Karl Marx Is Coming to Town PDF Print E-mail
By Boyan Penev   
Saturday, 03 December 2005
With the support of IUB's Theater Club and particularly of Lorena Silvestri and Teodora Todorova, next Tuesday, December 6th, Prof. Jerry Levy will come to IUB and present Howard Zinn's one-man show 'Marx in Soho" at the ICC. 'I know one thing: I am not a Marxist."
- Karl Marx

Sounds strange, does it not? Yet historian Howard Zinn (famous for his 'A People's History of the United States") and sociology professor and renowned actor Jerry Levy argue exactly that. According to them, Marxist ideology has deviated significantly from the ideas Marx himself formulated, and his infamy as the forefather of gulags, the Red Army, and Stalin's purges is unjust.

Imagine: Marx has had around a century to see how his ideas have been put into practice throughout the world. He has seen the collectivization in Ukraine, the camps in Siberia, the division of Germany and the Prague spring. Might not he - the scholar, the father, the activist - have something to say? Well, he certainly does!

So yes, ladies and gentlemen: Marx is back. Apparently, whoever was in charge of the more traditional afterlives did not really want a firebrand social speaker among them ('Sinners of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose save molten sulfur, chains, and eternal suffering" can be a rather catchy slogan), so he was sent to a more secular afterlife reserved for the more troublesome deceased.

After filling up the necessary paperwork and waiting a fair amount of time, he is allowed to return to the London Soho in order to clear his name somehow. Yet apparently bureaucratic slip-ups do not end with death, and he ends up in the New York Soho instead.

From then on, we get to meet the Marx that lived and breathed the moist, cool, and somewhat dirty air of Victorian England, as presented by Jerry Levy the Actor.

After the performance, the audience will be able to have a discussion on Marx and Marxism with Jerry Levy the Professor. Several members of the IUB social sciences and humanities' faculty have expressed interest as well.

So if you want to learn what Marx was like, what Marxism basically means past all the labels, or simply to have your say on Marx's controversial historical legacy, make sure that you have your evening on Tuesday 6th reserved: 'Marx in Soho" will take place at the ICC from 19:30 on.

Tickets can be bought from the college offices or reserved by e-mail from Ms. Teodora Todorova ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ). The price is 3 Euro for IUB students and 5 Euro for non-students.
 
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