politics. Alice Walker complimenting Howard Zinn as a teacher writes, "What can I say that will in any way convey the love, respect and admiration I feel for this unassuming hero who was my teacher and mentor, this radical historian and people—loving trouble-maker, this man who stood with us and suffered with us? Howard Zinn was the best teacher I ever had, and the funniest." This was corroborated by Chomsky whom I recently asked as to who he thought was one of the great dissidents of our time. "Howard Zinn," he remarked without thinking twice.

The play is one of Zinn’s original and imaginative ways to educate ourselves. Zinn had already been successful with Emma, a play on Emma Goldman, the American anarchist-feminist. His interest in the theory of anarchism had inspired him to introduce a seminar at Boston University on "Marxism and Anarchism." The growing horrors of Stalinism in the Soviet Union had suggested to rebels like Zinn to reconsider and redefine the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, standing up instead for the practice of a participatory democracy and a grassroots democratic decision-making with no central authority.

Zinn, therefore, decided to subject Marx to an anarchist critique and put on the stage the passionate engaged revolutionary who had not only limited himself to theory but had taken active part in the worker’s associations in Paris and the Community League in Brussels. After his exile to London, he was involved with the International Workingmen’s Association and also with the cause of Irish freedom. Zinn incorporates all this into the play, as well as Marx’s glowing tributes to the society created by the Paris Commune of 1871. Zinn hopes that the play will illuminate not just the times of Marx and his place in it, but our time and our place in it.

The assertion of the play is that in spite of repeated obituaries of Marx, he is still not dead. Here in the play, he is allowed by the bureaucracy to return for an hour, but on the condition that he will not agitate the people. The establishment, Marx ironically comments, believes in the freedom of speech, but within limits. And, thus, through his imagined discussions with his wife Jenny who was his severest critic, with his daughter Eleanor who was the youngest and the brightest of his children and a "revolutionary at eight" and with his other contemporaries like Bakunin, he comes to the conclusion that "capitalism, by its nature, its attack on the human spirit, breeds rebellion...." A revolution, the resurrected Marx feels, will certainly come, but it would be "taken over by men like Pieper—flatterers when out of power, bullies and braggarts when holding power. They will organise a new priesthood, a new hierarchy, with excommunications and indexes, inquisitions and firing squads. All this will de done in the name of Communism, delaying for a hundred years the Communism of freedom, dividing the world between capitalist empires and Communist empires. They will muck up our beautiful dream and it will take another revolution, maybe two or three, to clean it up. That’s what I fear."