Marx in Soho

Marx in Soho is a 1999 one-man play written by American historian Howard Zinn, about the life of 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx. Zinn wrote the play to "show Marx as few people knew him, as a family man, struggling to support his wife and children." The play is set in the New York City neighborhood of Soho, a humorous nod to the London neighborhood of the same name in which Marx spent much of his life.

Marx in Soho has often been produced. The play depicts Marx resurrected to defend the ideals of communism from the dehumanized version of it practiced in the former Soviet Union and to defend humanity from capitalism.

Zinn writes in his foreword that as early as 17, he had seen dramatic evidence "that the machinery of government was not neutral, that, despite its pretensions, it served the capitalist class.... 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."

Zinn continued: "Karl and Jenny Marx had moved to London after he was expelled from country after country on the European continent. They lived in the grubby Soho district, and revolutionaries from all over Europe, arriving in London, trooped in and out of their home. That imagined scene — Marx at home, Marx with his wife, Jenny, with his daughter Eleanor — fascinated me."

A Los Angeles Times reviewer, who saw a 2001 performance at the Hollywood and Highland Center starring the actor and activist Brian Jones, said that the play "mounts a clarion defense of the principles of Marxism, while taking a timely jab at a consumerist culture run amok.... Zinn's indignation oozes through the levity, and Marx's own words remind us that capitalism without conscience is a recipe for revolution."

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