[Peace-discuss] Was Marx Right?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Uh, yes. And not the least virtue of Eagleton's piece is the simple observation 
that Marx wrote aobut - was concerned with - capitalism, not socialism.. He says 
very little about the latter, and a great deal about the former. The question is 
whether what he says about capitalism is still relevant, mutatis mutandis. 
Eagleton thinks it is, and that seems right. --CGE]

Was Marx Right?
It’s Not Too Late to Ask
Terry Eagleton

Thirty-five years ago many people in the United States and Europe were willing 
to give Marxism a hearing. Just a decade later nearly everyone agreed it had 
been discredited. Why this sudden change? Had some new discovery disproved 
Marxist theory? Were people no longer interested in the problems Marxism 
addressed? Or had the problems themselves disappeared?

Something had indeed happened in the period in question. From the mid-1970s 
onwards, the Western system underwent some vital changes. There was a shift from 
traditional industrial manufacture to a “postindustrial” culture of consumerism, 
communications, information technology, and the service industry. Small-scale, 
decentralized, versatile, nonhierarchical enterprises were the order of the day. 
Markets were deregulated, and the working-class movement was subjected to savage 
legal and political assault. Traditional class allegiances were weakened, while 
local, gender, and ethnic identities grew more insistent.

The new information technologies played a key role in the increasing 
globalization of the system, as a handful of transnational corporations 
distributed production and investment across the planet in pursuit of the 
readiest profits. A good deal of manufacturing was outsourced to cheap-wage 
locations in the “underdeveloped” world, leading some parochially minded 
Westerners to conclude that heavy industry had disappeared from the planet 
altogether. Massive international migrations of labor followed in the wake of 
this global mobility, and with them a resurgence of racism and fascism as 
impoverished immigrants poured into the more advanced economies. While 
“peripheral” countries were subject to sweated labor, privatized facilities, 
slashed welfare, and surreally inequitable terms of trade, the bestubbled 
executives of the metropolitan nations tore off their ties, threw open their 
shirt necks, and fretted about their employees’ spiritual well-being.

None of this happened because the capitalist system was in a blithe, buoyant 
mood. On the contrary, its newly pugnacious posture, like most forms of 
aggression, sprang from deep anxiety. If the system became manic, it was because 
it was latently depressed. What drove this reorganization above all was the 
sudden fade-out of the postwar boom. Intensified international competition was 
forcing down rates of profits, drying up sources of investment, and slowing the 
rate of growth. Even social democracy was now too radical and expensive a 
political option. The stage was thus set for Ronald Reagan and Margaret 
Thatcher, who would help dismantle traditional manufacturing, shackle the labor 
movement, let the market rip, strengthen the repressive arm of the state, and 
champion a new social philosophy known as barefaced greed. The displacement of 
investment from manufacturing to the service, financial, and communications 
industries was a reaction to a protracted economic crisis, not a leap out of a 
bad old world into a brave new one.

Even so, it is doubtful that most of the radicals who changed their minds about 
the system between the ’70s and ’80s did so simply because there were fewer 
cotton mills around. It was not this that led them to ditch Marxism along with 
their sideburns and headbands, but the growing conviction that the regime they 
confronted was simply too hard to crack. It was not illusions about the new 
capitalism, but disillusion about the possibility of changing it, which proved 
decisive. There were, to be sure, plenty of former socialists who rationalized 
their gloom by claiming that if the system could not be changed, neither did it 
need to be. But it was lack of faith in an alternative that proved conclusive. 
Because the working-class movement had been so battered and bloodied, and the 
political Left so robustly rolled back, the future seemed to have vanished 
without trace. For some on the left, the fall of the Soviet bloc in the late 
1980s served to deepen the disenchantment. It did not help that the most 
successful radical current of the modern age—revolutionary nationalism—was by 
this time pretty well exhausted. 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.

