Marx!

21 March 2009

The Spectator imagines Das Kapital: The Musical

At The Spectator, we are anti-Marxist but pro-musical. So it is with mixed feelings that we learned that Chinese producers in Beijing are to turn Das Kapital into a stage show, complete with big dance numbers and catchy songs. The director, He Nian, told Wen Hui Bao newspaper that ‘the particular performance style we choose is not important, but Marxist theories cannot be distorted’.

We disagree. Marx’s theories are wholly discredited, but the style in which musicals are performed is a matter of global importance. Imagine, then, the scene as the two founders of communism perform the duet that will lead to the Russian Revolution and the Cold War.

Friedrich Engels returns from hunting and finds his friend reading yet another volume of Hegel by candlelight. He shakes his head, and tap dances.

Engels: The British Library/ Well, that’s no place to be/ If you want a dialectic/ It’s got to get more hectic

(Marx gets up from his desk: ragtime music plays)

Marx: The proletarian/ Is quite contrarian/ When alienated/ From the fruits of his work./ And the bourgeoisie/ Behave historically/ And assume the proles/ Do nothing but shirk.

Chorus: Hey, Karl!/ Give the moaning a rest, oh/ Doc Marx!/ Give us a manifesto!/ Let’s have the revolution/ That’s must be the solution/ And we’ll all do/ The Communist rag!

The producers of the Chinese show could do worse than raid other musicals. We think especially of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret. The founder of historical materialism would surely have appreciated the line ‘Money makes the world go round’; and surveying the present global scene, with anti-capitalist wrath and lynch mobs chasing bankers, he might well have hummed Liza Minnelli’s classic: ‘Maybe this Time’.

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