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Why Marx Was Right

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Terry Eagleton's "Why Marx Was Right" is a wonderfully written and accessible introduction to the thought of Karl Marx. It is fashionable to dismiss Marxism as "outdated" or "irrelevant" as it pertains to contemporary economic and political problems. Eagleton provides a much needed correction to this ignorant viewpoint.

Eagleton takes the many objections voiced by the enemies of Marxism (e.g. Marxism is "great in theory" but only leads to bloodshed; Marxism is utopian; Marxism reduces everything to economics; Marxism is deterministic, etc.) and demolishes them one by one. Here is Eagleton's take on those who hypocritically condemn Marxism as "bloodstained":

"Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror, which is not the case with Stalinism and Maoism." (p. 12-13)

Ever argue with someone who claims that socialism is an "unrealizable utopia"? Here's Eagleton's answer:

"There is good reason that there can never be any complete reconciliation between the individual and society....Marx's claim in the Communist Manifesto about the free self-development of all can never be fully realized. Like all the finest ideals it is a goal to aim at, not a state to be literally achieved....Those who scoff at socialist ideals should remember that the free market can never be perfectly realized either...Some of those who claim that socialism is unworkable are confident that they can eradicate poverty, solve the global warming crisis, spread liberal democracy to Afghanistan and resolve world conflicts by UN resolutions. It is only socialism which for some mysterious reason is out of reach." (p. 87-88)

These are only two of the many criticisms demolished by Eagleton. "Why Marx Was Right" is an entertaining and informative defense of Marxism and its relevance for modern humans. Highly recommended!

I'll admit upfront that I haven't' read much of Marx or Engels directly - only the assigned pages way back in the haze of college years, which reading I poorly understood at the time and has long since drained from consciousness. Rectifying this gap is one of those things - along with running a marathon and organizing my closet - that I've been meaning to do for quite some time, but somehow hasn't happened yet. Therefore, it is quite handy to have a single volume reference guide to address the most common criticisms of Marx.

Eagleton breaks up the book into ten chapters, each of which purports to address one common criticism of Marx. The actual division is perhaps my biggest criticism of the book. While each chapter header does indeed give common criticism, and one certainly can't accuse Eagleton of creating strawmen to knock down, he does tend to lump too much into each critique.

Chapter Six, for instance, begins, "Marx was a materialist.... He was brutally dismissive of religion, and regarded morality simply as a question of the end justifying the means.... There is an obvious route from this dreary, soulless vision of humanity to the atrocities of Stalin and other disciples of Marx." There are several different themes running through that critique - materialism, religion, morality, and atrocities of Marx's avowed followers. Certainly, such themes are all arguably related, but trying to address them all together makes it rather confusing to remember exactly what critique Eagleton is rebutting. Several times I found myself flipping back to the beginning of the chapter to refresh my memory. Also, it makes the book rather repetitive because many themes end up getting addressed in several sections. It seems that Eagleton could have done a better job of breaking up the individual critiques into more discreet chapters.

But beyond my complaint about the organization, Eagleton's content is masterful. He does an excellent job of demonstrating how Marx's critics contradict themselves, how they (often intentionally) misunderstand and distort Marx's message into the exact opposite, and how they project many of the faults of capitalism - conformity and rigidity, among others - onto Marxism.

I can't say that this book converted me to Marxism (not that I was ever anti-Marxist to begin with - the idea of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" has always sounded appealing, if rather idealistic). To be fair, Eagleton himself is not a Marx literalist; he too finds faults with Marx's thinking. But the book helped to clarify the depth and richness of Marxist thought which is so often parodied and pigeon-holed. Whether you are a life-long socialist or an ardent capitalist, I recommend this book. You may not - probably won't - agree with everything it has to say, but if you read it with an open mind, it should broaden your understanding of Marxism/socialism/communism, which have become so distorted in the popular mind that they are almost as frightening as "Islamofascism".

