The nineteenth-century based play Marx in Soho written by Howard Ziin is performed by Bob Weick, a monologist, who interprets philosopher Karl Marx’s life and relates it to twenty-first century America. Through satirical and witty rhetoric, Bob Weick emphasizes how humans create social institutions based on economic factors resulting in income inequality and class division. Under these conditions a minority of the population control a disproportionate amount of economic power over the masses breeding poverty and oppression in both the nineteenth and twenty-first century.

Throughout the play, Bob Weick, as Karl Marx, explains how the social structures in the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century are similar in that the wealth gap continues to widen creating an impoverished, powerless, and uninformed working class. Mr. Weick makes the case that while in the twenty-first century the United State’s Gross Domestic Product is around 5,000 billion dollars, only one percent of the population controls half of the nation’s wealth. To have the top one percent of the population hold the majority of the wealth emphasizes the severity of the growing wealth gap. An effect of having a minority population of ultra rich and a majority population of poor leads to worsening drug and alcohol abuses, overcrowded prisons, and flawed public education institutions. In fact, nineteenth century Europe is not so different, in terms of income inequality, as twenty-first century America. In Europe, the working class was viewed as expendable given just enough money to meet the bare minimum requirements that a human being needs to survive.

Marx explains how capitalism continues to triumph in the twenty-first century and will continue to “breed rebellion”. The disproportionate lack of power that the working class has in the nineteenth and twenty-first century will precipitate social, economic, and political inequality until the rise of a communist revolution.