[Peace-discuss] Obama confounded by emigrant academic

[C. G. Estabrook]

April 10, 2011
In Praise of Marx
By Terry Eagleton

Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the 
Boston Strangler. Were not Marx's ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, 
labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men 
and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by 
the name of Stalin, and another a brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had 
the blood of some 30 million of his people on his hands?

The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of 
the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one 
thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in 
desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. 
If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalized 
scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the 
poor. It would mean a recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less 
tasteful translation, "the same old crap." Marxism is a theory of how 
well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve 
justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations 
bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic 
heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a 
skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age.

Marx certainly wanted to see justice and prosperity thrive in such forsaken 
spots. He wrote angrily and eloquently about several of Britain's downtrodden 
colonies, not least Ireland and India. And the political movement which his work 
set in motion has done more to help small nations throw off their imperialist 
masters than any other political current. Yet Marx was not foolish enough to 
imagine that socialism could be built in such countries without more-advanced 
nations flying to their aid. And that meant that the common people of those 
advanced nations had to wrest the means of production from their rulers and 
place them at the service of the wretched of the earth. If this had happened in 
19th-century Ireland, there would have been no famine to send a million men and 
women to their graves and another two or three million to the far corners of the 
earth.

There is a sense in which the whole of Marx's writing boils down to several 
embarrassing questions: Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more 
resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to 
overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality? What are the 
mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and 
indignity for the many? Why does private wealth seem to go hand in hand with 
public squalor? Is it, as the good-hearted liberal reformist suggests, that we 
have simply not got around to mopping up these pockets of human misery, but 
shall do so in the fullness of time? Or is it more plausible to maintain that 
there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates 
deprivation and inequality, as surely as Charlie Sheen generates gossip?

Marx was the first thinker to talk in those terms. This down-at-heel émigré Jew, 
a man who once remarked that nobody else had written so much about money and had 
so little, bequeathed us the language in which the system under which we live 
could be grasped as a whole. Its contradictions were analyzed, its inner 
dynamics laid bare, its historical origins examined, and its potential demise 
foreshadowed. This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered 
capitalism as simply a Bad Thing, like admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco 
smoke in your children's faces. On the contrary, he was extravagant in his 
praise for the class that created it, a fact that both his critics and his 
disciples have conveniently suppressed. No other social system in history, he 
wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the 
capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes 
from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, 
invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled 
empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly 
global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty 
historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal.

That, however, was only part of the story. There are those who see modern 
history as an enthralling tale of progress, and those who view it as one long 
nightmare. Marx, with his usual perversity, thought it was both. Every advance 
in civilization had brought with it new possibilities of barbarism. The great 
slogans of the middle-class revolution—"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—were his 
watchwords, too. He simply inquired why those ideas could never be put into 
practice without violence, poverty, and exploitation. Capitalism had developed 
human powers and capacities beyond all previous measure. Yet it had not used 
those capacities to set men and women free of fruitless toil. On the contrary, 
it had forced them to labor harder than ever. The richest civilizations on earth 
sweated every bit as hard as their Neolithic ancestors.
Enlarge Image In Praise of Marx 1

Illustrated London News, Getty Images

An 1849 engraving of the Irish Potato Famine.
Enlarge Image In Praise of Marx 2

Alex Wong, Getty Images

A protest in front of the Washington office of Goldman Sachs in November, 2009

This, Marx considered, was not because of natural scarcity. It was because of 
the peculiarly contradictory way in which the capitalist system generated its 
fabulous wealth. Equality for some meant inequality for others, and freedom for 
some brought oppression and unhappiness for many. The system's voracious pursuit 
of power and profit had turned foreign nations into enslaved colonies, and human 
beings into the playthings of economic forces beyond their control. It had 
blighted the planet with pollution and mass starvation, and scarred it with 
atrocious wars. Some critics of Marx point with proper outrage to the mass 
murders in Communist Russia and China. They do not usually recall with equal 
indignation the genocidal crimes of capitalism: the late-19th-century famines in 
Asia and Africa in which untold millions perished; the carnage of the First 
World War, in which imperialist nations massacred one another's working men in 
the struggle for global resources; and the horrors of fascism, a regime to which 
capitalism tends to resort when its back is to the wall. Without the 
self-sacrifice of the Soviet Union, among other nations, the Nazi regime might 
still be in place.