Presumably, readers of this book fall into two broadly defined categories: 1) avid students of Marx looking for further insights, perspectives and heretofore unnoticed nuances of the dialectical materialist analysis of economics and 2) those driven to alternative analysis of the recurrent and increasingly devastating financial debacles assailing the world's capitalist economies. Regrettably, Eagleton's book will likely fail to satisfy the interest or needs of either category of reader.

This book is difficult to review without mentioning certain specifics, many of which undermine its central premises. Beginning with Eagleton's assertion that capitalism has "delivered the goods" (so to say) with regard to providing the material wealth on which the socialist transition is predicated: no doubt about that, at least in the West. Next, the notion of "class solidarity" on which both Eagleton and Marx base the socialist imperative: this has been refuted by the trajectory of human economic and social behavior repeatedly and irrefutably throughout the course of history. Why, for instance, would Russia (nexus of the former USSR) have evolved from a flawed version of "socialism" into a state capitalist, authoritarian, highly nationalist, corrupt nation instead of a better socialist one? Is the current version of Chinese "Communism" any less rapacious and predatory than the Western version of "market capitalism"? Why no evolution to benign socialism in these or other members of the former "Communist Block"? This begs the question, as the answer is, of course, the avarice that appears fundamental to human nature; enlightened (or not-so-enlightened) self-interest trumps putative class consciousness (a concept still awaiting empirical validation) each and every time.

Eagleton repeatedly asserts that Marx, as a thinker, has been "travestied": in fact, that's the basis for the book. Doubtlessly that's correct as a generality, but unfortunately for this argument, many highly sophisticated students of Marxist theory (Lenin, Trotsky and legions of others) derived remarkably consistent conclusions from his works and these, each and every one of them, are diametrically opposite from those posited by Eagleton. However perverted in implementation, the central tenants of Marxism as understood by its most prominent practitioners probably helps explain why 20th century socialist states were so uniform in their general modes of governance.

The ineluctable progression of economic systems (simplified version:feudalism;industiral capitalism; bourgeoise parliamentary democracy; transition stage to socialism via the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; culminating in communism) is the core of Marx's dialectic. But the "scientific" analysis so carefully cultivated and repeatedly asserted by Marx with its significant authoritarian overtones is dismissed as a misconstruction by Eagleton. The repeated and starkly authoritarian statements by Marx (such as this one, "We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror", from ''Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe", 1849) are simply elided. Not to be pedantic nor to claim authority as a Marxist scholar, but having read, amongst others, "Capital", "The Communist Manifesto", "The Eighteenth Brumaire"; works by and on Trotsky, Marx, Stalin and Thornton Anderson's (highly recommended) but long out-of-print survey of the "Masters of Russian Marxism" (Plekhanov through Lenin, Martov, Trotsky, Kollontai, Bukharin, Stalin and Khruschchev) myself, I believe Eagleton is oftentimes incorrect when asserting his alternative and squishy humanistic interpretation of Marx.

A major thesis presented in "Why Marx Was Right" is that Marx posits a society of individuals in complete harmony with society (some sort of organic social unity): this is known as "the collective". That is accurate, with qualifications. Eagleton acknowledges that, "There is good reason to suspect that there can never be any complete reconciliation between individuals and society..." but fails to note that this concept has also served as the underpinning for all sorts of "social engineering" efforts, including those of radical Right movements (Nazism, for instance) as well as the radical Left: attempts to implement such a society have fallen afoul of individual rights with horrible and often-times barbaric consequences.

Marx's insights and abundant writing on the invidious aspects of religion (which, contrary to reasonable expectations for human progress, continues to assert its baleful effects on social, political and economic harmony) are inaccurately portrayed by Eagleton. Marx wrote, "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843). It follows directly from this that religion ought to evaporate along with capitalism because the oppressed are no longer suffering under the socialist/communist system. But, Eagleton himself has religious proclivities of his own to protect, perhaps accounting for his tangential mention (and incorrect interpretation) of Marx's accurate assertion that religion is both an instrument for and expression of class repression.

