In Howard Zinn’s Marx in Soho performed by Bob Weick, Karl Marx was introduced to the 21^st century world, in which capitalism and money still rules.  Money exists as the anchor of 21^st century society, and while people that have money are loving the idea and stability of capitalism, the poor despise the current system.  Capitalism exists as a way for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer in Marx’s eyes.  It exists as a way for people to squander their gains and simply consume.  In the play, Marx tells that capitalism does not create citizens, but rather consumers.  Advertising is an attribute to humans being consumers rather than citizens because it attacks people’s vulnerabilities and forces people to consume what they want instead of what they might need.  As long as people keep spending more and more money, the corporations of the world will profit and be happy while the rest of the world, which is the majority, suffers tremendously in this capitalistic society.

In the play, Marx’s flaws as a man and a father, but also flaws in his ideas.  Marx had no way of telling the future, but he thought that after a revolution occurred, the people would take to rule and there would be his dream of a dictatorship of the proletariat.  This idea was one that Marx did not have a complete understanding over at the time because even though a dictatorship run by the people or the proletariat is a revolutionary idea, it simply cannot be attained.  In the play, Bakunin, a revolutionary Russian anarchist, asserted that Marx’s idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat is simply unattainable because no dictatorship has ever lasted and the proletariat did not have the ability to rule a whole society.  Putting people in power that have never experienced power before is a risky situation because they will abuse their new found power without realizing the consequences of their decisions.