What helped discredit Marxism above all, then, was a creeping sense of political 
impotence. It is hard to sustain your faith in change when change seems off the 
agenda, even if that is when you need to sustain it most of all. After all, if 
you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable 
the inevitable was. If the fainthearted had managed to cling to their former 
views for another two decades, they would have witnessed a capitalism so 
exultant and impregnable that in 2008 it only just managed to keep the cash 
machines open. They would also have seen a whole continent south of the Panama 
Canal shift decisively to the political left. The End of History was now at an 
end. In any case, Marxists ought to be well accustomed to defeat. They had known 
greater catastrophes than this. The political odds will always be on the system 
in power, if only because it has more tanks than you do. But the heady visions 
and effervescent hopes of the late 1960s made this downturn an especially bitter 
pill for the survivors of that era to swallow.

What made Marxism seem implausible, then, was not that capitalism had changed 
its spots. The case was exactly the opposite. It was the fact that as far as the 
system went, it was business as usual but even more so. Ironically, then, what 
helped beat back Marxism also lent a kind of credence to its claims. It was 
thrust to the margins because the social order it confronted, far from growing 
more moderate and benign, waxed more ruthless and extreme than it had been 
before. And this made the Marxist critique of it all the more pertinent. On a 
global scale, capital was more concentrated and predatory than ever, and the 
working class had actually increased in size. It was becoming possible to 
imagine a future in which the megarich took shelter in their armed and gated 
communities, while a billion or so slum dwellers were encircled in their fetid 
hovels by watchtowers and barbed wire.

In our own time, as Marx predicted, inequalities of wealth have dramatically 
deepened. The income of a single Mexican billionaire today is equivalent to the 
earnings of the poorest 17 million of his compatriots. Capitalism has created 
more prosperity than history has ever witnessed, but the cost—not least in the 
near destitution of billions—has been astronomical. 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 resources; 
and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. 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. The traditional leftist slogan 
‘‘Socialism or barbarism’’ was never more grimly apposite, never less of a mere 
rhetorical flourish.

Apart from the apparent triumph of capitalism, though, hasn’t Marxism been 
discredited from within? How could Marxists ever live down the history of 
Communist totalitarianism, which has been pitting self-described Marxists 
against one another ever since the Russian Revolution? Surely anyone who calls 
himself a Marxist today must answer for Stalin’s show trials and Mao’s labor 
camps, as well as the brutal crackdowns in Prague and Tiananmen Square.

Taken overall, both Stalinism and Maoism were botched, bloody experiments that 
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. Marx never imagined that socialism 
could be achieved in the impoverished conditions Stalin and Mao faced. Such a 
project requires almost as bizarre a loop in time as inventing the Internet in 
the Middle Ages. You cannot reorganize wealth for the benefit of all if there is 
precious little wealth to reorganize. You cannot abolish social classes in 
conditions of scarcity, since conflicts over a material surplus too meager to 
meet everyone’s needs will simply revive them again. As Marx comments in The 
German Ideology, the result of a revolution in such conditions is that “the old 
filthy business” will simply reappear. All you will get is socialized scarcity. 
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.

Building up an economy from very low levels is a backbreaking, dispiriting task. 
It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships it 
involves. So unless this project is executed gradually, under democratic 
control, and in accordance with socialist values, an authoritarian state may 
step in and force its citizens to do what they are reluctant to undertake 
voluntarily. The militarization of labor in Bolshevik Russia is a case in point. 
The result, in a grisly irony, will be to undermine the political superstructure 
of socialism (popular democracy, genuine self-government) in the very attempt to 
build up its economic base.

It is not that the building of socialism cannot be begun in deprived conditions. 
It is rather that without material resources it will tend to twist into the 
monstrous caricature of socialism known as Stalinism. The Bolshevik revolution 
soon found itself besieged by imperial Western armies, as well as threatened by 
counterrevolution, urban famine, and a bloody civil war. With a narrow 
capitalist base, disastrously low levels of material production, scant traces of 
civil institutions, a decimated, exhausted working class, peasant revolts, and a 
swollen bureaucracy to rival the tsar’s, the revolution was in deep trouble 
almost from the outset. In the end, the Bolsheviks were to march their starving, 
despondent, war-weary people into modernity at the point of a gun.

Marx himself was a critic of rigid dogma, military terror, political 
suppression, and arbitrary state power. He believed that political 
representatives should be accountable to their electors, and castigated the 
German Social Democrats of his day for their statist politics. He insisted on 
free speech and civil liberties, was horrified by the forced creation of an 
urban proletariat (in his case in England rather than Russia), and held that 
common ownership in the countryside should be a voluntary rather than coercive 
process. Yet as one who recognized that socialism cannot thrive in 
poverty-stricken conditions, he would have understood perfectly how the Russian 
revolution came to be lost.