Marx was famously, absolutely and demonstrably correct on one salient aspect of capitalism: its inherent instability with its resulting disruptive social effects. The fatuous notion that "unfettered and self-correcting" markets, as so stridently advanced by current-generation Republicans has, as any sentient observer can see, been utterly discredited by recent events. The "virtuous" concept of the "Great (capitalist) Moderation" has been utterly discredited, as well. Based on its present destabilizing trajectory, it seems quite likely that capitalism will provoke ever increasing social, economic and environmental crises and, in so doing, fulfill at least one of Marx's principle predictions. The question remains: What follows?

Eagleton correctly notes that the property-owning middle class (the "bourgeoisie", in common parlance) is rapidly evaporating. Many governments have enthusiastically espoused the most predatory forms of capitalism, becoming indistinguishable from the moneyed interests they represent. In concert with that expected development, the concept of social democracy has fallen into the dust as the global scramble for profit homogenizes, marginalizes and eliminates security for the bulk of the people, both in financial and social terms. So, Eagleton accurately characterizes governments as protectors of the propertied "classes" (a term he does not define until chapter 7 and then, for the "proletariat" in such a way as to dilute the term to the point of meaninglessness) but he often fails to coherently carry his arguments on to logical conclusions. Many astringent comments by Marx could have been selected to buttress the text, but Eagleton's digressions and pseudo-philosophical tangents confuse the issues. Much more trenchant criticisms of capitalism in its current forms have been made by highly respected "mainstream" economists, including John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini, all to better effect than Eagleton's efforts.

According to Eagleton, "Capitalist society generates enormous wealth, but in a way that cannot help putting it beyond the reach of most of its citizens. Even so, that wealth can always be brought within reach. It can be disentangled from the acquisitive, individualist forms which bred it, invested in the community as a whole and used to restrict disagreeable work to a minimum" (chapter 3). This is obviously true and the logical conclusion from it is that wealth should be "re-distributed", either by policy (taxation) or by force. The problem is that, by Eagleton (and Marx's) own admission, the necessary predicate for a socialist society is one of material abundance and the ever disagreeable "haves" do not want to relinquish their perquisites to the "have nots": so, trouble and violence loom, especially as resources vanish. In this case, Thomas Malthus appears more prescient than Karl Marx: population increases beyond the carrying capacity of the planet and increasing competition over ever-declining resource pools (witness Chinese capitalism at work in Africa, for instance) strongly suggest a major catastrophe is looming; in other words, a socialist utopia based on "plenty" is not likely on the horizon. This, in my estimation, is the major flaw in Marx's (and Eagleton's) thinking.

In summary, Marx was, beyond any doubt, an important thinker whose impact can scarcely be minimized...in some cases for better and in many cases for worse. Nonetheless, at least in the immediate future, a more practical and pragmatic solution to the problem of capitalism can be found in the much-reviled (by strict Marxist thinkers, anyhow) Social Democratic approach, which is, in my estimation, best encapsulated in the motto of the Dutch Labor Party: "Freedom, democracy, justice, sustainability and solidarity. These are the ideals of Social Democracy". I highly recommend their succinctly and lucidly stated party platform. Regrettably, while this approach may work for the EU and (hopefully) for the US for the near-term future, I'd bet on world-wide disaster in line with Malthus' predictions on the longer-term horizon. I suspect we will not realize a communist utopia as Eagleton tepidly and uninspiringly imagines in this book, but rather a dystopian and authoritarian future riven by conflict driven by shortages, religious, ethnic, nationalistic and regressive capitalist forces.

Terry Eagleton has one of the most brilliant minds on the planet today--and that's saying something! It also means his mind is so sharp-edged that his books, essays and talks can come across as in-your-face indictments of cherished assumptions. Many people of faith cheered when Eagleton aimed his guns at Richard Dawkins, and defended the spiritual richness of religion. Many of those same people were offended when Eagleton compared football fans to cocaine addicts.