Marxists were warning of the perils of fascism while the politicians of the 
so-called free world were still wondering aloud whether Hitler was quite such a 
nasty guy as he was painted. Almost all followers of Marx today reject the 
villainies of Stalin and Mao, while many non-Marxists would still vigorously 
defend the destruction of Dresden or Hiroshima. Modern capitalist nations are 
for the most part the fruit of a history of genocide, violence, and 
extermination every bit as abhorrent as the crimes of Communism. Capitalism, 
too, was forged in blood and tears, and Marx was around to witness it. It is 
just that the system has been in business long enough for most of us to be 
oblivious of that fact.

The selectiveness of political memory takes some curious forms. Take, for 
example, 9/11. I mean the first 9/11, not the second. I am referring to the 9/11 
that took place exactly 30 years before the fall of the World Trade Center, when 
the United States helped to violently overthrow the democratically elected 
government of Salvador Allende of Chile, and installed in its place an odious 
dictator who went on to murder far more people than died on that dreadful day in 
New York and Washington. How many Americans are aware of that? How many times 
has it been mentioned on Fox News?

Marx was not some dreamy utopianist. On the contrary, he began his political 
career in fierce contention with the dreamy utopianists who surrounded him. He 
has about as much interest in a perfect human society as a Clint Eastwood 
character would, and never once speaks in such absurd terms. He did not believe 
that men and women could surpass the Archangel Gabriel in sanctity. Rather, he 
believed that the world could feasibly be made a considerably better place. In 
this he was a realist, not an idealist. Those truly with their heads stuck in 
the sand—the moral ostriches of this world—are those who deny that there can be 
any radical change. They behave as though Family Guy and multicolored toothpaste 
will still be around in the year 4000. The whole of human history disproves this 
viewpoint.

Radical change, to be sure, may not be for the better. Perhaps the only 
socialism we shall ever witness is one forced upon the handful of human beings 
who might crawl out the other side of some nuclear holocaust or ecological 
disaster. Marx even speaks dourly of the possible "mutual ruin of all parties." 
A man who witnessed the horrors of industrial-capitalist England was unlikely to 
be starry-eyed about his fellow humans. All he meant was that there are more 
than enough resources on the planet to resolve most of our material problems, 
just as there was more than enough food in Britain in the 1840s to feed the 
famished Irish population several times over. It is the way we organize our 
production that is crucial. Notoriously, Marx did not provide us with blueprints 
for how we should do things differently. He has famously little to say about the 
future. The only image of the future is the failure of the present. He is not a 
prophet in the sense of peering into a crystal ball. He is a prophet in the 
authentic biblical sense of one who warns us that unless we change our unjust 
ways, the future is likely to be deeply unpleasant. Or that there will be no 
future at all.

Socialism, then, does not depend on some miraculous change in human nature. Some 
of those who defended feudalism against capitalist values in the late Middle 
Ages preached that capitalism would never work because it was contrary to human 
nature. Some capitalists now say the same about socialism. No doubt there is a 
tribe somewhere in the Amazon Basin that believes no social order can survive in 
which a man is allowed to marry his deceased brother's wife. We all tend to 
absolutize our own conditions. Socialism would not banish rivalry, envy, 
aggression, possessiveness, domination, and competition. The world would still 
have its share of bullies, cheats, freeloaders, free riders, and occasional 
psychopaths. It is just that rivalry, aggression, and competition would no 
longer take the form of some bankers complaining that their bonuses had been 
reduced to a miserly $5-million, while millions of others in the world struggled 
to survive on less than $2 a day.

Marx was a profoundly moral thinker. He speaks in The Communist Manifesto of a 
world in which "the free self-development of each would be the condition of the 
free self-development of all." This is an ideal to guide us, not a condition we 
could ever entirely achieve. But its language is nonetheless significant. As a 
good Romantic humanist, Marx believed in the uniqueness of the individual. The 
idea permeates his writings from end to end. He had a passion for the sensuously 
specific and a marked aversion to abstract ideas, however occasionally necessary 
he thought they might be. His so-called materialism is at root about the human 
body. Again and again, he speaks of the just society as one in which men and 
women will be able to realize their distinctive powers and capacities in their 
own distinctive ways. His moral goal is pleasurable self-fulfillment. In this he 
is at one with his great mentor Aristotle, who understood that morality is about 
how to flourish most richly and enjoyably, not in the first place (as the modern 
age disastrously imagines) about laws, duties, obligations, and responsibilities.

How does this moral goal differ from liberal individualism? The difference is 
that to achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings for Marx must find it in and 
through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own 
thing in grand isolation from others. That would not even be possible. The other 
must become the ground of one's own self-realization, at the same time as he or 
she provides the condition for one's own. At the interpersonal level, this is 
known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism. Socialism for 
Marx would be simply whatever set of institutions would allow this reciprocity 
to happen to the greatest possible extent. Think of the difference between a 
capitalist company, in which the majority work for the benefit of the few, and a 
socialist cooperative, in which my own participation in the project augments the 
welfare of all the others, and vice versa. This is not a question of some 
saintly self-sacrifice. The process is built into the structure of the institution.

