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    Karl Marx In Soho: A Play On History
    Karl Marx In Soho: A Play On History
    Karl Marx In Soho: A Play On History
    Ebook57 pages51 minutes

    Karl Marx In Soho: A Play On History

    By Howard Zinn

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublishereBookIt.com
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9781456610845
    Karl Marx In Soho: A Play On History
    Author

    Howard Zinn

    Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and social activist. In addition to A People’s History of the United States, which has sold more than two million copies, he is the author of numerous books including The People Speak, Passionate Declarations, and the autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

    Read more from Howard Zinn

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      Book preview

      Karl Marx In Soho - Howard Zinn

      Marx in Soho

      A Play on History

      Howard Zinn

      About Howard Zinn

      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.

      —Alice Walker

      "Howard Zinn, who almost single-handedly popularized a people’s perspective on U.S. history, never stops inventing new ways to educate ourselves. Here he comes now with Marx in Soho, which combines hard-hitting information with humor, sharp politics, and sheer delight. Zinn is, quite simply, a national treasure."

      —Elizabeth Martínez

      Copyright © 1999 Howard Zinn

      Any properly footnoted quotation up to 500 sequential words may be used without permission, as long as the total number of words quoted does not exceed 2,000. For longer quotations or a greater number of total words, please write for permission to Ward & Balkin Agency.

      Contents

      Foreword

      Marx in Soho

      Annotated Reading List

      A Note on Marx in Soho

      Index

      About the Author

      foreword

      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

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