By trade, he is a celebrated literary scholar, ensconced in the "academy" in his UK homeland. That brings us to his latest book, Why Marx Was Right. His basic idea is simple: What if our assumptions as Westerners about one of our favorite old Bad Guys--were wrong? Stop for a moment to remember that, not too many decades ago, this little book could have landed Eagleton in a world of legal hurt. The Western assumptions about Marx were so firmly etched in granite that Marxists were considered lethal. But a whole lot has changed in our world! Even the late Pope John Paul II argued passionately that neither capitalism nor socialism had a lock on truth and moral values.

So, why not pause in the economic turbulence, and the relative safety, of this new 21st century to consider this idea with Eagleton: While Marx was wrong about some things, perhaps there are some instances in which Marx's critics were wrong. In his analysis of the question, Eagleton has come up with 10 such instances.

I'm not giving this book 5 stars because I agree with every one of Eagleton's points--I don't. And I don't even like the tone of some of Eagleton's acid commentary. But you have to respect a scholar this courageous and creative. Americans, this summer, are just going through a fresh critical consideration of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin thanks in part to Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the most influential American book of the 19th century, but students haven't actually read and discussed the book for decades. Now, Stowe's work is getting a fresh look. Similarly, it's high time we took a fresh look at the world's most influential book of the 19th century: Marx's manifesto.

You'll have lots of lively conversation in your small group with this little volume--especially if you gather men and women across the generations. Thus, on this controversial book, I'm definitely in the 5-star camp of reviewers.

Terry Eagleton is a student of Marx Extraordinaire and he brings his fantastic mind and his lifetime of study to bear on a book that is more relevant now than ever (or maybe just as relevant as it ever was, excuse my hyperbole).

In this book, he takes a look and refutes ten separate criticisms of Marx and the Marxist thought that has developed in the years since the man's death. He takes on ideas of its continued relevance, the idea that Marxism in practice leads to barbarism and despotism, the idea of the overly utopian character, and others for a clear ten chapters of Marxist cheer-leading -- a better world is possible!

The ideas he struggles with are often ideas that Marxist thinkers have struggled with too. For example, which is the path to the future communist world, reform or revolution? (See Luxembourg, Rosa. But unfortunately, most of the misconceptions that Eagleton deals with are not those of the concerns of the Marxist/Marxian thinker, but are the straw men set up by conservative thinkers that are used to reinforce the status quo and dismiss the possibility of change either through reform or revolution. It is a book needed by those who can look at capitalism and see that it does not work, but don't have the vocabulary to describe why, or have been indoctrinated that there is no other possible social/economic order except for the way things are.


Eagleton writes in a crisp, clean style that is largely devoid of jargon, making this book highly accessible for novice readers of Marx's ideas. The text itself is nicely presented, also a crisp and clean layout that is easy on the eyes. My main criticism is that the notes are not footnotes - if you want to see the reference you have to really break your reading cadence and flip to the back. I know that is more or less standard practice, bit I'm still old-fashioned and prefer footnotes over end-notes. But, at least the text is clean.

The last thing is that the title should be "Why Marx IS Right". The man is dead, but his ideas remain with pressing verity to this day, as Eagleton makes pains to point out. The ideas live on.

I read Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers [7th Edition] (except it wasn't the 7th edition!) over Christmas break and thought that Marx deserved a second look. Heilbroner was in general fairly even-handed, but more or less put Marx to rest as having not anticipated what a wonderful thing well-regulated capitalism could be in the modern welfare state. That's all fine and dandy if you are writing from the middle of the twentieth century, as Heilbroner was, when well-regulated capitalism had embraced the welfare state, perhaps in part out of fear of Soviet-inspired revolution. But in 2011, with the world still entranced by a "purer" capitalism that has just stolen the shirt off it's collective back, one wonders whether, in fact, Marx was at more right than a mid-century economist might have given him credit for.

So I bought this book primarily because of the title, without having researched the author. I was sort of expecting, after Heilbroner, a more up-to-date application of Marx's economics. Well, no. Terry Eagleton is not an economist. Nor is he a political scientist, or even a decent historical commentator. He writes like a pundit, non-sequitur following non-sequitur following "witty" comment. I see from the dust jacket that he is a Professor of English Literature! Ooops! Lesson learned. Research authors before buying books!

