Why Marx was right (Terry Eagleton)

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Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. He is the author of more than fifty books spanning the fields of literary theory, post-modernism, politics, ideology and religion. His most recent titles—Reason, Faith, and Revolution, On Evil, The Event of Literature, How to Read Literature, Hope Without Optimism, Culture and the Death of God, Culture, Materialism and Radical Sacrifice—are published by Yale. Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2011, 2018 Yale University 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 guerrilla 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.