Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

This is not to suggest that Marx never put a foot wrong.

The Communist Manifesto has been described as “without doubt the single most influential text written in the nineteenth century.”

“the most powerful reform movement that history has ever known,

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon that it is.

Marxism is finished.

That Marxism is finished would be music to the ears of Marxists everywhere. They could pack in their marching and picketing, return to the bosom of their grieving families and enjoy an evening at home instead of yet another

tedious committee meeting. Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire. It is more like being a medic. Medics are perverse, self-thwarting creatures who do themselves out of a job by curing patients who then no longer need them. The task of political radicals, similarly, is to get to the point where they would no longer be necessary because their goals would have been accomplished.

What bred the culture of postmodernism, with its dismissal of so-called grand narratives and triumphal announcement of the End of History, was above all the conviction that the future would now be simply more of the present. Or, as one exuberant postmodernist put it, “The present plus more options.”

What helped to discredit Marxism above all, then, was a creeping sense of political impotence.

The End of History was now at an end.

According to the World Bank, 2.74 billion people in 2001 lived on less than two dollars a day. We face a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of re-sources; and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself.

“Socialism or barbarism”

“Marxism must necessarily become true again.”

well in theory. Whenever it has been put into practice, however, the result has been terror, tyranny and mass murder on an inconceivable scale.

Socialism means lack of freedom;

lack of material goods,

Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror,

But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union

dragged their citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at however horrific a human cost; and the cost was so steep partly because of the hostility of the capitalist West.

forced the Soviet Union into an arms race which crippled its arthritic economy even further, and finally pres...

Even so, the gains of communism scarcely outweigh the losses.

this did not have to mean Stalinism, or anything like it. Taken overall, Maoism and Stalinism were botched, bloody experiments which made the very idea of socialism stink in the nostrils of many of those elsewhere in the world who had most to benefit from it.

Nor did Marxists ever imagine that it was possible to achieve socialism in one country alone. The movement was international or it was nothing.

The outlandish notion of socialism in one country was invented by Stalin in the 1920s, partly as a cynical rationalisation of the fact that other nations had been unable to come to the aid of the Soviet Union.

Socialist revolutions must of course start somewhere. But they cannot be completed within national boundaries.

To judge socialism by its results in one desperately isolated country would be like drawing conclusions about the human race from...

Ideally, socialism requires a skilled, educated, politically sophisticated populace, thriving civic institutions, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions and the habit of democracy. None of this is likely to be on hand if you cannot even afford to mend the dismally few highways you have, or have no insurance policy against sickness or starvation beyond a pig in the back shed.

As Marx insists, socialism also requires a shortening of the working day—partly to provide men and women with the leisure for personal fulfilment, partly to create time for the business of political and economic self-government. You cannot do this if people have no shoes; and to distribute shoes among millions of citizens is likely to require a centralised bureaucratic state.

We will know that socialism has established itself when we are able to look back with utter incredulity on the idea that a handful of commercial thugs were given free rein to corrupt the minds of the public with Neanderthal political views convenient for their own bank balances but for little else.

There is no evidence that Marx is in general a determinist, in the sense of denying that human actions are free. On the contrary, he clearly believes in freedom, and talks all the time, not least in his journalism, about how individuals could (and sometimes should) have acted differently, whatever the historical limits placed on their choices.

dream of utopia.

perfect society, without hardship, suffering, violence or conflict.

Nobody will work, human beings will live in complete harmony with one another, and the flow of material goods will be endless.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. In The German Ideology, Marx rejects the idea of communism as “an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.” Instead, he sees it in that book as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

Just as the Jews were traditionally forbidden to foretell the future, so Marx the secular Jew is mostly silent on what might lie ahead. We have seen that he probably thought socialism was inevitable, but he has strikingly little to say about what it would look like.

The prophet, by contrast, is not a clairvoyant at all. It is a mistake to believe that the biblical prophets sought to predict the future. Rather, the prophet denounces the greed, corruption and power-mongering of the present, warning us that unless we change our ways we may well have no future at all. Marx was a prophet, not a fortune-teller.

The idea that history is moving onwards and upwards to a state of perfection is not a leftist one.

The point for Marx is not to dream of an ideal future, but to resolve the contradictions in the present which prevent a

better future from coming about. When this has been achieved, there will be no more need for people like himself.

But there is, of course, nowhere else to start from. A different future has to be the future of this particular present. And most of the present is made up of the past.

Marx writes in the Critique of the Gotha Programme of how the new society will be stamped with the birthmarks of the old order from whose womb it emerges. So there is no “pure” point from which to begin. To believe that there is is the illusion of so-called ultraleftism (an “infantile disorder,” as Lenin called it),

rejects, for example, the complacent “evolutionist” view of the future which regards it simply as more

of the present. It is simply the present writ large. This, by and large, is the way our rulers like to view the future—as better than the present, but comfortably continuous with it. Disagreeable surprises will be kept to a minimum.

This view was known until recently as the End of History, before radical Islamists inconvenient...

and a future which broke radically with the present would have us straining at the limits of our language.

“We have to plan what can be planned, according to our common decision. But the emphasis of the idea of culture is right when it reminds us that a culture, essentially, is unplannable. We have to ensure the means of life, and the means of community. But what will then, by these means, be lived, we cannot know or say.”

we would not call what they did instead “leisure.” This is because the idea of leisure depends on the existence of its opposite (labour), rather as you could not define warfare without some conception of peace.

For Marx, socialism is the point where we begin collectively to determine our own destinies. It is democracy taken with full seriousness, rather than democracy as (for the most part) a political charade. And the fact that people are more free means that it will be harder to say what they will be doing at five o’clock on Wednesday.

In this sense, he is that rarest of creatures, a visionary who is also a sober realist. He turns from fantasies of the future to the prosaic workings of the present; but it is precisely there that he finds a greatly enriched future to be unleashed. He is more gloomy about the past than many thinkers, yet more hopeful than most of them about what is to come.

To see the present as it truly is, is to see it in the light of its possible transformation;