Why Marx Was Right Quotes

“After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“... Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism....”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Those who speak of harmony and consensus should beware of what one might call the industrial chaplain view of reality. The idea, roughly speaking, is that there are greedy bosses on one side and belligerent workers on the other, while in the middle, as the very incarnation of reason, equity and moderation, stands the decent, soft-spoken, liberal-minded chaplain who tries selflessly to bring the two warring parties together. But why should the middle always be the most sensible place to stand? Why do we tend to see ourselves as in the middle and other people as on the extremes? After all, one person’s moderation is another’s extremism. People don’t go around calling themselves a fanatic, any more than they go around calling themselves Pimply. Would one also seek to reconcile slaves and slave masters, or persuade native peoples to complain only moderately about those who are plotting their extermination? What is the middle ground between racism and anti-racism?”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Most of the reforms we now regard as precious features of liberal society—universal suffrage, free universal education, freedom of the press, trade unions and so on—were won by popular struggle in the teeth of ferocious ruling-class resistance.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Marx’s once scandalous thesis that governments are simple business agents for international capital is today an obvious fact”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Capitalism, too, ws forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they’re winning. Then it moves in with its water hoses and paramilitary squads, and if these fail with its tanks.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“It is worth noting in this respect that the original proletariat was not the blue-collar male working class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” comes to us from the Latin word for “offspring,” meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Much of the media under capitalism avoid difficult, controversial or innovative work because it is bad for profits. Instead, they settle for banality, sensationalism and gut prejudice.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less 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 society where the economic no longer monopolised so much time and energy.

That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. When you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by an affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as these predecessors ever did.

Marx's work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“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.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Alienation, the 'commodification' of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady hemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Marx was the first to identify the historical object known as capitalism - to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end. Rather as Newton discovered the invisible forces known as the laws of gravity, and Freud laid bare the workings of an invisible phenomenon known as the unconscious, so Marx unmasked our everyday life to reveal an imperceptible entity known as the capitalist mode of production.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“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. Moreover, whatever was born can always die, which is why social systems like to present themselves as immortal. Rather as a bout of dengue fever makes you newly aware of your body, so a form of social life can be perceived for what it is when it begins to break down.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“One thinks of the flamboyant student slogan of Paris 1968: ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible!’’ For all its hyperbole, the slogan is accurate enough. 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.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“It is capitalism that sees production as potentially infinite, and socialism that sets it in the context of moral and aesthetic values. Or as Marx himself puts it in the first volume of Capital, “under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Even a whole society,” Marx comments, “a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and like boni patres familias [good fathers of families] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Marxova tvrdnja u ''Komunističkom manifestu'' o slobodnom samostalnom razvoju svih nikad se ne može u cijelosti ostvariti. Poput svih najboljih ideala, to je cilj kojem treba stremiti, a ne stanje koje se može doslovno postići. Ideali su putokazi, a ne opipljivi entiteti. Oni nam pokazuju kojim smjerom krenuti. Oni koji se rugaju socijalističkim idejama trebaju imati na umu da se ni slobodno tržište nikad ne može u cijelosti ostvariti, što ne sprječava one koji u njemu sudjeluju da i dalje djeluju. Činjenica da nema besprijekorne demokracije većinu od nas neće nagovoriti da se podvrgnemo tiraniji. Nećemo se odreći nastojanja da nahranimo gladne u svijetu samo zato jer znamo da će neki od njih umrijeti prije negoli to uspijemo učiniti.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Nature has the upper hand. For the individual, his is known as death. The Faustian dream of progress without limits in a material world magically responsive to our touch overlooks "the priority of external nature". Today, this is known not as the Faustian dream but the American one. It is a vision which secretly detests the material because it blocks our path to the infinite. This is why the material world has either to be vanquished by force or dissolved into culture. Postmodernism and the pioneer spirit are sides of the same coin. Neither can accept that it is our limits that make us what we are, quite as much as that perpetual transgression of them we know as human history.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, revolution is not a runaway train; it is the application of the emergency brake. It is capitalism which is out of control, driven as it is by the anarchy of market forces, and socialism which attempts to reassert some collective mastery over this rampaging beast.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“At every stage, public debate over alternative economic plans and policies would be essential. In this way, what and how we produce could be determined by social need rather than private profit. Under capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. Under socialism, this freedom would be regularly exercised.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“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.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“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... If there are still Marxists or feminists around in twenty years' time, it will be a sorry prospect. Marxism is meant to be a strictly provisional affair, which is why anyone who invests the whole of their identity in it has missed the point. That there is a life after Marxism is the whole point of Marxism.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“[the idea that history arises in phases] is not what Marxism teaches. To say that capitalism can be drawn on for an improved future is not to imply that it exists for that reason. Nor does socialism follow necessarily from it. It is not to suggest that the crimes of capitalism are justified by the advent of socialism. Nor is it to claim that capitalism was bound to emerge. Modes of production do not arise necessarily. It is not as though they are linked to all previous stages by some internal logic. No stage of the process exists for the sake of the others. History for Marx is not moving in any particular direction. Capitalism can be used to build socialism, but there's no sense in which the whole historical process is secretly laboring towards the goal.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the Modern Age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazy 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.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right