Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

On the one hand, Marxists are hardheaded types who are sceptical of high-minded moralism and wary of idealism. With their naturally suspicious minds, they tend to look for the material interests which lurk behind heady political rhetoric. They are alert to the humdrum, often ignoble forces which underlie pious talk and sentimental visions.

There are also those sad, self-deceived characters who hallucinate that, given more time and greater effort, capitalism will deliver a world of abundance for all. For them, it is simply a regrettable accident that it has not done so thus far. They do not see that inequality is as natural to capitalism as narcissism and megalomania are to Hollywood.

Theodor Adorno once remarked that pessimistic thinkers (he had Freud rather than Marx in mind) do more service to the cause of human emancipation than callowly optimistic ones. This is because they bear witness to an injustice which cries out for redemption, and which we might otherwise forget. By reminding us of how bad things are, they prompt us to repair them. They urge us to do without opium.

If history has been so bloody, it is not because most human beings are wicked. It is because of the material pressures to which they have been submitted. Marx can thus take a realistic measure of the past without succumbing to the myth of the darkness of men’s hearts.

Neither is it possible to have a social order in which everyone is equal. The complaint that “socialism would make us all the same” is baseless. Marx had no such intention. He was a sworn enemy of uniformity. In fact, he regarded equality as a bourgeois value. He saw it as a reflection in the political sphere of what he called exchange-value, in which one commodity is levelled in value with another.

In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he also rejected the idea of an equality of income, since people have uniquely different needs: some do more dirty or dangerous work than others, some have more children to feed, and so on. This is not to say that he dismissed the idea of equality out of hand.

In Marx’s view, what was awry with the prevailing notion of equality was that it was too abstract. It did not pay sufficient attention to the individuality of things and people—what Marx called in the economic realm “use-value.”

So much, then, for the Marx who wants to reduce us all to the same dead level. So much also for the Marx who when he looks at people can see nothing but workers. Equality for socialism does not mean that everyone is just the same—an absurd proposition if ever there was one. Even Marx would have noticed that he was more intelligent than the Duke of Wellington. Nor does it mean that everyone will be granted exactly the same amount of wealth or resources.

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the modern age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazed notion that a single global system known as the free market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills.

He was, Adorno writes, an enemy of utopia for the sake of its realisation.

Marxism reduces everything to economics.

The first historical act, Marx writes in The German Ideology, is the production of the means to satisfy our material needs. Only then can we learn to play the banjo, write erotic poetry or paint the front porch. The basis of culture is labour. There can be no civilisation without material production.

The production that mattered to him was closer to art than it was to assembling transistor radios or slaughtering sheep.

The claim that everything for Marx is determined by “economics” is an absurd oversimplification. What shapes the course of history in his view is class struggle; and classes are not reducible to economic factors.

Besides, as we shall see shortly, labour for Marx concerns a great deal more than the economic. It involves a whole

anthropology—a theory of Nature and human agency, the body and its needs, the nature of the senses, ideas of social cooperation and individual self-fulfilment. This is not economics as the Wall Street Journal knows it.

For Marx, as for his mentor Aristotle, the good life consists of activities engaged in for their own sake. The best things are done just for the hell of it. We do them simply because they belong to our fulfilment as the kind of animals we are, not out of duty, custom, sentiment, authority, material necessity, social utility or fear of the Almighty.

The word “production” in Marx’s work covers any self-fulfilling activity: playing the flute, savouring a peach, wrangling over Plato, dancing a reel, making a speech, engaging in politics, organising a birthday party for one’s children. It has no muscular, macho implications. When Marx speaks of production as the essence of humanity, he does not mean that the essence of humanity is packing sausages. Labour as we know it is an alienated form of what he calls “praxis”—an ancient Greek word meaning the kind of free, self-realising activity by which we transform the world.

He had no interest in the spiritual aspects of humanity, and saw human consciousness as just a reflex of the material world.

In this sense, Marx was more of an antiphilosopher than a philosopher. In fact, Étienne Balibar has called him “perhaps … the greatest antiphilosopher of the modern age.”1 Antiphilosophers are those who are wary of philosophy—not just in the sense that Brad Pitt might be, but nervous of it for philosophically interesting reasons. They tend to come up with ideas that are suspicious of ideas;

what Marx calls alienation. He means the condition in which we forget that history is our own production, and come to be mastered by it as by an alien force.

Our biological needs are the foundation of history. We have a history because we are creatures of lack, and in that sense history is natural to us.

In fact, we begin to be a story. Animals that are not capable of desire, complex labour and elaborate forms of communication tend to repeat themselves. Their lives are determined by natural cycles. They do not shape a narrative for themselves, which is what Marx knows as freedom. The irony in his view is that though this self-determination is of the essence of humanity, the great majority of men and women throughout history have been unable to exercise it. They have not been permitted to be fully human. Instead, their lives have been for the most part determined by the dreary cycles of class-society.

Human labour works Nature up into that extension of our bodies which we know as civilisation.

But at the root of all this, which we know as culture, history or civilisation, lies the needy human body and its material conditions. This is just another way of saying that the economic is the foundation of our life together. It is the vital link between the biological and the social. This, then, is how we come to have history; but it is also what we mean by spirit. Spiritual matters are not disembodied, otherworldly affairs.

For Marx, by contrast, “spirit” is a question of art, friendship, fun, compassion, laughter, sexual love, rebellion, creativity, sensuous delight, righteous anger and abundance of life. (He did, however, sometimes take the fun a bit too far: he once went on a pub crawl from Oxford Street to Hampstead Road with a couple of friends, stopping at every pub en route, and was chased by the police for throwing paving stones at street lamps.

All of the spiritual activities I have just listed are bound up with the body, since that is the kind of beings we are. Anything which doesn’t involve my body doesn’t involve me. When I speak to you on the phone I am present to you bodily, though not physically. If you want an image of the soul, remarked the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, look at the human body.

Happiness for Marx, as for Aristotle, was a practical activity, not a state of mind.

he sees human consciousness as embodied—as incarnate in our practical behaviour.

“we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all

other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.”

the essential irrationality of the drive for capital accumulation, which subordinates everything to the requirements of the

self-expansion of capital and so-called growth, is unavoidably hostile to ecological balance.”26 The old communist slogan “Socialism or barbarism” always seemed to some a touch too apocalyptic. As history lurches towards the prospect of nuclear warfare and environmental catastrophe, it is hard to see how it is less than the sober truth. If we do not act now, it seems that capitalism will be the death of us.