Imagine a slightly crazed capitalist outfit that tried to turn a premodern tribe 
into a set of ruthlessly acquisitive, technologically sophisticated 
entrepreneurs speaking the jargon of public relations and free-market economics, 
all in a surreally short period of time. Does the fact that the experiment would 
almost certainly prove less than dramatically successful constitute a fair 
condemnation of capitalism? Surely not. To think so would be as absurd as 
claiming that the Girl Scouts should be disbanded because they cannot solve 
certain tricky problems in quantum physics. 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.

There is, however, another sense in which socialism is thought by some to be 
unworkable. Even if you were to build it under affluent conditions, how could 
you possibly run a complex modern economy without markets? The answer for a 
growing number of Marxists is that you do not need to. Markets in their view 
would remain an integral part of a socialist economy. So-called market socialism 
envisages a future in which the means of production would be socially owned, but 
where self-governing cooperatives would compete with one another in the 
marketplace. In this way, some of the virtues of the market could be retained, 
while some of its vices could be shed. At the level of individual enterprises, 
cooperation would ensure increased efficiency, since the evidence suggests that 
it is almost always as efficient as capitalist enterprise and often much more 
so. At the level of the economy as a whole, competition ensures that the 
informational, allocation, and incentive problems associated with the 
traditional Stalinist model of central planning do not arise.

Market socialism places economic power in the hands of the actual producers; it 
does away with social classes and exploitation. It is therefore a welcome 
advance on a capitalist economy. For some Marxists, however, it retains too many 
features of that economy to be palatable. Under market socialism there would 
still be commodity production, inequality, unemployment, and the sway of market 
forces beyond human control. How would workers not simply be transformed into 
collective capitalists, maximizing their profits, cutting quality, ignoring 
social needs, and pandering to consumerism in the drive for constant 
accumulation? How would one avoid the chronic short-termism of markets, their 
habit of ignoring the overall social picture and the long-term antisocial 
effects of their own fragmented decisions? Education and state monitoring might 
diminish these dangers, but some Marxists look instead to an economy that would 
be neither centrally planned nor market-governed. On this model, resources would 
be allocated by negotiations between producers, consumers, environmentalists, 
and other relevant parties, in networks of workplace, neighborhood, and consumer 
councils. The broad parameters of the economy, including decisions on the 
overall allocation of resources, rates of growth and investment, energy, 
transport, and ecological policies would be set by representative assemblies at 
local, regional, and national levels. These general decisions about, say, 
allocation would then devolve downward to regional and local levels, where more 
detailed planning would be progressively worked out. 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.

Some champions of such so-called participatory economics accept a kind of mixed 
socialist economy: goods that are of vital concern to the community (food, 
health, pharmaceuticals, education, transport, energy, subsistence products, 
financial institutions, the media, and the like) need to be brought under 
democratic public control, since those who run them tend to behave antisocially 
if they sniff the chance of enlarged profits in doing so. Less socially 
indispensable goods, however (consumer items, luxury products), could be left to 
the operations of the market. Some market socialists find this whole scheme too 
complex to be workable. As Oscar Wilde once remarked, the trouble with socialism 
is that it takes up too many evenings. Yet one needs at least to take account of 
the role of modern information technology in oiling the wheels of such a system. 
Even the former vice president of Procter & Gamble has acknowledged that it 
makes workers’ self-management a real possibility. In Democracy and Economic 
Planning, Pat Devine reminds us of just how much time is currently consumed by 
capitalist administration and organization. There is no obvious reason why the 
amount of time taken up by a socialist alternative should be greater.

Socialists will no doubt continue to argue about the details of a postcapitalist 
economy. There is no flawless model currently on offer. One can contrast this 
imperfection with the capitalist economy, which is in impeccable working order 
and which has never been responsible for the mildest touch of poverty, waste, or 
slump. It has admittedly been responsible for some extravagant levels of 
unemployment, but the world’s leading capitalist nation has hit on an ingenious 
solution to this defect. In the United States today, over a million more people 
would be seeking work if they were not in prison.