I must admit I didn't get past page 100, and I'm writing this review before I finished the book because I don't think I'm going to finish the book. I think I'll just get a copy of Marx in translation and read him for myself. Anybody want to buy a used copy of Eagleton's book?

Terry Eagleton is one of my favorite literary critics and philosophers of all times. This new book of his, however, was a complete and utter disappointment. The good news about Why Marx Was Right is that Eagleton is very clear on who he is writing for. His audience consists of hopeless illiterates who have fallen off a pumpkin cart fifteen seconds ago and have hit their heads against the ground really hard in the process. Nobody else would buy into the author's truly egregious prevarications. I use the word "prevarication" with full understanding of what it implies. Eagleton is a highly erudite person, and it is simply not possible that in this book he speaks out of ignorance. To give an example, at the very beginning of Why Marx Was Right, Eagleton mentions that Marx drew his conclusions on basis of observing 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."
The idea of uprooted peasants in today's Russia is completely bizarre. All of Russia's peasants were uprooted with the goal of creating an urban working class out of them during Stalin's industrialization. I know that Marxists are given to wild leaps of imagination but, surely, not to the extent of imagining crowds of uprooted peasants marching through a country that has been heavily industrialized for decades?

Another equally ridiculous statement comes when Eagleton begins to enumerate the so-called achievements of the Soviet Union, a task he engages in with the earnestness of a brainless male cheer-leader: "Soviet Union played a heroic role in combating the evil of fascism, as well as in helping to topple colonialist powers. It also fostered the kind of solidarity among its citizens that Western nations seem able to muster only when they are killing the natives of other lands." Given that the Soviet Union brought Hitler to power and promoted the imperialist goals of the Russian Empire, this statement sounds, at the very least, disingenuous. Eagleton's suggestion that it "fostered solidarity among its citizens" is equally confusing since it is common knowledge that the Soviet Union exploded in a mass of ethnic conflicts beginning in 1989. These ethnic conflicts and their attendant genocides are still going on in many of the former Republics of the Soviet Union. I wonder if Eagleton ever heard the word "Chechnya" or asked himself which historical events promoted the feelings of solidarity that are still making the Russians and the Chechens slaughter each other. (In case you don't know, in 1944 Stalin deported the entire Chechen and Ingush population, consisting approximately of 400,000 people to Siberia. About 30% of Chechens died during the deportation.) One has to be either completely cynical or in the throes of a massive attack of Alzheimer's to use the word "solidarity" to describe the horrible relations between the different ethnic groups within the Soviet Union.

Eagleton is equally annoying when he pontificates about "the loss of women's rights" that the collapse of the Soviet Union supposedly brought about. He gives no examples, of course, which is a shame because, as a woman who has lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, I would surely love to hear which of my rights were lost as the Soviet Union fell apart. Does Eagleton refer to the right to abortion as the only form of contraception available in the Soviet Union, which led many women to undergo dozens of abortions within their lifetime? Abortion is still free and legal in the non-Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. Now, however, people have easy access to condoms, oral contraceptives, IUDs, patches, etc. Absolutely none of this was available to the citizens of the USSR. Maybe Eagleton is talking about the horrifying sexual harassment that existed everywhere in the USSR and for which there was no legal remedy? It is still present everywhere in the FSU (former Soviet Union), but at least now there are people who have discovered the word "feminism" and are speaking out against harassment.

The book is structured around some extremely inane objections to Marxism that Eagleton invents and then spends countless pages trying to debate. To make his own task easier, he couches these objections in terms that are stunning in their stupidity. Of course, it is very easy for him then to reject these points. As a result, the book doesn't even reach the "Marxism for Dummies" standard. It would be much better off titled "Marxism for Very Unintelligent Five-Year Olds."

In his latest book, Eric Hobsbawm suggested that perhaps '[o]nce again, the time has come to take Marx seriously'. In this book, Eagleton does precisely that and, in doing so, demonstrates the continuing relevance and importance of Marx.

