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  Why Marx Was Right

  Why Marx Was Right

  TERRY EAGLETON

  UNIVERSITY PRESS

  New Haven & London

  Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2011 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Granjon Roman type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eagleton, Terry, 1943— Why Marx was right / Terry Eagleton. p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  isBN 978-0-300-16943-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818—1883. 2. Communism. 3. Capitalism. I. Title. HX39.5E234 2011 335.4—dc22

  2010041471

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48—1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 987654321

  For Dom and Hadi

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Preface

  This book had its origin in a single, striking thought: What if all the most familiar objections to Marx's work are mistaken? Or at least, if not totally wrongheaded, mostly so?

  This is not to suggest that Marx never put a foot wrong. I am not of that leftist breed that piously proclaims that everything is open to criticism, and then, when asked to produce three major criticisms of Marx, lapses into truculent silence. That I have my own doubts about some of his ideas should be clear enough from this book. But he was right enough of the time about enough important issues to make calling oneself a Marxist a reasonable self-description. No Freudian imagines that Freud never blundered, just as no fan of Alfred Hitchcock defends the master's every shot and line of screenplay. I am out to present Marx's ideas not as perfect but as plausible. To demonstrate this, I take in this book ten of the most standard criticisms of Marx, in no particular order of importance, and try to refute them one by one. In the process, I also aim to provide a clear, accessible introduction to his thought for those unfamiliar with his work.

  The Communist Manifesto has been described as ''without doubt the single most influential text written in the nineteenth century.''1 Very few thinkers, as opposed to statesmen, scientists, soldiers, religious figures and the like, have changed the course of actual history as decisively as its author. There are no Cartesian governments, Platonist guerilla fighters or Hegelian trade unions. Not even Marx's most implacable critics would deny that he transformed our understanding of human history. 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 civilisations.''2 Yet there is a curious notion abroad that Marx and his theories can now be safely buried—and this in the wake of one of the most devastating crises of capitalism on historical record. Marxism, for long the most theoretically rich, politically uncompromising critique of that system, is now complacently consigned to the primeval past.

  That crisis has at least meant that the word ''capitalism,'' usually disguised under some such coy pseudonym as ''the modern age,'' ''industrialism'' or ''the West,'' has become current once more. 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. 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.

  I say very little in this book about Marxism as a moral and cultural critique. This is because it is not generally raised as an objection to Marxism, and so does not fit my format. In my view, however, the extraordinarily rich, fertile body of Marxist writing in this vein is reason in itself to align oneself with the Marxist legacy. 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.

  In the early days of feminism, some maladroit if well-meaning male authors used to write ''When I say 'men,' I mean of course 'men and women.' '' I should point out in similar vein that when I say Marx, I quite often mean Marx and Engels. But the relationship between the two is another story.

  I am grateful to Alex Callinicos, Philip Carpenter and Ellen Meiksins Wood, who read a draft of this book and made some invaluable criticisms and suggestions.

  Why Marx Was Right

  ONE

  Marxism is finished. It might conceivably have had some relevance to a world of factories and food riots, coal miners and chimney sweeps, widespread misery and massed working classes. But it certainly has no bearing on the increasingly classless, socially mobile, postindustrial Western societies of the present. It is the creed of those who are too stubborn, fearful or deluded to accept that the world has changed for good, in both senses of the term.

  That Marxism is finished would be music to the ears of Marxists everywhere. They could pack in their marching and picketing, return to the bosom of their grieving families and enjoy an evening at home instead of yet another tedious committee meeting. 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. 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.

  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 is also the only such critique
that has transformed large sectors of the globe. 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. Before we examine this claim in more detail, 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. We shall be looking at this a little later. He also foresaw so-called globalisation—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.

  In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, many of them no longer considered that it had. What exactly had happened in the meanwhile? Was it simply that these people were now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxist theory been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Did we stumble upon a long-lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke? It was not that we discovered to our dismay that Marx was in the pay of capitalism. This is because we knew it all along. Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich En-gels's textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers.

  Something had indeed happened in the period in question. From the mid-1970s onwards, the Western system underwent some vital changes.1 There was a shift from traditional industrial manufacture to a ''postindustrial'' culture of consumerism, communications, information technology and the service industry. Small-scale, decentralised, versatile, nonhierarchical enterprises were the order of the day. Markets were deregulated, and the working-class movement subjected to savage legal and political assault. Traditional class allegiances were weakened, while local, gender and ethnic identities grew more insistent. Politics became increasingly managed and manipulated.

  The new information technologies played a key role in the increasing globalisation 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 labour 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 labour, 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 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 reorganisation 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 Reagan and Thatcher, who would help to dismantle traditional manufacture, shackle the labour 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 manufacture 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 rationalised 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. Or, as one exuberant postmodernist put it, ''The present plus more options.''

  What helped to 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 this 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 on the high streets. 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 to 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 these circumstances, to claim that Marxism was finished was rather like claiming that firefighting was out of date because arsonists were growing more crafty and resourceful than ever.

  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 seventeen 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. For the first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. 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. In these dire conditions, as Fredric Jameson writes, ''Marxism must necessarily become true again."2

  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 which Brazil, China, Russia and India are living through today. 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.''3

  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. The fact that its underlying logic remains pretty constant is one reason why the Marxist critique of it remains largely valid. Only if the system were genuinely able to break beyond its own bounds, inaugurating something unimaginably new, would this cease to be the case. But capitalism is incapable of inventing a future which does not ritually reproduce its present. With, needless to say, more options . . .