BOSTON — Somewhere out in the nether regions Karl Marx has been
reading our newspapers and is just fit to be tied about how he’s
being portrayed, so he begs “the authorities” for a chance to come
down for one hour to defend his ideas. Benevolently, they grant his
wish and he gets drunk while going off on his detractors in front
of small, friendly audiences.
Such is the conceit of A People’s History of the United
States author Howard Zinn’s play Marx in Soho, which
I happened to catch at a theater just outside of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, last week. (Zinn, a professor emeritus at Boston
University, was on hand for the show.) Apparently destined for the
London section of Soho where he once lived and worked, we are told,
a bureaucratic mix-up sends Marx to Boston instead. “You may wonder
how I got here,” Marx announces as he steps into view. “Public
transportation!” Apparently the authorities have a sense of humor
— they sent Marx back to us on a Red Line train.
“It is the second coming!” Marx shouted to loud cheers. “Christ
couldn’t make it so Marx came!”
Religion may be the opiate of the masses, but Marx in
Soho doesn’t feel like a rejection of the drug. Derisive as
both Marx and the catcalling audience may be (and not entirely
without warrant) with regard to those with an overzealous need to
see a marriage of church and state, everyone involved seemed
oblivious to the fact that the entire play was but a recitation of
another catechism with a different vocabulary and several socialist
articles of faith sprinkled with modern day references. (Although
the meek shall inherit the earth/camels will go through needle eyes
before Bill Gates gets to heaven rhetoric is basically the
same.)
Thus, lines such as, “Ah yes, the wonders of the free market,
men being reduced to commodities,” were followed by whoops and
hollers, as was the proclamation, “Your nation” — yeah, he’s
talking to you America — “has not only robbed its own people, but
sucked the wealth out of the rest of the world!” Ditto a line about
America’s “gross national product…Yes, gross.” When Marx intones,
“Yes, capitalism has triumphed, but over whom?” a collective
knowing sigh emanates back towards him.
ZINN DOES A GOOD JOB of bringing Marx’s family, friends, and fellow
revolutionaries to life, especially in the context of a one-man
play, and the details of his life in London while writing Das
Kapital is fascinating, if overly melodramatic. For a
historian to succeed on that level is impressive. To his credit,
actor Bob Weik comes across as authentically Marxian enough, which
unfortunately only makes the scenes where he rails on Fleet Bank or
exaggerates U.S. unemployment statistics all the more awkward.
Nevertheless, Marx in Soho is advertised as a defense
of the economist’s ideas, which is something the play never gets
around to actually doing. By the beginning of the third act, Marx
is writhing, tearing apart American newspapers in a rage and
running into the audience screaming swaths of The Communist
Manifesto.
So it’s clear Marx doesn’t appreciate free-market values.
(Shocking, I know.) But can we not reasonably ask of Marx what his
solution would be? What of the millions upon millions who have died
under those totalitarian dictatorships espousing Marxist rhetoric
and claiming to be emulating the spirit of Marx’s “dictatorship of
the proletariat”? After a short rant about Stalin’s “new
priesthood” and dogmatists mucking up his philosophy, modern day
Marx dismisses the bloody history of communism-in-practice with a
declaration that “Socialism was not supposed to reproduce the
stupidity of capitalism!” When communism fails to deliver it’s all
chalked up to a perversion of its true nature, but whatever good or
ill may come of capitalism it remains illegitimate.
Both Marx during the play and Zinn afterwards spoke of a gradual
socialist revolution wherein the useful machinery of capitalism
would eventually be handed over to the workers and used for just
means. “Let’s just speak of using the incredible wealth of the
earth for human beings,” Marx explained. “Give people what they
need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass,
pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of
leisure.”
What is never addressed is how a new order
more-leisure-than-work society is possibly going to be able to —
excuse the terminology — exploit the machinery of capitalism to
its fullest, or more accurately, ongoing potential. Zinn’s play
suggests there is a point when we can call the civil and
technological advances brought about by a competitive free market
system as finished. Someone should ask Marx or Zinn exactly where
we’d be today if we threw over work for leisure when Marx first
suggested it in 1848. Perhaps we could still be leisurely plowing
our fields with oxen!
INSTEAD OF A MODERN explanation, Zinn/Marx offers up the Paris
Commune of 1871, when socialists briefly seized control of the
French capital during the chaotic aftermath of Napoleon III’s
defeat at the hands of the Prussians, as proof that a communist
society can thrive. This is familiar material: Mao, Lenin, and
Trotsky also referenced it.
One imagines the chic liberals attending this sort of event are
the type who guffaw at trailer park dwellers who see the Virgin
Mary in their grilled cheese sandwiches, yet not one seems to
question the wisdom of junking free-market capitalism (of which
they are definitely beneficiaries if how they are dressed is any
indication) on the basis of a two-month example from 130 years
ago.
Zinn himself was a warm, witty speaker, who gave his time
generously to admirers both in the Q&A session and in the lobby
during the intermission. He told the audience that it is “evident”
that “capitalism is failing” and, while he would not put forward a
timeline, said he believed one day soon people would embrace
Marxism.
One young Swedish woman who was studying at an American
university asked Zinn if the capitalistic welfare state as known in
several European countries was “Marxist enough.”
“Nothing is Marxist enough,” Zinn replied, before going into a
longer explanation that showed he was clearly joking. But some of
the true believers didn’t laugh, nodding their heads instead.