Spectacular inequalities of wealth and power, imperial warfare, intensified 
exploitation, an increasingly repressive state: if all these characterize 
today’s world, they are also the issues on which Marxism has acted and reflected 
for almost two centuries. One would expect, then, that it might have a few 
lessons to teach the present. Marx himself was particularly struck by the 
extraordinarily violent process by which an urban working class had been forged 
out of an uprooted peasantry in his own adopted country of England—a process 
Brazil, China, Russia, and India are living through today. Writing in the 
Guardian, Tristram Hunt points out that Mike Davis’s book Planet of Slums, which 
documents the “stinking mountains of shit” known as slums to be found in the 
Lagos or Dhaka of today, can be seen as an updated version of Engels’s The 
Condition of the Working Class. As China becomes the workshop of the world, Hunt 
comments, “the special economic zones of Guangdong and Shanghai appear eerily 
reminiscent of 1840s Manchester and Glasgow.”

What if it were not Marxism that is outdated but capitalism itself? Back in 
Victorian England, Marx saw the system as having already run out of steam. 
Having promoted social development in its heyday, it was now acting as a drag on 
it. He viewed capitalist society as awash with fantasy and fetishism, myth and 
idolatry, however much it prided itself on its modernity. Its very 
enlightenment—its smug belief in its own superior rationality—was a kind of 
superstition. If it was capable of some astonishing progress, there was another 
sense in which it had to run very hard just to stay on the spot. The final limit 
on capitalism, Marx once commented, is capital itself, the constant reproduction 
of which is a frontier beyond which it cannot stray. There is thus something 
curiously static and repetitive about this most dynamic of all historical regimes.

Capitalism has brought about great material advances. But though this way of 
organizing our affairs has had a long time to demonstrate that it is capable of 
satisfying human demands all round, it seems no closer to doing so than ever. 
How long are we prepared to wait for it to come up with the goods? Why do we 
continue to indulge the myth that the fabulous wealth generated by this mode of 
production will in the fullness of time become available to all? Would the world 
treat similar claims by the far Left with such genial, let’s-wait-and-see 
forbearance? Right-wingers who concede that there will always be colossal 
injustices in the system, but that that’s just tough and the alternatives are 
even worse, are at least more honest in their hard-faced way than those who 
preach that it will all finally come 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. They would then be 
free to bow out, burn their Guevara posters, take up that long-neglected cello 
again, and talk about something more intriguing than the Asiatic mode of 
production. Marxism is meant to be a strictly provisional affair, which is why 
anyone who invests his whole identity in it has missed the point. That there is 
a life after Marxism is the whole point of Marxism.

There is only one problem with this otherwise alluring vision. Marxism is a 
critique of capitalism—the most searching, rigorous, comprehensive critique of 
its kind ever to be launched. It follows, then, that as long as capitalism is 
still in business, Marxism must be as well. Only by superannuating its opponent 
can it superannuate itself. And on the last sighting, capitalism appeared as 
feisty as ever.

Most critics of Marxism today do not dispute the point. Their claim, rather, is 
that the system has altered almost unrecognizably since the days of Marx, and 
that this is why his ideas are no longer relevant. It is worth noting that Marx 
himself was perfectly aware of the ever-changing nature of the system he 
challenged. It is to Marxism itself that we owe the concept of different 
historical forms of capital: mercantile, agrarian, industrial, monopoly, 
financial, imperial, and so on. So why should the fact that capitalism has 
changed its shape in recent decades discredit a theory that sees change as being 
of its very essence? Besides, Marx himself predicted a decline of the working 
class and a steep increase in white-collar work. He also foresaw so-called 
globalization—odd for a man whose thought is supposed to be archaic. Though 
perhaps Marx’s “archaic” quality is what makes him still relevant today. He is 
accused of being outdated by the champions of a capitalism rapidly reverting to 
Victorian levels of inequality.


This essay is adapted from Why Marx Was Right, published this month by Yale 
University Press. Copyright © by Terry Eagleton. Reprinted with permission.

Published on Commonweal magazine (http://commonwealmagazine.org)