Marx's goal is leisure, not labor. The best reason for being a socialist, apart 
from annoying people you happen to dislike, is that you detest having to work. 
Marx thought that capitalism had developed the forces of production to the point 
at which, under different social relations, they could be used to emancipate the 
majority of men and women from the most degrading forms of labor. What did he 
think we would do then? Whatever we wanted. If, like the great Irish socialist 
Oscar Wilde, we chose simply to lie around all day in loose crimson garments, 
sipping absinthe and reading the odd page of Homer to each other, then so be it. 
The point, however, was that this kind of free activity had to be available to 
all. We would no longer tolerate a situation in which the minority had leisure 
because the majority had labor.

What interested Marx, in other words, was what one might somewhat misleadingly 
call the spiritual, not the material. If material conditions had to be changed, 
it was to set us free from the tyranny of the economic. He himself was 
staggeringly well read in world literature, delighted in art, culture, and 
civilized conversation, reveled in wit, humor, and high spirits, and was once 
chased by a policeman for breaking a street lamp in the course of a pub crawl. 
He was, of course, an atheist, but you do not have to be religious to be 
spiritual. He was one of the many great Jewish heretics, and his work is 
saturated with the great themes of Judaism—justice, emancipation, the Day of 
Reckoning, the reign of peace and plenty, the redemption of the poor.

What, though, of the fearful Day of Reckoning? Would not Marx's vision for 
humanity require a bloody revolution? Not necessarily. He himself thought that 
some nations, like Britain, Holland, and the United States, might achieve 
socialism peacefully. If he was a revolutionary, he was also a robust champion 
of reform. In any case, people who claim that they are opposed to revolution 
usually mean that they dislike certain revolutions and not others. Are 
antirevolutionary Americans hostile to the American Revolution as well as the 
Cuban one? Are they wringing their hands over the recent insurrections in Egypt 
and Libya, or the ones that toppled colonial powers in Asia and Africa? We 
ourselves are products of revolutionary upheavals in the past. Some processes of 
reform have been far more bloodstained than some acts of revolution. There are 
velvet revolutions as well as violent ones. The Bolshevik Revolution itself took 
place with remarkably little loss of life. The Soviet Union to which it gave 
birth fell some 70 years later, with scarcely any bloodshed.

Some critics of Marx reject a state-dominated society. But so did he. He 
detested the political state quite as much as the Tea Party does, if for rather 
less redneck reasons. Was he, feminists might ask, a Victorian patriarch? To be 
sure. But as some (non-Marxist) modern commentators have pointed out, it was men 
from the socialist and communist camps who, up to the resurgence of the women's 
movement, in the 1960s, regarded the issue of women's equality as vital to other 
forms of political liberation. The word "proletarian" means those who in ancient 
society were too poor to serve the state with anything but the fruit of their 
wombs. "Proles" means "offspring." Today, in the sweatshops and on the small 
farms of the third world, the typical proletarian is still a woman.

Much the same goes for ethnic matters. In the 1920s and 30s, practically the 
only men and women to be found preaching racial equality were communists. Most 
anticolonial movements were inspired by Marxism. The antisocialist thinker 
Ludwig von Mises described socialism as "the most powerful reform movement that 
history has ever known, the first ideological trend not limited to a section of 
mankind but supported by people of all races, nations, religions, and 
civilizations." Marx, who knew his history rather better, might have reminded 
von Mises of Christianity, but the point remains forceful. As for the 
environment, Marx astonishingly prefigured our own Green politics. Nature, and 
the need to regard it as an ally rather than an antagonist, was one of his 
constant preoccupations.

Why might Marx be back on the agenda? The answer, ironically, is because of 
capitalism. Whenever you hear capitalists talking about capitalism, you know the 
system is in trouble. Usually they prefer a more anodyne term, like "free 
enterprise." The recent financial crashes have forced us once again to think of 
the setup under which we live as a whole, and it was Marx who first made it 
possible to do so. It was The Communist Manifesto which predicted that 
capitalism would become global, and that its inequalities would severely 
sharpen. Has his work any defects? Hundreds of them. But he is too creative and 
original a thinker to be surrendered to the vulgar stereotypes of his enemies.

Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor at Lancaster University, in England; the 
National University of Ireland; and the University of Notre Dame. His latest 
book, Why Marx Was Right, was just published by Yale University Press.