Each chapter of the book starts with a common criticism of Marxist thought. So, for example, Chapter 1 begins with:

"Marxism is finished. It might conceivably have had some relevance to a world of factories and food riots... But it certainly has no bearing on the increasingly classless, socially mobile, postindustrial Western societies of the present." (P1)

From here, Eagleton goes on to demonstrate that the 'underlying logic' of capitalism remains the same and thus a Marxist critique is still most certainly relevant. As he points out, to simply accept that:

"some people are destitute while others are prosperous is rather like claiming that the world contains both detectives and criminals. So it does, but this obscures the truth that there are detectives because there are criminals..."(P11)

Other criticisms that Eagleton considers include (Chapter 2) the murderous and tyrannical nature of actually existant socialist societies such as Stalin's Russia and Mao Zedong's China; (Chapter 3) the idea that Marxism is a form of historical determinism and that 'Marx's theory of history is just a secular version of Providence or Destiny' (P30); (Chapter 4) Marxism is utopian and thus unrealistic; (Chapter 5) Marxism reduces everything to the economic and is a form of 'economic determinism'. The final chapter considers whether Marxism has been superseded by later radical movements such as feminism and environmentalism - movements more relevant to our 'postclass, postindustrial world'.

He draws upon a variety of sources besides Marx and Engels themselves - including Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas, Etienne Balibar et al - but puts them all together in a readily accessible way.

This is not a book using Marx's ideas to criticise the current travails of global capitalism - there are plenty of those around already, such as Chris Harman's excellent Zombie Capitalism. This book is about returning to Marx's basic ideas and trying to draw out the power, subtlety and immediate relevance of his philosophy - taking on post-modernist relativism, free market neoliberalism and even human nature along the way - and it does this really well, not afraid to recognise shortcomings in Marx's ideas but overall amply demonstrating their continuing power. Take Marx seriously again.

These days it's heartening or, perhaps, more than a bit alarming, to see so many distinguished Leftists confessing the faith of their youth - airing out the philosophical stank contained within too many academic rooms, where alt-pseudo-post Marxist ideologies, which they helped create, have ruminated for the past 20-30 years, achieving little but fellow traveling and the enabling of capital.

Marx is back, and if you are wondering why or if he should be, Eagleton, as usual, provides a beautifully written and accessible book; a place to renew or begin your faith in the world to come, outside this historical and contingent economic system of capital. But Eagleton, again, as usual, provides an activist/critical case for the political Marx, but the enigma of the economic Marx is still very vague and contradictory, which is where we `Left' off in the 1970's.

So, communism can only take place simultaneously and internationally - all in advanced capitalist countries - the failure or `contradiction' of the first series of Marxist experiments was driven by not heeding this insight; further, Marx, on the one hand, talks like the forces of capital will eventually founder, like the geological analogy of tectonic plates and earthquakes. This structural idea seems to preclude the necessity or affect of volunturistic activism. For example, the great crash of 2008 was a structural part of the mechanism of capital - it did not crash because of any moralizing by its critics or demonstrations against it. Thus, the political Marx, the activist or volunturistic-romantic revolutionary Marx is, in my mind, `negated' by the objective-structural Marx. Where's the Marxist international equivalent of NAFTA? Where's the economic plan? Are we to trust, yet again, our future to romantic spontaneous self-emergence, which can easily turn to fascism. If `we' are to get serious, we need the economic Marx just as much, or more, than the revival of his political specter; but we certainly need the former - which is Eagleton's great achievement in this book.

There were a few legitimate points in the book, but not nearly enough to make it worthwhile reading. Among many weak arguments, he actually argues that Stalin's crimes are an argument for Marxism! But that is not my main complaint with the book. Eagleton presents a false dilemma throughout the book: either Marxism or unbrindled, unregulated capitalism. It's as if the choice was between socialism and a libertarian paradise run by,say, Ron Paul. There's a double standard throughout the book: Eagleton judges capitalism by its hypothetical worst, and Marxism on its hypothetical best.