Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

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.

Its very enlightenment—its smug belief in its own superior rationality—was a kind of superstition.

Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror,

The Soviet Union played a heroic role in combating the evil of fascism, as well as in helping to topple colonialist powers. It also fostered the kind of solidarity among its citizens that Western nations seem able to muster only when they are killing the natives of other lands.

When freedom and democracy finally rode to the rescue of the Soviet bloc, they did so in the shape of economic shock therapy, a form of daylight robbery politely known as privatisation, joblessness for tens of millions, stupendous increases in poverty and inequality, the closure of free nurseries, the loss of women’s rights and the near-ruin of the social welfare networks that had served these countries so well.

The system has also proved incapable of breeding affluence without creating huge swaths of deprivation alongside it. It is true that this may not matter much in the long run, since the capitalist way of life is now threatening to destroy the planet altogether.

If you need to accumulate capital more or less from scratch, then the most effective way of doing so, however brutal, is through the profit motive. Avid self-interest is likely to pile up wealth with remarkable speed, though it is likely to amass spectacular poverty at the same time.

If a socialist nation failed to win international support in a world where production was specialised and divided among different nations, it would be unable to draw upon the global resources needed to abolish scarcity.

In fact, there is a paradoxical sense in which Stalinism, rather than discrediting Marx’s work, bears witness to its validity. If you want a compelling account of how Stalinism comes about, you have to go to Marxism.

Marxists do not believe that the mighty liberal lineage from Thomas Jefferson to John Stuart Mill is annulled by the existence of secret CIA-run prisons for torturing Muslims, even though such prisons are part of the politics of today’s liberal societies. Yet the critics of Marxism are rarely willing to concede that show trials and mass terror are no refutation of it.

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.

(Postmodernists tend to assume that there is either one grand narrative or just a lot of mini-narratives. But this is not the case.)

So what is class struggle fundamental to? Marx’s answer would seem to be twofold. It shapes a great many events, institutions and forms of thought which seem at first glance to be innocent of it; and it plays a decisive role in the turbulent transition from one epoch of history to another.

for Marx the disintegration of capitalism will unavoidably lead men and women to sweep it away of their own free will.

There is a difference between doing evil in the hope that good may come of it, and seeking to turn someone else’s evil to good use. Socialists did not perpetrate capitalism, and are innocent of its crimes; but granted that it exists, it seems rational to make the best of it.

His critics may therefore accuse him of unpardonable vagueness; but they can hardly do that and at the same time accuse him of drawing up utopian blueprints.

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.

What is realistically needed to repair society is beyond the powers of the prevailing system, and in that sense is impossible. But it is realistic to believe that the world could in principle be greatly improved. Those who scoff at the idea that major social change is possible are full-blown fantasists. The true dreamers are those who deny that anything more than piecemeal change can ever come about.

Critics of Marx might find this stress on class interests distasteful. But they cannot claim in the same breath that he has an impossibly rosy view of human nature.

Because of the nature of our material bodies, we are needy, labouring, sociable, sexual, communicative, self-expressive animals who need one another to survive, but who come to find a fulfilment in that companionship over and above its social usefulness.

Socialists often speak of oppression, injustice and exploitation. But if this were all humanity had ever known, we would never be able to identify these things for what they are. Instead, they would simply seem like our natural condition.

the usual caricature of his work. In this view, Marxism is all about faceless collectives which ride roughshod over personal life. Nothing, in fact, could be more alien to Marx’s thought.

Those who scoff at socialist ideals should remember that the free market can never be perfectly realised either. Yet this does not stop free-marketeers in their tracks. The fact that there is no flawless democracy does not lead most of us to settle for tyranny instead.

There are villains everywhere you look, but only some of these moral ruffians are so placed as to be able to steal pension funds or pump the media full of lying political propaganda.

In a socialist society, nobody would be in a position to do so. This is not because they would be too saintly, but because there would be no private pension funds or privately owned media.

You do not need to make people physically incapable of violence in order to end a war. You just need negotiations, disarmament, peace treaties, monitoring and the like. This can be difficult. But it is not half as difficult as breeding a race of people who would vomit and swoon at the slightest sign of aggression.

Materialists are not those who deny the spiritual, but those who remind us that spiritual fulfilment requires certain material conditions.

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.

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.” It was capitalism that standardised people, not socialism. This is one reason why Marx was rather chary of the notion of rights.

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

It is consumer capitalism that decks out its citizens in uniforms

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.

obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted a society where the economic no longer monopolised so much time and energy.

Marx does not mean that there are two entirely distinct slices to social life. On the contrary, there is a good deal of traffic between the two. The base may give rise to the superstructure, but the superstructure is important for the base’s continued existence.

Prince Charles, who exists largely to inspire deference in the British public, but who also makes a sizeable profit out of doing so.

It is not just that in order to study Plato you have to eat. It is also that the way material production is organised will tend to affect the way you think about him.

Oxford academics find their thought shaped by the material realities of their age. Most of them are unlikely to interpret Plato, or for that matter any other writer, in a way which undermines the rights of private property, the need for social order and so on.

It is true that Marx quite often denounces morality. By this, however, he meant the kind of historical inquiry which ignores material factors in favour of moral ones. The proper term for this is not morality but moralism. Moralism abstracts something called “moral values” from the whole historical context in which they are set, and then generally proceeds to hand down absolute moral judgements.

A truly moral inquiry, by contrast, is one which investigates all the aspects of a human situation. It refuses to divorce human values, behaviour, relationships and qualities of character from the social and historical forces which shape them.

Marxists, however, have reservations about parliamentary democracy—not because it is democratic, but because it is not democratic enough. Parliaments are institutions to which ordinary people are persuaded to permanently delegate their power, and over which they have very little control.

It is scarcely in the interests of the powerless to be told that all power is distasteful, not least by those who already have enough of the stuff to spare.

Marx refuses to “reify” power, severing it from its social surroundings and treating it as a thing in itself.

For most of the great first-generation theorists of the anticolonial wars, Marxism provided the indispensable starting point. In the 1920s and ’30s, practically the only men and women to be found preaching racial equality were communists. Most African nationalism after the Second World War, from Nkrumah and Fanon onwards, relied on some version of Marxism or socialism. Most communist parties in Asia incorporated nationalism into their agendas.

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.