Why "Why Marx Was Right" Is Wrong

The eminent British professor literature Terry Eagleton offers a breezy take that from a conventional standpoint is intellectually transgressive. It is easy to read and vigorously argued, but not especially well-argued. I need to be careful, because TE had the benefit of heavyweights Ellen Meiksins Wood and Alex Callinicos reading his drafts. Taking them on would probably be more than I could handle.

TE does effectively debunk enduring canards commonly attributed to Marx and Engels. Even so, I’m not sure who is supposed to read this book. Enthusiasts will want something deeper. For anyone with some background, this is a book to skim. Others could just as well not bother.

TE’s launching pad is the idea that sure, Marxism in the form of Stalin, Mao, and others can be linked to abominable crimes, thanks largely to the constraints of economic scarcity, but Capitalism is pretty bad too. Included are workman-like, sometimes thin apologetics for injustices under the Russian and Chinese transitions to socialism. This all begs the question of what superior alternatives might be available under kinder, gentler marxisms.

TE proposes decentralized, common ownership, in the form of cooperatives and worker ownership of factories. This idea is old and would give us a better world, but I’m afraid it does not solve the problems turned up by Marx. There would still be commodity production, which TE rails against later in the book as a fundamental problem.

First, state ownership of capital under these arrangements is a can of worms. There would naturally be competition for resources. Workers who owned their factories would have an incentive to ‘eat the capital stock,’ meaning sell their shares and walk away. Second, if commodity production continues, we can also get anti-social behavior by those producing commodities. The difference is it would be workers rather than owners, but the incentives would remain. Anyone with experience dealing with trade unions knows that the policies of such organizations can be inflexible and self-interested. Third, markets in speculative assets could still disrupt economies. Markets in commodities could still result in problems for consumers. Fourth, national enmities founded on economic competition, or envy, would still be with us.

I want to repeat that this could still be a better world, maybe the best we could do. That would take more of book than TE offers. You could say that with much less inequality, in a new epoch of common ownership, all types of public-spirited governance would be easier. There is still the question of how ownership would be transferred from its current beneficiaries to the citizenry.

Marxism as economic determinism, utopianism, or the roots of insurrectionary violence are three of those canards. TE dissects them well enough. He still struggles with the inevitability of socialism that underlies Marxist texts. It could be said that grappling with Marx in this context is the real benefit of his contribution.

As I’ve argued before, and will again, the purported inevitability of socialism distorts political program in favor of maximalist approaches and encourages frustration that suggests political adventurism. The utopian pretensions support a binary view, the status quo vs. Valhalla, that glosses over the difficult details of transition. At the same time, in his treatment of the “withering away of the State,” TE indulges in some utopianism of his own.

It’s all an unwelcome distraction from vital, constructive social-democratic reform. TE, as part of his project to broaden the scope and appeal of Marxism, easily outlines the long history of Marxist support for such reforms. I would say rejection of the evolutionary path is the real defeatism.

I like TE’s discussion of class. It dovetails with my remarks about the working class as ‘Humanity,’ and with Marx as well. If socialism is the abolition of class, then the working class bringing about socialism is nothing less than Humanity writ large.

In the end, TE is so intent on demonstrating the flexibility and broad-mindedness of Marxism, both as theory and as practice, that he risks drowning its most important insights in the sea of “anti-capitalism.” Still, anti-capitalism beats the hell out of pro-capitalism. Democratic political leaders like Obama, the Clintons, and now Kamala, like to claim they are capitalists. They have lost their way, if they ever had one.